Well, we got through the first week alive. That’s the good news. I had the creeping fear that Herr Mr. Hair might mistake the biscuit for his smartphone one early morning and, in an attempt to throw Twitter shade on Alec Baldwin, mistakenly launch World War III. That didn’t happen, but it has been a busy start to what promises to be a very problematic presidency. There has been the usual flurry of shiny media objects, which in Trump world amounts mostly to diversion tactics, drawing the press’s attention away from the crucial legislative and executive actions that form the core of the Republicans’ reactionary agenda.
The most effective way of distracting the media is by attacking them head-on, which we saw last weekend when Sean Spicer marched into the White House press room and delivered a stern lecture to the fourth estate, mostly based on outright lies and falsehoods. It was a remarkable performance, worthy of a pre-teenager, and pure Trumpist arrogance/ignorance. All presidential administrations lie; the Trump cadre, however, is distinctive in that they tell painfully obvious lies – lies that require no research to disprove. Many of their transparent lies are rooted in Trump’s overheated ego: the whining about the relative size of his inaugural crowd, the fable about millions of fraudulent votes in California, and so on. The press should just slap the “lie” label on this trash and soldier on.
It’s what lies behind the lies that should be our focus. The voter fraud accusation is the opening salvo in Trump’s effort to nationalize the ongoing GOP war on minority voters. This will start with an investigation along the lines of his inquiry into Obama’s birth certificate. (“You won’t believe what my people are finding.”) And while the mainstream press has reported that Trump’s fellow Republicans have backed away from this, Paul Ryan’s response was instructive. He essentially said that voter fraud was a “concern” in Wisconsin that the state addressed through voter I.D. legislation and other measures. Those responses helped deliver that Wisconsin to Trump, of course. So, with respect to legislative “solutions” to so-called voter fraud (i.e. voting on the part of people who don’t typically vote for them), Trump and Ryan are on the same page.
Bottom line: Keep your eye on Congress and on the executive orders and memorandums flying out of the White House, and respond accordingly. That’s where the real fight is now.
luv u,
jp
Lots of people have taken issue with this reaction, and more than 50 sitting congresspeople elected not to attend Trump’s inauguration as a protest. And this incident is being spun in the media as just another instance of the president-electoral not being able to let any critical comment pass, of being too thin-skinned or too sensitive. I have to say, though, that I think there’s more to this social media rant than just the T-bone’s usual expression of his hyper narcissism. This incident seriously smells of Bannon, which is to say that it’s a strategic tirade, aimed at a very specific audience.
That last issue got a boost from the Senate over the past few days, setting up the budgetary framework for pulling the whole thing down. The end of the ACA will of course mean an enormous tax break for top earners, particularly the top tenth of one percent, whose tax benefit will be in the six figures. That’s the real reason why Paul Ryan is smiling – nothing makes him happier than forcing people off of the kind of assistance his family needed when he was young. (A psychologist might have an explanation for that.) Trump, of course, blew some smoke at his presser, saying that the ACA would be simultaneously replaced by something better, details yet to follow. Just be patient, folks …. he’s gonna change!
The challenge this time around is being able to move fast enough to make a difference. The GOP-run Congress is going to ram a stack of legislation through over the next few weeks that will disable the ACA (so called “Obamacare”), cut back or restructure (privatize) Medicare and Medicaid, cut Social Security (perhaps privatize as well), and more. We need real-time information on specific legislation that’s being proposed, voted on, etc. Sourcing that will be crucial. We also need to organize on a local, Congressional district level, to apply pressure where it will have the greatest impact.
Probably the most prominent feature of a discouraging week was the fallout over 
Well, now the “war on Christmas” crew has a prominent new spokes-moron: President-elect Donald Trump, who has made a point of pushing Christmas at all of his victory tour rallies across the country. You’ve probably seen it – big “Merry Christmas” sign on the front of his podium, lines of Christmas trees behind him. At 
The United States has had dogs in this fight for years, despite what you’ll hear on bullshit broadcast outlets like Morning Joe. They have provided covert support to rebel groups in Syria since before the uprising, so there’s little doubt that some of those fighters assumed – as Chalabi did with regard to Iraq – that Uncle Sam would swoop in and save the day, Kosovo style. The notion that the United States could somehow fix this problem through the application of military force has remarkable currency among politicians, pundits, and talking heads.
The list thus far seems custom designed to irritate centrists and liberals. That’s only to be expected, right? People who didn’t support Trump, people who said bad things about him, people who worked for his opponent – their attitude is, well, fuck those people. And since they have no philosophical commitment to making government work effectively, the vengeance factor is of greater relative importance than it might otherwise be. Still, it is pretty stunning to see them assemble such a wrecking crew. We knew that a Republican win would mean hitting the ground running in January, and it looks like that’s going to be the case.
This cannot be overstated: South Africa and some of its immediate neighbors (Namibia, Angola) would not be the nations they are today without Cuba’s intervention on their behalf in the fight against the racist Apartheid military and its allies. Whatever criticisms anyone may have about Castro’s rule and his repression of internal dissent, we have to acknowledge that the Cubans have engaged in humanitarian intervention to a degree that far surpasses anything we have done. They did so at great cost: Washington really turned the screws on Havana, making them pay dearly for their activist stance in support of independence movements overseas.
Let me see if I can guess: whatever his last advisor told him to do. Unfortunately, the two corner offices of the White House will be occupied by two of the most unstable people in his entourage – former Breitbart editor (and man who looks like he spent the last two months sleeping under a bridge) Steve Bannon, who helped buoy the now famous alt-right movement, and General Michael Flynn, who feigns a pretty good imitation of General Jack Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. This makes the Trump White House what may be described as an attractive nuisance, in a way. It seems likely that terror groups will be even more emboldened to mount a spectacular attack on the United States, since they know these people are far more likely than Obama to overreact. Violent overreaction is just what they want from us. Just ask them.