Sunday, June 22, 2025

TO YOUR RIGHT-WING NEIGHBORS, THIS WILL BE TRUMP'S WAR ONLY IF IT WORKS

Vox's Joshua Keating says that President Trump can't evade responsibility for what happens now that American forces have bombed Iraninan nuclear facilities.
President Donald Trump claimed during his 2024 campaign for president that America had fought “no wars” during his first presidency, and that he was the first president in 72 years who could say that.

This was not, strictly speaking, true. In his first term, Trump intensified the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime in response to chemical weapons use, and escalated a little-noticed counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia. But in those cases, Trump could say, with some justification, that he was just dealing with festering crises he had inherited from Barack Obama.

Likewise, the president has repeatedly claimed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine never would have happened had he been president when they broke out, rather than Joe Biden.... it’s fair to say that both are wars Trump inherited rather than chose.

This time, it’s different. This time, it’s Trump’s war....

It’s quite a gamble – and this time he will have no one else to blame if it doesn’t go as planned.
Oh, he'll find someone to blame -- the two people you'd expect him to blame. And every Republican in America will agree with him.

At this moment, most Republicans are backing Trump. A handful of Republicans -- Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance -- are opposed to this intervention.


But ask any Republican, especially rank-and-file Republicans, about Iran, and the first thing you'll hear is that Barack Obama made a horrible deal with Iran and both Obama and Joe Biden were appeasers who tossed money at Iran strictly because Democrats are evil traitors who always want to help America's enemies.


That's been Trump's line for many years.


In a speech in Saudi Arabia last month, Trump said,
The Biden administration's extreme weakness and gross incompetence derailed progress toward peace, destabilized the region and put at risk everything we had worked so hard to build together.
Specifically:
They lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for getting nothing and sent the regime tens of billions of dollars to fund terror and death all over the world. And they laughed at him, they laughed at our leader and they're still laughing at our leader.

They thought him a fool and they made nothing but trouble ever since....
Much of the money that Trump and other Republicans talk about consisted of Iranian assets that were unfrozen with strict conditions imposed. But right-wingers don't care, just as they don't care about the effectiveness of the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated and Trump scrapped in his first term.


They'll blame Obama and Biden (and Jimmy Carter) if Trump's intervention leads to bad consequences. But if there's a good outcome, Trump will get the credit.

*****

UPDATE: And there you go...

Posted by Steve M. at 10:05 AM 15 Comments

Saturday, June 21, 2025

YOUR RIGHT-WING NEIGHBORS STILL DON'T BELIEVE THE MINNESOTA SHOOTER WAS A CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGUE

Prominent right-wing figures who tried to portray the recent Minnesota shootings as left-on-left violence have been widely criticized. Senator Mike Lee, one of the worst offenders, took down tweets implying that the shooter was a "Marxist" (a right-wing euphemism for "Democrat") and implicating Governor Tim Walz in the murder plan.

But the right won't let this go. Yesterday, Alpha News, a Minnesota site with ties to GOP-affiliated groups, reported this:
Assassination suspect Vance Boelter wrote a letter in which he blamed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the murderous rampage Boelter committed, according to sources.

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation have confirmed to Alpha News that Boelter’s so-called confession letter was intended for Kash Patel, the director of the FBI.
A later story in The Minnesota Star Tribune offered clarification:
In a rambling, conspiratorial letter addressed to the FBI, alleged assassin Vance Boelter claimed Gov. Tim Walz instructed him to kill U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate, according to two people familiar with the contents of the letter.

The letter ... is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents. It includes Boelter alleging he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books, and that Walz, who is not running for Senate, had asked him to kill Klobuchar and others.
Some right-wing influencers are taking the allegation against Walz literally.


Others are being more "responsible" -- which, to right-wingers, means acknowledging that Walz had nothing to do with the shootings, but also arguing that a guy who shot several Democrats and wanted to shoot many more couldn't possibly have had a political motive and was just a sad, apolitical insane person.

Townhall:
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) even tried to cast Boelter as a crazed right-winger. That narrative quickly fell apart due to a lack of evidence. Also, left-wingers are the ones driving today’s political violence—evidence to that effect is overwhelming.
PJMedia:
There is no evidence that support for Trump or any conservative cause motivated Boelter’s actions. Instead, his violent spree was rooted in a deranged fixation on Walz, a far cry from the media’s initial narrative that sought to weaponize the tragedy against the pro-Trump right.

In short, Boelter is just a wacko. His letter is a testament to his fractured mind, not a manifesto of political grievance. The media’s rush to blame conservatives and the governor’s passive complicity in allowing false narratives to spread are failures that demand scrutiny.
And what's the result of this? COVER-UP! Here's RedState:
Details about a letter written by Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter have been released, and they paint a much clearer picture of his state of mind and why he did what he did. They also give a pretty good indication of why this story disappeared from the news so quickly.
And more from PJMedia:
This deliberate misinformation campaign explains why the story vanished from the headlines so quickly. Once the facts emerged, the narrative that fit the media’s partisan agenda collapsed. The silence that followed speaks volumes about the lengths to which some will go to manipulate public perception and exploit tragedy for political gain.
Yes, evil liberals are trying to bury the story of the Minnesota shootings, and the evidence is reporting on new developments in the story that appeared in the state's most prominent newspaper.

Why isn't this still the biggest story in America? Because this is America. I have a rule of thumb about this rage-saturated (and gun-saturated) country: We're so desensitized to violence that stories like these drop out of the headlines almost immediately if fewer than five people are killed. At this point, the correct number might be ten. But in this sick country, two dead is nothing.

I'll make an exception for an incident involving the president or a current presidential candidate -- or, because we live in a plutocracy, a prominent CEO. Otherwise, these stories fade fast.

David French, a conservative evangelical, has no problem linking Boelter's ideology to the deeds he's accused of:
Boelter’s roommate identified him as a President Trump-supporting Republican, and Boelter voted in the 2024 Republican primary. And he wasn’t just a Republican. He was also a 1990 graduate of the Dallas-based Christ for the Nations Institute and engaged in missionary activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he delivered exuberant sermons that soon appeared online.

In other words, Boelter wasn’t just a political assassin; he was a Christian assassin — and a person deeply connected to one of America’s most radical religious movements.

Christ for the Nations isn’t a staid, traditional seminary. It opened its doors in 1970. One of its founders was an extremist Pentecostal pastor named James Gordon Lindsay, who was part of a spiritual movement called the New Order of the Latter Rain.

... elements of Latter Rain are now part of a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, or N.A.R.

... The New Apostolic Reformation — and its close cousin, the independent charismatic movement — houses the most radical Christian Trumpists. Deeply influenced by prophecy, they see Trump as divinely destined to save America from the godless left and its political party, the “demoncrats,” who are doing Satan’s bidding here on earth.
Even if, for some reason, Boelter thought he was acting on behalf of Walz, his target list was unquestionably ideological, as even the reporter covering the story for Alpha News acknowledges.


in 2023, Walz signed a bill enshrining reproductive rights in Minnesota state law. Did Boelter not know that? Did he not pay attention to the pro-choice Kamala Harris/Tim Walz presidential campaign? And if all this was done so Walz could run for Senate, why shoot two state legislators? They weren't impediments to a Walz run. And in any case, Walz has chosen not to run in 2026 for the Minnesota Senate seat that's being vacated by Tina Smith, who's retiring. Why would Walz want to take Klobuchar's seat if he doesn't want Smith's?

I wonder whether this note says what we're being told it says. If the reporting is accurate, I suspect the note was a clumsy attempt to shift blame to yet another Democratic enemy -- and now many of Boelter's fellow right-wingers appear to be persuaded.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:07 AM 8 Comments

Friday, June 20, 2025

CLYBURN SIDES WITH CUOMO AND THE PLUTOCRACY

This is regrettable:
Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, a veteran lawmaker who was once the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, will endorse former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday....

“The mayor of New York is uniquely positioned to play an important role in the future of the national Democratic Party,” Mr. Clyburn said in a statement, adding that Mr. Cuomo had the “experiences, credentials and character to not just serve New York, but also help save the nation.”
Yes, Clyburn praised Cuomo's "character."

This is part of the cold civil war in and around the Democratic Party:
The endorsement comes three days after Mr. Cuomo’s main rival, Zohran Mamdani, was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont....

Mr. Sanders has also placed the race in a national context, arguing that Mr. Mamdani represents a break from ”corporate-dominated politics driven by billionaires.”

Mr. Clyburn does not often take sides in Democratic primaries, but he did so in a 2021 congressional race in Ohio to help defeat an acolyte of Mr. Sanders.
In that race, Clyburn endorsed Shontel Brown, who went on to win the seat after defeating the Sanders-wing candidate, Nina Turner. At the time, Clyburn offered his reasons for the endorsement:
He said his decision to back Ms. Brown, the chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, was not about Mr. Sanders, or even Ms. Turner.... But he took a swipe at what he called the “sloganeering” of the party’s left flank, which has risen to power with calls for “Medicare for all,” and to “abolish ICE” and “defund the police.”

“What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party,” Mr. Clyburn said in an interview. “When I spoke out against sloganeering, like ‘Burn, baby, burn’ in the 1960s and ‘defund the police,’ which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I’m against that.”
So moderation in all things? Not just public safety, but money issues?

Based on a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, I'd say Clyburn doesn't know exactly where his constituents are:
Some 62% of self-identified Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that "the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people." Only 24% disagreed....

The poll found a gap between what voters say they care about and what they think the party’s leaders prioritize. It was particularly wide on the issue of reducing corporate spending in political campaigns, where 73% of Democrats said they viewed putting limits on contributions to political groups like Super PACs a priority, but only 58% believed party leaders prioritize that....

Along that line, 86% of Democrats said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority, more than the 72% of those surveyed think party leaders make it a top concern....

Democratic respondents said the party should be doing more to promote affordable childcare, reduce the price of prescription drugs, make health insurance more readily available and support mass transit. They view party leaders as less passionate about those issues than they are, the poll found.
Universal healthcare is a priority for more than 80% of Democratic voters. Maybe some of these voters would reject "Medicare for All," but they share the goal. They want to tax the rich more. They want affordable childcare. They want lower Medicare drug prices. click to enlarge:


It seems to me that Democratic voters want an economic agenda that's not incrementalist, which explains why Mamdani isn't being rejected in New York as a wild-eyed radical.

When we talk about this, we tend to bundle economic populism with "wokeness" -- on trans athletes, for instance, or on policing. Establishmentarians like Clyburn tell us that the vast majority of Americans reject it all. But if you don't look at the facts that way, you see a country where many people want to reduce the power of the obscenely wealthy and give more of a break to ordinary people, and they don't see that as necessarily connected to "wokeness." Reuters tells us:
Just 17% of Democrats said allowing transgender people to compete in women and girls’ sports should be a priority, but 28% of Democrats think party leaders see it as such.

Benjamin Villagomez, 33, of Austin, Texas said that while trans rights are important, the issue too easily lends itself to Republican attacks.

“There are more important things to be moving the needle on,” said Villagomez, who is trans. “There are more pressing issues, things that actually matter to people’s livelihoods.”
Of course, Clyburn might not really care about the non-economic issues he mentioned in 2021. He might just want to keep big-money donations flowing to the Democrats. After all, this endorsement comes in the same week that this story appeared:
Just months into the tenure of a new party leader, Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee’s financial situation has grown so bleak that top officials have discussed whether they might need to borrow money this year to keep paying the bills.

Fund-raising from major donors — some of whom Mr. Martin has still not spoken with — has slowed sharply....

Six people briefed on the party’s fund-raising, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its finances frankly, said big donors — who are an essential part of the party’s funding — had been very slow to give to the party this year....
Establishment Democrats don't want to upset billionaire donors -- but they'll lose many of their voters if they insist on mollifying the rich at all costs. Cuomo is the candidate of the plutocracy. If the party continues to favor politicians like him, it might please donors, but it might not have much of a voter base in the future.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:29 PM 16 Comments

Thursday, June 19, 2025

NO REAL CHANGE, PLEASE -- WE'RE CORPORATISTS

There have been several recent editorials in the major newspapers about the New York mayor's race, which appears to be a two-person contest between thuggish sex pest Andrew Cuomo and charismatic but inexperienced social democrat Zohran Mamdani -- but this editorial, from The Washington Post's David Von Drehle, gets right to the point about what the corporatists who hope to maintain control of the Democratic Party in perpetuity really want:
For Democratic Party malaise in the age of Donald Trump, proposed cures are a dime a dozen. But a couple of ideas stand out. Find some fresh, inspiring candidates to replace the 20th-century relics. And put the kibosh on left-wing ideas associated with decline and disorder in some of America’s bluest cities.
There you go: The Democratic Party desperately needs fresh blood -- but please, no "left-wing ideas"!

Von Drehle cites a New York Times editorial published on Monday that begins with Murdochian scare tactics and doesn't get much better after that:
Many longtime New Yorkers have had a sinking feeling at some point in the past decade. They have worried that their city was heading back to the bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s.

Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality. Nearly half of bus riders board without paying their fares. The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade. The city’s fourth graders, after significantly outperforming their peers in other large cities during the early 2000s, have fallen back in math and reading. Housing has become even less affordable, and homelessness has risen. In the most basic measure of the city’s appeal, the population remains well below its pre-Covid peak.

We believe that New York is the world’s most dynamic and important city, thanks to its energy, diversity, creativity, prosperity and history. And though some of the complaints about the city today are overstated, we are also worried. The quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade. On some issues, like crime rates, the city has recovered modestly over the past few years, and it remains in far better shape than it was 50 years ago. Still, New Yorkers deserve better than the status quo.
"Some of the complaints about the city today are overstated"? Then why begin by validating the fears of those who believe the city is as dysfunctional and dangerous as it was at its worst in the late twentieth century? New York City had more than a thousand murders every year from 1969 through 1995. It had more than two thousand murders in 1990 and again in 1991. But there hasn't been a year with even five hundred murders in the city since 2011. Crime in the seven major categories is down more than 72% since 1993.

The Times editorial was apparently written in a state of desperation: Mamdani continues to rise in the polls, and denunciations of him don't seem to be working, so the editorial shifts to a different tactic: portraying Mamdani as the second coming of the widely reviled Bill de Blasio.
New York needs a mayor who understands why the past decade has been disappointing. Crucial to that understanding is an acknowledgment that a certain version of progressive city management has failed, in New York and elsewhere.... At the municipal level, this liberalism was skeptical of if not hostile to law enforcement. It argued that schools needed more money and less evaluation. It blamed greedy landlords for high rents, instead of emphasizing the crucial role of housing supply.

Bill de Blasio, whose eight-year tenure as New York’s mayor began in 2014, came from this wing of the Democratic Party. And he had some successes, including his expansion of preschool and his curtailment of widespread stop-and-frisk policing. Overall, though, he bears significant responsibility for the city’s problems. He did not take disorder seriously enough, and he set back the city’s K-12 school system. His main legacy is to have contributed to the city’s recent decline.
We're told that de Blasio "did not take disorder seriously enough" and "contributed to the city’s recent decline," but do you know which years had New York's fewest murders in living memory? The years 2017 and 2018. New York had fewer than three hundred murders in each of those years, for the first time since World War II. Do you know who was mayor then? Bill de Blasio.

Also, when the editorial says, "The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade," it's comparing 2024 figures to figures in 2014 -- when de Blasio was mayor.

But the editorial gives the game away when it defends greedy landlords and underfunding of schools: This is an effort to persuade voters not to try to move the Democratic Party of the Second Gilded Age to the left economically. The ed board's ideal candidate would be a Chuck Schumer with Mamdani's charisma -- or Cuomo himself without the baggage.

I expect Cuomo to win the primary. If he doesn't, he'll have a third-party ballot line in the general election. Mamdani might be on the ballot as the Working Families Party candidate if he loses the Democratic primary.

If both Cuomo and Madani are on the November ballot, I expect an even more brutal smear campaign against Mamdani than we've seen in the primary. And on whose behalf? Well, let me show you a campaign mailer I received this week...


The billionaires want to retain control of the Democratic Party and New York City -- and the ed board of The New York Times wants that too.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:55 AM 10 Comments

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

JEB BUSH WAS RIGHT ABOUT TRUMP AND "CHAOS"

Jamelle Bouie believes that recent declines in President Trump's polling are occurring because Trump's policies are affecting more and more Americans personally.
In his influential 1922 book, “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann observed that political leaders hold their greatest sway over the public when the issue or interest in question is abstract to most people’s experience....

This was why, Lippmann explained by example, Prohibition was popular “among teetotalers” or why “governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs.” All but the most exceptional leaders, he concluded, “prefer policies in which the costs are as far as possible indirect.”
Maybe Lippmann was right in 1922, but I don't think he's right about modern America, where exurban and rural people are enraged by Fox News images of crime in Chicago or homelessness in San Francisco, cities they'll never visit, and shake their fists at images of young trans athletes from the sedentary comfort of their retirement communities.

Bouie believes that Americans are turning against Trump's immigration policy because more and more of them are directly experiencing the crackdown.
... Trump ... and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies ... are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles, or even a few million undocumented immigrants, out of the more than 340 million people in the United States? But the reality is that to harden the border and more tightly police immigration — to remove as many unauthorized people as possible — is to necessarily subject American citizens to the scrutiny and violence of the state. External control requires internal suppression.
But how many Americans are personally encountering ICE agents? Some are seeing respected community members led away in handcuffs, but I think most Americans are still experiencing the crackdown as a media event. They do care about the protests in Los Angeles. But here's my hypothesis: an increasing number of Americans see the defiant protesters and burning cars and blame Trump.

It's widely believed that nonviolent protest is more persuasive than violent protest -- Erica Chenoweth, a highly regarded political scientist, has made that argument over the years. Much of the public thinks the L.A. protests aren't peaceful.


We've also been told that demonstrators in L.A. are alienating the public by waving Mexican flags.

But that clearly isn't helping Trump, whose overall approval rating has dropped five points in the past two weeks, while his approval on immigration has dropped by seven points. I think it's because he was elected to restore order, and what Americans are seeing is chaos. You and I knew how disruptive Trump's presidency would be, but he said Democrats were the disruptors, and many voters believed him -- they found inflation unsettling, they watched images of immigrants being bused north and west from the border, and they were told that crime was rising (it was, slightly).

Trump told them he'd fix all that, quickly. The MAGA base assumed that meant a war against everyone they hate, and they were ready for it. They love what he's doing. But the swing voters who put him over the top in November just wanted problems solved. They believed their lives would experience fewer disruptions under Trump, because he'd solve all the world's problems effortlessly, using his big deal-making brain. They wanted peace and prosperity. Now they're getting neither. It's not just that he's done nothing for them economically -- it's also the disruption day after day in the streets. You can't credibly call yourself a law-and-order president when there's no order.

Trump also promised to end all the wars instantly. How's that going?
More than half of those Americans who supported Donald Trump for president in 2024 don’t think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel.

A new The Economist/YouGov poll conducted on June 13-16 found that 53% of Trump voters said the U.S. should not join the war, versus just 19% who said the U.S. military should. Sixty percent of all Americans surveyed agreed that the U.S. should not get involved.
Every subgroup in this poll is overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. involvement (click to enlarge):


Fear of World War III was a more signifcant factor in the 2024 election than many people realize. Trump and his supporters knew it. They ginned up that fear during the campaign.



Trump made big foreign policy promises, and now, instead of going from two wars to zero, we've gone from two wars to three.

Poor Jeb Bush. He called it in December 2015.


If you say you're going to clean up Dodge, some people will conclude it's your fault if Dodge is in flames.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:02 AM 13 Comments

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

REPUBLICANS HATE DEMOCRATS, AND MEDIA LIBERALS CONSIDER THAT AN ACCEPTABLE PREJUDICE

I told you a couple of days ago that people on the right were portraying Vance Boelter, the Minnesota assassination suspect, as a Democrat (or a leftist or Marxist, which on the right are synonyms for "Democrat") despite ample evidence that he's a right-wing, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ Trump supporter. In a couple of updates to that post, I noted that this narrative was being advanced by well-known right-wingers, including two U.S. senators, Mike Lee and Bernie Moreno.

There's more, as Axios notes:
Elon Musk, sharing a post that claimed "the left" was responsible for the Minnesota shootings and a string of other crimes, wrote, "The far left is murderously violent."

Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson described Boelter as a "Tim Walz associate." Far-right activist Laura Loomer claimed Walz was "friends" with the suspect and called for the governor to be "detained by the FBI and interrogated."
Walz was one of two Democratic governors who named Boelter to the state's Workforce Development Board, but as Axios notes, citing Minnesota's Star-Tribune,
The board has around 60 members ... many of whom are not politically connected or would have meaningful access to the governor. The paper added there are more than 130 such boards, advisory councils, task forces and commissions.
President Trump says he won't phone Walz, telling reporters, “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out, I’m not calling him.” And in other expressions of contempt for Democrats and groups associated with Democrats, Donald Trump Jr. picked this moment to link pro-immigrant sentiment to election fraud and to advance a debunked anti-trans group slander:
... Trump Jr made ... baseless comments about the trans community during a discussion with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson.

“In leftist states and in blue states, they don’t want to enforce [the law] because they understand that’s their voter base, no different than immigration, so rather than follow the law, they’d rather let them get away with it so they vote for more Democrats again,” he said....

Trump Jr continued: “Just like the radical transgender movement is per capita the most violent domestic terror threat in America, probably the entire world, because you have all these shooters or murders or attempted murderers in such a tiny population of a country, yet they’re beyond reproach.”
And a couple of days after a Florida sheriff went viral for this rant...


... there's this:
An image apparently shared on the Facebook page for the Adams County sheriff depicting a blood-covered truck with the words “Protester Edition,” is going viral and prompting outrage.

The meme shows a white Dodge pickup with the front half stained with splotchy red and was posted on the personal page of James Muller over the weekend, according to screenshots.

But mainstream pundits don't talk about this as a problem unique to one party -- either they denounce political polarization across the board or they single out Democrats as the people more likely to have contempt for their political opponents, wringing their hands as they quote Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark yet again and stereotyping all liberals as EV-driving elitists who sneer at laborers and farmers with dirt under their fingernails.

Our pundits don't react with horror to group slanders and even eliminationist jokes directed at Democrats and others on the left. The pundits might vote Democratic (and drive electric vehicles themselves), but they've been subject to nearly half a century of right-wing ref-working, so they agree that liberals are bad and Republicans are the only true Americans, although they'll also grant humanity to swing voters who have become disillusioned by Democrats, as we know from a dozen or more New York Times focus groups.

Pundits don't feel moral outrage in response to Trump's contempt and the sheriffs' bloodlust because, at least subconsciously, they feel the president and the sheriffs are punching up -- snooty lefties deserve to be taken down a peg. Trump and the sheriff are seen as avengers speaking on behalf of the downtrodden working class, not as power-mad fascists.

I wouldn't say that contempt for liberals and leftists is "the last acceptable prejudice" -- in Trump's America, there are many, many acceptable prejudices -- but this one has been acceptable all our lives.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:27 AM 28 Comments

Monday, June 16, 2025

TRUMP RENEWS L.A.-BASED REALITY SERIES, ANNOUNCES TWO SPINOFFS

The big news story this morning is the arrest of the Minnesota shooter, Vance Boelter, but the news with the greatest impact is a policy adjustment announced last night at Truth Social. AP reports:
President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”

He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
The AP story implies that the announcement was a defiant response to Saturday's demonstrations. That might be true -- if Trump has a core principle, it's one he learned from his great mentor, Roy Cohn: When you're attacked, never apologize and always go on offense. In response to the demonstrations, and to polls showing his support on immigration slipping, he's doubling down.

He also wants to be perceived as not retreating after his recent announcement that he's pausing ICE raids on farms, hotels, and restaurants, which upset some of his richest backers.

The press is focusing more on the policy shift and less on the Truth Social post itself. I believe that America is in trouble because the voters for the country's dominant political party respond well to this kind of presidential rhetoric:
Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People.
Republicans run America because they've persuaded tens of millions of Americans that Democrats are history's greatest monsters. When Trump refers to "Radical Democrat Politicians," he's talking about all Democrats -- they're all radicals, as far as he and his voters are concerned. You may not see Democratic politicians engaged in "violence, harassment, and even threats" against ICE agents "every day," but Trump's voters (and Trump himself) think they have. They're sure they see it every day on Fox News.
In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.
Referring to this passage, Axios says that Trump "echoed baseless claims he made during the 2024 presidential election" -- but they're not just claims he made in 2024. Obviously he said the same things in 2020, but he also made similar claims after the 2016 election, when he insisted that he would have won California, a state he lost in a landslide, if it weren't for illegal votes. And it's not just Trump -- a large percentage of the Republican Party regularly accuses Democrats of cheating on elections, something that's been true at least since President George W. Bush fired U.S. attorneys two decades ago because they wouldn't pursue cases involving nonexistent Democratic election fraud.

Trump continues:
These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!
Here we have the core belief of the Republican Party: Democrats deliberately weaken America because they hate America. The GOP has been saying this since the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The party's media spokespeople -- on talk radio a generation ago, on Fox News and podcasts now -- say it every day as if it's established fact. This decades-long demonization of one of our major political parties has corroded democracy in America. It's a much greater crisis than, say, Democratic attempts to downplay President Biden's age-related impairment, or the fact that some progressives use the word "Latinx," but there's no Jake Tapper out there decrying this as a major threat to the Republic, even though it's the greatest threat to the Republic, and the reason at least 45% of Americans think the Trump/GOP dictatorship is perfectly acceptable.

You might see Trump's sudden change of subject -- what the hell do trans people have to do with immigration? -- as a sign of mental impairment, but it just means that his brain is wired like the brains of millions of other Fox viewers. A generation ago, the digression might have been about "Sharia law" or the subject of some other Fox-driven panic. Now it's trans people.

Trump writes:
I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day.
If you don't agree with Republicans on this issue, you're not a real American. You shouldn't be allowed to vote. You shouldn't have citizenship. As Republicans say:


Real Americans are enjoying the footage from L.A. the way normal people enjoy a horror movie: they're watching what terrifies them most -- people who disagree with them politically -- and there seems to be violence and chaos (even if they never process the fact that it's confined to a few blocks of a large, sprawling city, and even if they don't grasp that the tear gas smoke they see is coming from the cops, not the protesters). Then, after this series of delicious scares, their hero arrives to kill the monsters.

In their America, it's great TV. No wonder Trump is renewing Police State: L.A. and announcing two new spinoffs, Police State: Chicago and Police State: New York.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:02 AM 15 Comments
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