The Mice in Winter

Time to roar. Not cower.

Personal note: I’m here at Yale, at a conference of academics, where — as the author of books like ProfScam and Fail U. — I imagine that I could well be the most unpopular person in the room. Send good thoughts.

**.

Monday Night Massacre. “Justice Dept. Donald Trump Fires Prosecutors Who Worked on Trump Investigations.”

Justice Department veterans called the firings an egregious violation of well-established laws meant to preserve the integrity and professionalism of government agencies….

[Many} of the dismissals appeared to target career lawyers and most likely violated civil service protections for nonpolitical employees.

Former prosecutor Andrew Weissman predicts that the “firing of career prosecutors who were assigned to the Trump prosecutions will be found to violate the law protecting career employees. But the damage will have been done. Lawlessness in plain sight.”

For all intents and purposes, the final tattered bits left of the DOJ’s independence were bludgeoned into oblivion Monday night.

The firings came just days after the illegal firings of 17 independent inspectors general; and the same day that the White House “Orders Pause in All Federal Grants and Loans,” except, presumably Social Security Checks.

Meanwhile: “Man Pardoned in Jan. 6 Riot Is Fatally Shot by Sheriff’s Deputy During Traffic Stop.”

Also meanwhile, the media seem rather impressed by the “efficiency” and speed with which the Trump Administration is doing all this… And Trump critic Jim Acosta is apparently out at CNN.

Happy Tuesday.

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A bit of tech karma?

It’s been a rough couple of days for the tech bros and their crypto cousins.

By now you’ve probably heard about Trump’s meme coin — $Trump — which enables anyone with a few spare billions to buy the temporary affection of the mostpowerfulmanintheworld. This has, evidently disconcerted much of crypto-world, including that segment which regarded Trump’s ascension as the Second Coming of the Gilded Age. The new coin, however, put a tad too much crass on the gild for their tastes, and so they fret.

Crypto executives criticized the move as a cash grab, saying that Mr. Trump had undercut the industry’s credibility at the very moment when proponents were seeking a more prominent place for digital currencies in mainstream finance and business.

His venture, they said, created a brief and highly publicized bubble that partly deflated within a few days even as Mr. Trump’s family and its business partners collected millions of dollars from fees on purchases and sales of the coin.

“It makes it all look corrupt and self-interested,” said Nic Carter, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump who runs the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures and was at the Crypto Ball as the new $Trump coin was announced. [Emphasis added for the sake of schadenfreude.]

Then came DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that made the Silicon Bros look like chumps and ate away hundreds of billions of dollars in the value of their stocks. So I think its safe to say that the Golden Age is off to a less than optimal start.

OK. Enough snark.

A word from our readers

Never forget?

History is a fickle and often unreliable bitch academic discipline, but it ought to take note of the date — January 27, 2025, which marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Remembrances were held across the globe, with the pledge, “Never Forget.”

In this country, however, the anniversary came the day after the American president called for ethnically cleansing Gaza; and just two days after the Shadow President appeared via video at a rally for Germany’s neo-Nazi party and declared that it’s time to “move on” from “past guilt.”

This, of course, came days after he yukked it up on X about that whole Nazi-like salute that absolutely, positively, was not about Nazis at all.

Earlier in the week, the ADL tried to cut Musk some slack over the “awkward” gesture. But this was too much.

[After] Musk’s jokes Thursday, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt seemed to have enough of it all. In a statement directly addressing Musk, he wrote:

“We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it …@elonmusk, the Holocaust is not a joke.”

The Mice in Winter

Fair warning: metaphors are being mixed here. “The Mouse that Roared,” is one of my all-time favorite movies, along with the “Lion in Winter.” I am also a big fan of “Game of Thrones,”¹ which should confirm my tastes are both eclectic and erratic.

But as we watch the feckless Democrats cower before confront the Trumpian blizzard, I keep imagining the image of a mouse in winter. Winter has most definitely come, but where is the roar?

Longtime Dem operative Dan Pfeiffer asks an especially trenchant question: Why are Democrats Voting for Trump's Nominees?

“If Trump's agenda is so dangerous, why endorse the people who will implement it?”

Some Sunday Notes on Week One

That’s a question bristling with fuck yeah excellence.

If this is, indeed, the fight of our political lives, why does it feel as if Democrats are just going through the motions? If the assaults on bedrock constitutional principles are really an existential threat, why are so many senators behaving as if everything is basically normal? Why have they so easily acquiesced in Trump’s defining down of deviancy? And why are they actually voting to confirm nominees whose only quality is their abject loyalty to Trump’s campaign of chaos and cruelty?

Here’s Pfeiffer:

This mind-boggling decision speaks to strategic incoherence and a misunderstanding of how politics works in the Trump era.

Yes, he acknowledges, Democrats voted en masse against confirming a weekend cable host with a reported drinking problem and accusations of sexual assault and domestic abuse as Secretary of Defense.” They are all likely to vote against Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and (most, if not all?) against RFK Jr.’s crackpottery.

But, notes Pfeiffer, “these are exceptions, not the rule.”

Every Democrat voted to confirm Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Nine Democrats voted to confirm Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. Huge swaths of Democrats voted to advance the nomination of Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary. Twenty-one Democrats voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as CIA Director. The Ratcliffe nomination is a case in point for the incoherence of the Democratic approach. As Semafor’s Burgess Everett pointed out, no Democrat voted to confirm Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence when Trump nominated him in 2020. Even Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voted against him!

Did Ratcliffe do such a great job in his brief stint as Director of National Intelligence that many Democrats changed their mind about him?

Of course not. Ratcliffe didn’t change; how Democrats viewed politics changed.

So, what is happening here? Democrats don’t have the power to unilaterally block any of Trump’s appointees. But what on earth is the political upside of voting affirmatively to confirm them?

For the entire campaign, Democrats argued Trump was a danger to democracy who would use the White House to exact revenge on his political adversaries. Establishment Republicans, business types, and media figures said we were being hyperbolic.

Well, in the first week, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1600 people involved in January 6th including those who assaulted police officers and the former leaders of anti-government militias. He threatened President Biden and Adam Schiff with prosecution. He rescinded the security protection from political opponents like Anthony Fauci and former State Department employees who are believed to be assassination targets by Iranian intelligence. Trump is doing exactly what he said. Democrats were right about the threat he posed.

What message does it send about Trump and his agenda when Democrats sign off on the people who are designated to implement that agenda?

Do these Democrats who voted yes think they are going to get points for bipartisanship or for upholding norms? Do they really believe they will get credit from Trump voters when they go to the polls in two years?

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

**

So what could happen? What can the opposition do as Trump seeks to gather power, destroy guardrails, fire watchdogs, flout the constitution, wreck alliances, pardon seditionists, gag his critics, and bring his patented personal graft into the heart of our government?

This would seem a good time, Bill Kristol suggests, for members of the senate to act like… members of the United States Senate. They have the power to tie the senate into knots. Use every tool of parliamentary procedure to slow the roll and sound the alarm that none of of this remotely normal. What can Democrats do now? Writes Kristol:

Tell the truth—and do it clearly, and do it loudly. Tell the truth about Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel. Tell the truth about Trump’s cruel and damaging immigration policies. Tell the truth about Trump’s plutocrats and corruption and grift. Tell the truth about Trump’s assault on the rule of law. For now, the public’s wondering what to think about Trump. Explaining how damaging and dangerous Trump’s policies will be would be important. Do it forcefully. Do it often.

And keep publicizing the raw insanity of this kind of bullshit:

Tuesday dog

Auggie’s in the mood for a roadtrip.

….

1. Also a fan of: “All Creatures Great and Small,” “This Is Us,” “Bad Sisters,” “Bad Monkey,” “Trying,” and “Only Murders in the Building.” And documentaries about Birds.