Further Dispatches from the Coup

With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!

My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.

This is Part 1, since it got too long to include anything related to the tariffs or domestic politics. Seriously, it has been a horrifying time to be an American and it will get much worse before it gets better. Sorry, world. Most of us have more contempt this clown than you do, if that's any help.

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1. So have you ever wondered what it was like in the early 1930s watching German democracy being annihilated from within by a Fascist movement? Well, now you know. It’s been another horrifying week or so to be an American and by the looks of things it will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future so buckle up, folks – it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I will stop calling them Nazis when they stop doing the things that Nazis did.

2. If you haven’t read Senator Chris Murphy’s piece “We Are Sleepwalking into Autocracy,” you should. He’s pretty blunt about where this is all headed.

Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about— regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election. So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever. And, of course, this is not an unfamiliar system. This is Hungary, this is Turkey, this is Serbia. There are plenty of countries, all around the world, that hold elections—it’s just that one party continues to win. And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now. … I think we are at risk of sleepwalking through this transition. We desperately want to believe that we can play politics as normal because it’s uncomfortable— really uncomfortable—to play politics as not normal. It involves taking really big risks.

There will be a time, probably in the very near future if Americans don’t stand up for their republic, when we will look back on this as a time when the world’s most powerful democracy collapsed because of the internal treachery of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves.

2. Laurence Tribe, one of the pre-eminent legal scholars in the US, is also blunt. We are heading for dictatorship. “The body politic is being hollowed out by a rapidly metastasizing virus attacking the underpinnings of our entire constitutional system. Make no mistake. This is how dictatorship grows.”

3. We are in the middle of a war of “the rule of law versus the rule of billionaires,” according to Alvaro Bedoya, who was recently illegally fired as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. “This isn’t about progressive versus conservative.” Bernie Sanders has been warning us about the oligarchs for decades now, and we’re definitely proving him right with every passing day.

4. Another authority on the end of democracies, Steven Levitsky, noted in an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, “We are currently witnessing the collapse of our democracy. Under Donald Trump, the U.S. is sliding into a form of authoritarianism. This will probably not be irreversible. But the fact is: Right now, the U.S. is ceasing to be a democracy. … The much-vaunted Constitutional checks are failing. Our Founding Fathers wanted to prevent an all-powerful tyrant. To this end, they created a series of institutions over 200 years ago: the Electoral College for electing the president, the separation of powers with an independent, bicameral legislature, and a largely independent judiciary. Not to mention a federalist system that grants far- reaching powers to the states. But they didn't foresee that one day there would be two strongly polarized parties, one of which is completely loyal to the incumbent president.” I don’t know about you, but that “probably” in the third sentence of his quote was not really all that reassuring.

5. One of the things I cover when I teach my early American history class is just how much we owe George Washington, a president who could easily have become a king but who wanted nothing to do with such a betrayal of the republic he had fought to create. He turned his back on power not once but twice – once at the end of the American Revolution, in the early 1780s, and again in 1797 after two terms as president. And now we have serving in that same office a two-bit grifter who sees himself as exactly the sort of absolute monarch that Washington rejected.

6. Understand something, folks: Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will not leave office while he is alive. He will either die in office when demographics and a lifetime of rage and cheeseburgers catches up with him, or he will go down in bloody violence when he refuses to accept that his time in office is over and has to be removed by an aggrieved people. He’s tried it once already and failed. Next time we will not be so lucky.

7. You can see Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s authoritarian design being played out clearly in his regime’s assaults on free speech – a cornerstone American value that he and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves find deeply threatening. His pet Attorney General – who hasn’t figured out yet that the Attorney General represents the nation and is not the president’s personal lawyer – warned a sitting Congressional Representative that criticizing Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk would lead to problematic consequences, and in an administration that was even within shouting distance of normal this would have resulted in her immediate removal and disgrace but which now seems to be standard for this crew of cannibals. The regime is also waging a war against any law firm that dares to represent anyone opposed to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s policies, a clear attempt to intimidate Americans into silence and obedience. Universities are being targeted for doing what universities are designed to do, which is encourage the free exchange of ideas, even – and especially – those that the powerful find uncomfortable. As David French, a former Republican, put it, “I think it’s fair to say that we can absolutely and totally dispense with the idea that Trump’s Republican Party defends free speech. We’re witnessing one of the most comprehensive attacks on political speech since the Red Scare.”

8. Speaking of Red Scares, we covered Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) in my US2 class this week. For those of you not up on your 20th-century political witch hunts, McCarthy was the blowhard who decided back in the 1950s that anyone who dared to oppose him was a Communist whose life needed to be destroyed, and he proceeded to do just that for several years all the while guided by his friend and mentor Roy Cohn who served as his lawyer and attack dog. McCarthy’s career collapsed when he overreached himself by accusing the US Army of being a haven for Communists in 1954 and he sank into alcoholism and died not long after, but Roy Cohn went on to become one of the most powerful lawyers in New York City in the 1960s and 70s before being disbarred for unethical conduct in 1986. In the 1970s he became a personal mentor to an up-and-coming young real estate developer named Donald Trump. Taught him everything he knew. As we are discovering.

9. The whole point of all of these attacks is to make Americans afraid. That’s why they’re attacking the legal profession. That’s why they’re attacking universities. That’s why they’re attacking journalists. That’s why they’re kidnapping people in the streets and disappearing them into hidden prisons. That’s the whole point. Frightened people don’t disobey. But the US was founded on disobedience, dissent, and revolution against those we considered tyrants. Fuck this. And fuck them.

10. Yeah, they’ll come for me too at some point, no doubt. I’m a small enough fish that it will take them a while to get down to my level and by then they may all have been removed from civilized society by more virtuous people, but don’t be too surprised if I suddenly stop posting. Fascists do not tolerate dissent and I regard it as my moral and patriotic duty to dissent from Fascism in any form. Clowns. Here I stand. I can do no other.

11. The latest casualty of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s war on free speech and independent thought is the Smithsonian Institute, part of a broader campaign against history in general. Last week there was another one of those imperial edicts that he’s so fond of vomiting forth, this one demanding that anything insufficiently celebratory of straight white men in general and right-wing notions of propriety in particular had to be purged and a more pliable propaganda put in its place. “It’s a five-alarm fire for public history, science, and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a historian at UM-Amherst. Other historians have noted much the same thing. “I take it as an insult, an affront, and an attempt to control what we do as historians,” said historian David Blight. “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans didn’t have an official history; at least we’ve never tried to have.” Raymond Arsenault, a historian at the University of South Florida, was equally blunt. “It’s totalitarian,” he said. “It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.” Never underestimate the willful megalomania of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, my good man.

12. Another unconstitutional Executive Order spewed out last week tried to hijack the American electoral process – something that the President has no legitimate say over. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has decreed that mail in ballots cannot be counted if they are received after election day even if they are postmarked on or before that day, and requires documented proof of citizenship in order to vote – something that millions of American citizens do not have and frankly do not need to have. Given that the Constitution explicitly gives the power to regulate the “time, place, and manner” of elections to the state legislatures and empowers only Congress to change laws regarding federal elections, this attempt to seize electoral control is a dictatorial move. This illegal order has already been challenged by multiple groups in court on the obvious grounds that it is not the business of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to make such pronouncements and we’ll see how that goes.

13. Illinois Governor JB Pritzger – who is rapidly making a name for himself as a beacon of anti-Fascist resistance in America – squarely informed Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump that he could go pound sand in this case. “We will not blindly follow illegal orders because Donald Trump wrote them down on a piece of paper,” he said. “Illinois follows the laws of the land – not the decrees of an aspiring king hell bent on disenfranchising millions of voters who deserve to have their voice heard.”

14. Seizing control of elections is not the only way that the regime is trying to destroy American democracy. The “SAVE Act” is scheduled to come up for a vote soon in the GOP-controlled Congress. Designed to disenfranchise trans voters, it declares that voters not only prove their citizenship – placing the burden of proof on the accused rather than those who would accuse someone of not being a citizen, which is counter to every facet of American law – but also denies the vote to anyone whose legal name does not match their birth certificate. So any married woman who took their husband’s name, for example, would be immediately disenfranchised. This is not an accident or the result of sloppy writing – it’s a known and sought after result. The GOP is a party of white male supremacy, and not even white women count in their world. Let alone anyone else. It’s not an accident that if only women voted the GOP would disappear in a single election cycle. This is the Republican Party’s way of getting rid of anyone who dares to oppose them.

15. Of course there is the more direct route of just bulldozing through Constitutional restrictions and having Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump run for a third term in office – something that has been banned in the US since the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951. This amendment flatly prohibits any such attempt (“No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”) and was passed to prevent an elective monarchy of the sort that Franklin Delano Roosevelt very nearly created with his four terms in office. Roosevelt at least was an intelligent man who did this country a world of good, but even that is not enough. You can’t run for a third term, and you can’t run for vice president and then have the top guy resign once in office because if you’re not eligible to run for president you’re not eligible to run for president. This was unconstitutional when liberals suggested Obama do it in 2016 and – barring a new Constitutional amendment – it’s unconstitutional now. Obama never sought nor discussed the idea of a third term – that was entirely the fevered product of some of his more deranged supporters. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is openly discussing it tells you a great deal about his derangement and his plans for dictatorship.

16. You know, other countries know how to deal with far-right wannabe dictators. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has been formally charged and his country’s Supreme Court has ruled he must stand trial on charges of insurrection. France’s Marie Le Pen has been convicted of embezzlement and unlike in the US when a politician is convicted of such crimes in France she isn’t allowed to run for office again (at least for a while). The US could take some lessons here.

17. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the police state that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is imposing on a once free country is that people continue to be kidnapped off the streets by anonymous thugs claiming to be from the government and spirited away to secret places without any due process of law or even notification for their families. The most recent high-profile case was Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey who is studying for her PhD in Massachusetts. Six masked men abducted her off the streets in broad daylight for the crime of having written an editorial affirming the “equal dignity and humanity of all people,” a statement that the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump disagrees with vehemently. She was taken to Louisiana in secret and nobody knew where she was for days. The junta continues to refuse to return her to Massachusetts despite Congressional demands and federal court decisions requiring them to do so. This is grotesque and evil, and everyone involved in this kidnapping should be rotting in jail already while Ozturk walks free.

18. Another grad student was kidnapped in Minnesota as well, and a man in NYC named Dustin West detailed the assault he received from ICE for trying to ask questions while they kidnapped a family walking their kids home from school.

19. Republicans are insisting that this is okay, and may God have mercy on their souls because the rest of us should not. Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN), a nobody who is apparently trying to make a name for herself by sucking up to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, expressly declared noncitizens were not entitled to due process of law because apparently their existence is a crime and criminals don’t get such protections. Folks, do you know how Fascist that is? People accused of violating the law are the ENTIRE REASON we have due process of law. Because without it, nobody is safe. All a dictator would have to do is accuse you of being a criminal and then kidnap you and without due process how would you defend yourself? To their credit, her constituents in blood red Indiana reacted with anger at the town hall where she said this and apparently booed her out of the building over it. As well they should have.

20. Maybe Representative Spartz (R-IN) should have taken some guidance from Antonin Scalia, one of the most right-wing Supreme Court justices in recent memory. Even he thought that was stupid.

21. As Robert Reich put it, “The Trump regime will round you up off the street and arrest you because you spoke your mind. And federal agents in plain clothes and unmarked cars who refuse to identify themselves will be the ones to do it. It’s fascism. Call it what it is.”

22. You are not safe. Do not kid yourself.

23. It’s hard to say whether this is the pinnacle of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s attempt at dictatorship or whether it’s simply groundwork, and that more than anything else should infuriate you if you are an American.

24. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution they specifically designed the Judiciary Branch as a coequal branch of government able to check the power of both the Legislative and Executive Branches through its power to block legislation and executive actions that violate the Constitution. This is a fundamental part of the American republic, and any threat to it is subversion and those responsible for it need to be severely punished. And if you want to see what those threats look like, you have only to look at Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves. The junta is on a catastrophic losing streak when it comes to the federal courts – they’ve lost pretty much every lawsuit that’s been brought to court against them, which is what happens when run roughshod over laws and Constitutional provisions and then try to justify those actions with bloviating nonsense. And rather than take the hint and at least pretend to give a rat’s ass about legalities or Constitutions the junta and its minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have gone on the offensive. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has threatened judges with criminal charges up to and including treason if they keep overturning his edicts, as well as more prosaic threats to impeach and remove any judge who doesn’t obey his commands. The Founding Fathers would have regarded Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump as a tyrant for such behavior and had him hauled off in chains.

25. And what does the GOP Congress have to say about this tyranny? They’re all for it, apparently, even though it undermines their own Constitutional position and renders them effectively meaningless. House Speaker Mike Johnson threatened to pass legislation eliminating entire district courts if they don’t fall in line, a clear assault on the Separation of Powers and further evidence that Johnson is both subversive and – let’s be honest here – delusional, since the GOP hasn’t been able to pass anything in over a decade. He’s also threatened to pass legislation (again, there he goes with the idea that he can get Congress do pass something) that would block the federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions, which is just a slightly fancier way of assaulting the Separation of Powers and just as subversive.

26. You have never in your lifetime seen anyone as fragile as the American conservative. If they can’t do whatever they please, they’re going to destroy the nation for everyone else. Seriously – such a bunch of snowflakes. Maybe stop doing illegal things instead? Maybe?

27. Last week the junta managed to pull off what is perhaps the most awe-inspiringly idiotic breach of national security in decades and it’s not even the worst thing they’ve done since St. Patrick’s Day. The bare facts of the matter are that a collection of the misfits supposedly in charge of this nation’s security put together a group chat on Signal to discuss bombing Yemen (in real time, as the bombs were falling) as well as any number of other side issues such as Junior Assistant J.D. Vance’s shocking ignorance about the importance of European nations to American security, and as part of this process they managed to include a journalist on the chat. When Jeffrey Goldberg published the story in The Atlantic, the junta went into Full Falsehood Overdrive denying it happened, minimizing that it happened, threatening the journalist, and denying that anything important happened. So when the junta declared that no classified information had been shared, Goldberg took them at their word and published all the screenshots in a followup story.

28. Let’s start with the most obvious problem with this whole situation, which is that these idiots are discussing classified information – and yes, they can say whatever they want and the fact that they denied it gives all the legal cover that Goldberg needed to publish it all, but by any rational standard of military security time sensitive attack orders and operational plans are highly classified – on an unsecured public app without bothering to check who they invited into it. If you’re a hostile nation looking to steal American secrets, this is your golden age – these people couldn’t hide a thumbtack at the bottom of the ocean. You can put money on the fact that every intelligence agency in the world celebrated that day, because they can stop paying spies and just listen to what this administration is saying. It’s a good thing the rest of the world loves us and would never with us harm, right? Because if there were a nation that wished us harm, they just got handed everything they need to do so in the future.

29. Even the folks at Signal thought it was stupid.

30. Although Gondor was no doubt grateful.

31. Since that story broke we’ve gotten updates that these security wizards were also sharing classified information on Gmail, an app so insecure that future updates will come with blankets and stuffed animals, because of course they were. Everyone of them should have been fired and prosecuted the day this came out and you know what? They’re still there, breathing free air.

32. Why are they using Signal, you ask? Because Signal offers end-to-end encryption and does not store messages on their servers which means that it is almost impossible for you, the American citizens, or any investigations that may follow to access these records. You can’t access Signal chats through the Freedom of Information Act. Federal law requires all conversations of this nature to be permanently recorded and archived, and if you don’t think this leads us into extremely dangerous territory you’re not paying attention.

33. If you’re not following Jim Wright (Stonekettle Station) on your various social media platforms, you should be. He served in the Navy as an intelligence officer and he has a lot of experience behind what he says. “It’s all there,” he said of this fiasco. “Time. Date. Locations. Weapons. Targets. Units. All of that, made public before or during a mission (and even sometimes after) can lead directly to mission failure and put our assets at risk.” If you are a member of the US military right now you probably realize just how badly your government has failed you, how casually they have risked your life for nothing, and how callously they have denied any problem associated with doing so. Pissing off the highly trained people with the heavy weaponry hasn’t turned out well for any previous government in recorded history, but maybe this time will be different? Let’s ask the Roman Empire about that.

34. Remember when people got all huffy over Hilary Clinton’s emails? Good times, man.

35. Meanwhile four American servicemen died in a bog in Lithuania and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump didn’t even acknowledge it for days and then when their bodies were returned to the US – a process that always involves the sitting president being at the airbase to see their return and acknowledge their service – our fearless leader chose to go golfing with his Saudi buddies instead. He is a disgrace and an embarrassment.

36. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is also destroying the foundations of American foreign policy, in case you haven’t noticed. He seems to think he is entitled to Canada – a sovereign nation and one of our closest allies in every sense of that word – and the Canadians are justifiably infuriated by this cavalier rejection of their independence by an unqualified moron. This will have long term consequences even if Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his entire regime drops off a cliff tomorrow and is replaced by actual thinking human beings who understand how the world works. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was clear on that. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over. It’s clear the US is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we could reestablish an element of confidence but there will be no going backwards. … We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere, and we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.” The French Minister for Europe was similarly blunt: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” No, no they cannot. I live here. I wouldn’t rely on the voters of this state to tie their own shoes correctly more than 45% of the time. Trust, once broken, is not easily repaired and the great lesson of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves is that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally.

37. There’s a reason why the number of Canadians visiting the US has dropped by over 75% in the last two months. This will cost the US economy hundreds of millions of dollars, not that the deadbeats running the US care about that. Why would Canadians come here?

38. Indeed, why would anyone? So many tourists with legitimate visas and passports have been illegally arrested and detained by US agents since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seized power that at least half a dozen countries – including formerly strong allies such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, and the UK – have issued travel advisories warning their citizens against coming here. Welcome to pariah status, my fellow Americans.

39. This even applies to American citizens, by the way. A friend of mine (who I will not identify because look around you and ask yourself why I should) was traveling recently and expressed concern that they might be detained at the border because of their social media presence – they, like myself and the majority of Americans, are not fans of the current regime – and because they took part in several activities to express this, activities that are legal under both US law and the laws of the country they were in. And I had to go through the long list of precautions that Americans now have to take in order to avoid being disappeared by our own government, and the mere fact that I had to do this – that there are lists and graphics specifically designed to address this that I could just forward along to my friend – is an outrage. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have perverted everything about this country and turned us into a tin-horn dictatorship and it is reprehensible that they continue to rule.

40. This will have consequences beyond tourism, though. As foreign nations realize that the US is no longer trustworthy they will abandon us and move on without the US. Europe, for example, has figured out that they need to create their own security apparatus to address a world where the US might be just as much of an enemy as Russia, particularly as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump continues to serve as Vladimir Putin’s meat puppet. NATO – the cornerstone of American strategic power since 1949 – is in disarray and European nations are now starting to envision a new security arrangement to replace it. This will include developing their own weapons systems, of course, which will further damage the US economy. Danish MP Rasmus Jarlov explained it well.

41. Denmark, of course, is on the front line of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s unchecked aggression, as they have sovereignty over Greenland and the junta has not ruled out military force to take it from them. Why the junta decided to send Junior Assistant JD Vance and his wife Usha over to Greenland is therefore an interesting question. As several Greenlanders reported, the advance teams for both Vances went door to door offering to pay locals to come out and wear the stupid MAGA hats and wave American flags and every single one of them told those teams to fuck off. This is why Usha and JD ended up making a lackluster appearance at a US military base there, a performance so deeply pathetic that there are now serious calls for Junior Assistant JD Vance just to resign and stop the pain.

42. If you missed Senator Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) questioning of Deputy Secretary of State nominee Christopher Landau, you should fix that. He started off big and never let up. “I wanted to ask you, Mr. Landau, is President Trump a Russian asset?” Landau denied it, of course, but the follow ups were pretty damning. He listed actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already taken – repeating Russian propaganda, conceding critical negotiating points to Russia without getting anything back, cutting off Ukraine, discrediting Zelensky, undermining security relations with Europe, basically Putin’s wish list. “I can’t imagine that if he was a Russian asset, he could be doing anything more favorable than those five points. What else could a Russian asset do that Trump hasn’t yet done?” Either Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is on Putin’s payroll or he’s working for free, which seems out of character.

43. I think I’m going to have to continue this in a separate post because it has gotten exceedingly long and I haven’t even gotten to the most immediate crisis, which is the catastrophic and completely avoidable destruction of global trade caused by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s dumbshit tariffs. The US economy is crashing, the world is recoiling in disgust, and our Fearless Leader is golfing with his buddies. Yeah, we’re fucked.