ANS -- The conservative media is going bonkers trying to normalize Trump

I got this from Robert Reich, who sent it along because he thought it was worth noting.  

--Kim

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The conservative media is going bonkers trying to normalize Trump

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  	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The conservative media is going bonkers trying to normalize Trump Robert Reich Feb 19   READ IN APP   Friends, From time to time, I come across essays that are particularly apt and helpful in terms of understanding the time we are in. Here's the latest from my friend Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect: One of the themes recurring in conservative media these days is the normalization of Donald Trump by historical analogy. This kind of sweeping arrogation of power, we're told by Wall Street Journal editorialists, columnist George Will, and other conservative commentators, has ample precedents in the records of progressive presidents particularly: Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. So why this harping on poor Donald Trump? Trump's overreaching claims to power, Will tells us, "is an institutional consequence of progressivism." Journal editorialists note that "Mr. Trump is stretching laws to see what he can get away with, but so have other recent Presidents," including both Obama and Biden. As historical analysis, this is malicious piffle. No previous president has told the nation's many thousands of autonomous school boards what their schools should teach; required his cabinet secretaries to affirm his Big Lie that he actually won a presidential election he actually lost; dictated which shows are suitable, and which not, for the Kennedy Center; told the NCAA which athletes to disqualify; or excluded media organizations from the White House that didn't conform to his renaming international bodies of water. If we seek precedents for this kind of conduct, we must look not to American presidents but to, say, the Bourbons of France. The power of our presidents has grown chiefly during wartime or other crises, and as the development of mass media, beginning with radio, enabled them to speak directly to their fellow Americans. There was nothing pernicious or threatening about Franklin Roosevelt's aptitude for radio or John F. Kennedy's for television. Trump's tweets, on the other hand, are pernicious and dangerous, not because he's mastered that medium but because he deliberately peddles lies and slanders. Nor has he taken power at a time of crisis; rather, he's claimed this to be a time of national emergency that presumably justifies his power grabs, though that emergency is not visible to the naked eye. So Trump's opening salvos are in no way like Franklin Roosevelt's first hundred days, as some right-wingers have argued. Roosevelt took office in a time of genuine crisis, when unemployment stood at 25 percent and when an epidemic of runs on banks had shuttered every depository institution in the nation on the eve of his inauguration. To address this, Roosevelt did order federal examiners to spend the next several days assessing the solvency of the country's banks, but then he turned to Congress to enact the emergency measures that defined his first months as president. At his behest, Congress enacted a bailout for American farmers and a semi-cartelization of American industry, created deposit insurance for the nation's bank depositors, and established a Civilian Conservation Corps that provided work to jobless young men and improvements to national parks and forests. He did not claim for himself powers he knew presidents did not have; he asked Congress, successfully, to enact these far-reaching changes. Progressive presidents have indeed enlarged government's regulatory capacity, but invariably because public interest and public safety demanded it. Congress established the departments and agencies that these presidents sought and the public desired. The growth of the administrative state did not come from presidential decrees, unlike the destruction of the administrative state flowing from unlawful executive orders today. Teddy Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration so that Americans wouldn't be poisoned so frequently by what they consumed. Wilson's allies pushed a bill through Congress that established the Federal Trade Commission to aid consumers and small businesses struggling to deal with corporate domination of markets. FDR signed congressional legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Congress, responding to the financial chicanery that led to the crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, passed a bill, which Obama signed, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This was all government by consent of the governed, with Congress passing, the president signing, and the courts upholding the constitutionality of these newly created agencies. None of these fundamental changes were due to presidential executive orders, decrees, tweets, or pronunciamentos. If there is a model in the annals of our history for the agency closures and funding impoundments that Trump has unilaterally ordered, it's the despotic one that James Madison cautioned against in his Federalist Papers arguments. There, he explained why the Constitution he'd just co-authored created separate branches of government precisely to forestall the prospect of a despot's rise. The possibility that the new American nation could degenerate into the monarchical form of government that then prevailed across Europe was very much on Madison's mind. "The accumulation of all powers—legislative, executive and judiciary—in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny," Madison wrote in Federalist 47. To keep that from happening, he wrote in Federalist 51, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." To this end, he installed the French philosophe Montesquieu's ideas of separation of powers and checks and balances as the centerpiece of the Constitution. Despite that, a cowed and supine Republican Congress has raised nary a peep at Trump's seizure of its power; because Republicans want these agency closures and funding impoundments but know they could not get them through their chambers of the legislature, they'd rather the president seize their power while they go mute. And while federal courts, so far, have sought to curtail those seizures of power, the Supremes have yet to be heard from. Ours is the only constitution enacted in the 18th century that's still operative; the constitutions of every other nation were drafted and enacted in more modern times, when the specter of a monarchial despot had by then generally receded. Ours was by no means a fully democratic document, limiting popular sovereignty to the lower levels of government and endeavoring to ensure rule by elites. While amendments have mitigated some of these biases, vestiges (the Senate, the Electoral College) are still with us today. Yet the Founders' emphasis on a separation of powers rooted in fear of a despotic president has long been a kind of background noise in discussions of our constitutional order. It's there, and we're generally glad it's there. But as a result of the nearly 250 years that we've gone without a wannabe despot president, it's not the sort of thing that has merited much attention. Mr. Will's and the Journal's stabs at Trump normalization notwithstanding, it does now.

ANS -- What's going to happen when Missouri eliminates half of its tax revenue?

This is from Brad Hicks.  He lives in Missouri.  This is about a bad idea that we are trying again. 

--Kim

infamousbrad

What's going to happen when Missouri eliminates half of its tax revenue?

We get poorer.

It's just that simple. Any kind of an even minimally functioning economy depends on taxpayer funded services for things that the private sector can't or won't fund. Once those services are curtailed or go away altogether, so does the private sector economy that depends on them.

• Once the roads go to shit, any job that depends on roads goes away.
• Once the justice system goes to shit, any job that depends on safety goes away.
• Once the schools go to shit, any job that needs even minimally educated workers goes away.
• Once public health goes to shit, any job that depends on people being healthy enough to work goes away.
• Once all semblance of affordable housing goes away, once affordable transportation goes away, any job that needs low-wage workers goes away.

This isn't even vaguely theory or ideology, this is historical fact. No county, no state, no country, has ever gotten wealthy by providing fewer government services, nobody has ever tax-cut their way to prosperity. I went to a John-Birch-Society-funded private high school, I know that the anarcho-capitalist right thinks that anything that deserves to be done can and will be done better by the private sector, but it's been tried over and over again since the term "laissez fair" was coined and they don't have a single success to point to.

But apparently we're going to try it again, and slide down into chaos and poverty again, and why? Because "my ideology says it does work." Because "nobody else has ever tried hard enough for long enough." (Yeah, there's a reason for that.) Because "we have alternative facts." Because "this time will be different."

Because there is no historical force more implacable than a bad idea whose time has come around again. Because we have record-high income inequality and nobody has ever designed a form of government that can keep money from being converted into power. Because for every problem there is a solution that is easy, obvious, and wrong.

ANS -- Don't Believe Him

Here is a piece by Ezra Klein.  It shows Trump's weakness.  We need to hear that.  It's a bit long.

--Kim

Lori Ryerson

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Once again, because Meta prevents Canadians from sharing news articles, I have copied and pasted this article from today's New York Times. *This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on "The Ezra Klein Show."* This is an outstanding analysis, well worth your time.

Opinion | Don't Believe Him

Ezra Klein, Feb. 2, 2025

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump's second term and you'll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS's "Frontline" in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we've got to start with muzzle velocity. So it's got to start, and it's got to hammer, and it's got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon's insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump's first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon's strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn't in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump's country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it's over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump's first term, we were told: Don't normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don't believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don't believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump's transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin's bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump's soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump's lawyers, "I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind." A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump's power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don't believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump's odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court's ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget's order to freeze spending suggests they don't. Bravado aside, Trump's political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump's approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden's in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump's aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump's whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they're ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We've learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — "it didn't go through the proper approval process," an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president's second term is embarrassing.

But it's not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the "deep state" it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: "Fork in the Road." Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: "Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits." The Washington Post reported that the email "blindsided" many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk's takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don't believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn't. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: "This non 'buyout' really seems to have backfired. I'll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible." As I write this, it's been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn't building support; he's losing it. Trump isn't fracturing his opposition; he's uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there's only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump's presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn't true. Don't believe him.