Tacos, Tariffs, Pardons, and a Weeping Bongino.
Your deplorable week in review.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, it got worse this week. An orgy of corruption morphed into a bacchanal of pardons for scuzzballs, crooks, cronies, and assorted MAGA loyalists. (Possibly including Sean Diddy Combs, because covfefe or something.) It was not, however all seashells and parades: Trump was compared to a Taco and had relationship issues with his BFF in the Kremlin, Elon Musk, and Bibi Netanyahu. Meanwhile, more tariff whiplash and court rulings; a nasty split with the Federalist Society; an escalation of his vendetta against Harvard and international students; even more insane appointments….
Happy Saturday.
Quick note to readers:
Once again, I want to thank all of you who helped drag me back into this fight. Your generosity has been life changing both for the dogs and for me.
I’m frequently asked: What can we do? How can we fight back? How can we get through this? How can we stay sane? One answer: Subscribe to the independent voices out there.
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I know that there are a lot of claims on your time and your wallet, but this should be on your list: Support the voices that are supporting democracy, the rule of law, free speech, and fundamental decency.
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Nota bene
Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy - by Andrew Sullivan
The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.
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The Tragedy of Elon Musk - by Francis Fukuyama - Persuasion
Musk illustrates perfectly our oligarch problem. The United States has produced an impressive group of tech entrepreneurs who have created world-beating companies. But a number of them don’t know how to stay in their lane. They think that because they have become rich and successful in one line of work, they will be good at anything, and stray into areas where they are way out of their depth.
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Trump Takes Aim at the Federalist Society - by Nick Catoggio The Dispatch
Conservatives got the judiciary they wanted in exchange for supporting a man who radiates contempt for the constitutional order. In doing so, they empowered a postliberal movement that despises judges who do their jobs conscientiously instead of dutifully midwifing a Trumpist autocracy. As the Republican Party proceeds further down the path to fascism that those conservatives enabled, eventually the federal judiciary will consist entirely of believers in the “living Constitution,” half authoritarian and half progressive. In the long run, as Reaganites age out and are replaced by younger Trumpists, conservative judges as we’ve known them will go mostly extinct.
That’s what conservatives got for their bargain. The devil has come to collect.
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ICYMI: The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist - by David Frum - The Atlantic [GIFT LINK]
Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.
A week of commentary, snark, and cheap shots
Sunday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
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EDIT NOTE: Coming up Next: Podcasts with Julian Zelizer and Justin Wolfers.
Saturday dogs
The boys are headed back to the lake this weekend. They will take their humans with them.
Dan Bongino lamented Thursday morning about how unhappy he’s become now that he’s the bureau’s deputy director, complaining that he “gave up everything” to take the job in what at times felt like a therapy session on the Fox & Friends couch.
But the griping about the office from the FBI’s second-most-powerful drew heaps of trolling online.
“Dan Bongino has a nice cry on Fox & Friends,” liberal influencer Aaron Ruper snarked while posting a clip of the one-time podcaster’s complaints.
“He gave up a podcast and has been on the job for a few weeks,” pundit Amanda Carpenter reacted on social media. “There are many qualified people who will gladly and expertly fill this job if Bongino can’t handle it.”
Senator Ernst had her own “Let them eat cake” moment with her nihilistic statement of “We’re all going to die”.
The cruelty is the point.
I will be sending money to her opponent in the next election.
I cannot feel any sort of positive emotion for Musk as long as the people he threw out of work, on short to no notice and with the total chaos for them and their families that came with it, remain impacted after the fact. It's called empathy, something that Taco and his list of enablers and supplicants seem wholly unable to understand and do not possess.
Most people would agree that an audit of government expenses and attempting to be more efficient in bureaucracy is not a bad idea. The issue remains the execution of it. I seem to recall that Bill Clinton slimmed down federal government somewhat and managed to leverage that toward the balanced budgets that he delivered by the end of his terms in office. But there was a plan in place, it was carried out carefully and with adequate time for those involved to adapt, and the shock and pain factor was minimized. Musk, on the other hand, was the kid in the candy store ("I want this and that, and give me these and those, and ..."). His urges went unchecked and there was no accountability; only a few particularly lousy ideas were revisited afterward.
And then we find out that he likely was drug-addled all the while.
For the history books it will be a cautionary tale of how too much hero worship and too much trust in people whose expertise lies elsewhere create outcomes that generate more problems than they solve. Who knew that such a haphazard, reckless, unprofessional approach would achieve suboptimal results? (Yes, you too. The long line forms to the left, several blocks down the street.)