Doom Report (Week 2: Hurtling towards Rock Bottom)

We seem to be in the business of continually reaching new lows these days.  The most amusing was Trump’s claim that he had “turned on the water” in California.  He’s apparently moved beyond taking credit for things that he didn’t do and moved on to taking credit for things that never even happened.  As Leah Litman put it in this week’s episode of Strict Scrutiny, “America is officially in its finding out era.”

Strict Scrutiny is another great show that I recommend people listen to; while I’ve never been a huge fan of the flagship Crooked Media show (Pod Save America), some of their other shows (such as Scrutiny and Pod Save the UK) are pretty good.  Also in this week’s show, Melissa Murray proposed that, under Trump, “DEI” was being redefined as “dicks, ex-husbands, and incels,” which I thought was a pretty trenchant observation.

I didn’t even get a chance to talk last week about their previous episode, where they covered the Supreme Court’s response to oral arguments in the Texas pornography case.  The concensus of the conservative judges—who seem to be the only ones who matter any more—was that technology is advancing too fast, so I guess I that means we don’t need to follow the Constitution any more.  You know, historically, I’ve been very opposed to slippery slope arguments, because they are often used by the Right to justify opposition to popular positions with completely ridiculous, made up consequences (remember how gay marriage was going to lead to people marrying turtles?).  But the Right has actually made me rethink this position.  If Trump 1.0 was the first step on a slippery slope, we seem destined, inevitably, to break our necks at the bottom of the incline.

Also from this week’s Strict Scrutiny episode: buried in the spectacle of pardoning 1600 insurrectionists, Trump also pardoned the first police officer in DC convicted of murder while on the job, as well as his pal who helped him cover it up.  Why?  Because they were white cops convicted of killing an unarmed black man, of course.  Just in case you were still, somehow, doubting that Trump is all in on the white supremacy.

On the Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews Chris Christie.  As an anti-Trump Republican, Christie is worth listening to: much of what he says you want to cheer, because he hates Trump, and much of what he says has you yelling at the screen, because he is after all still a Republican.  On the topic of why Trump won (or, rather, why Kamala lost), he dovetails nicely with what I’ve also been saying:

And I think strategically, for her, the big mistake was, she didn’t distance herself from Biden.  And when 72% of the country (as the last poll the last weekend) said the country is on the wrong track, not separating yourself from the person who was president when it went to 72% wrong track, is a politically fatal mistake.

Fair enough.  Brian Tyler Cohen has said (and many seem to agree) say that the Democrats were “punished for high prices.” Bullshit: they were punished for trying to gaslight the American people.

But Christie then goes on to talk about how Americans feel like their government is failing them, and he cites the LA wildfires and the air traffic controllers.  Now, it’s not clear if this interview took place after the horrific plane crash on Wednesday, or if Christie was just being eerily prophetic here, but what struck me at the time was how both of his examples about how the government is failing could be construed to be the fault of the Republicans.  Of course, this never occurred to him (because apparently we live in a post-irony society).  On the topic of the wildfires, I completely agree that some of the funding decisions made by LA Mayor Karen Bass had some impact on the fires, but it’s hard to argue that the 100MPH winds weren’t the major factor.  And why do we have such insane winds? could it be because the Republicans have been waging a deliberate, decades-long campaign to convince us that climate change was a hoax when we all know—can see with our eyes, for fuck’s sake—that it’s very real, and endangering property and lives?  As for the air traffic controllers, I’m trying not to leap to judgement on the recent crash, even though it’s very tempting to do so when Trump forced out the head of the FAA (because President Musk didn’t like him), fired the entire aviation security advisory committee (which had been around since the 1989 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie), and then tried to convince us that DEI initiatives instigated under Obama were responsible, even though they somehow were fine for 15 years until Trump managed to get into office again.  But we don’t even have to blame Trump here: Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers back in 1981—wiping out over 11 thousand jobs in one fell swoop—and the industry never recovered.  More Perfect Union all but predicted an incident like this in a video they did on the topic almost a year ago.

But Christie goes beyond not seeing the irony in pointing out a bunch of deficits in the government that his own party is almsot certainly responsible for (or at least responsible for making worse).  He and Stewart get into a pretty spirited debate over DEI.  Christie is, predictably, against it.  He says that the American people feel like DEI forces companies to choose unqualified candidates just because they’re women or minorities—note that he won’t quite so far as to claim DEI actually does this, merely that people have this perception.  But Stewart points out that all DEI does is throw open the pools of candidates to people who traditionally would have never been considered.  Christie somehow manages to disagree with this perspective and then tells a long story about how he, when he was a US attorney in New Jersey, specifically sought out candidates of color because he recognized his office was “the whitest, male-est office I had ever been in, in my life.” And yet somehow, when he says it, that’s not DEI ... man, I hate to tell you, Chris, but if you were doing that today instead of 20 years ago, someone would have reported you to the DEI snitch line by now.  (As a side note, it never ceases to amuse me that the Trump regime’s poster child for the “meritocracy” that’s going to replace all the evil DEI initiatives is Pete Hegseth, a straight white man utterly devoid of merit.)

And the takeover of the government continues.  The OPM is sending out memos written by Project 2025 authors, President Musk is getting in on the act by recycling his buyout offer to Twitter employees, now directed at government employees, and federal workers are suffering an existential crisis.  Still, that’s nothing compared to Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (and others) having their security detail eliminated when there are still credible threats on their lives, just because they spoke out against Trump.  On this week’s Coffe Klatch, Reich had another take on this:

I think the Press gets this wrong, Heather: even the mainstream press are are describing this as retribution for people like Fauci or Bolton who have crossed Trump in the past, but, if you understand this in the terms that I’ve been giving you—and that is the consolidation of power—what Trump is really doing with all of these punishments is warning people who are currently in the government, currently officials, anybody who is potentially standing up to him, he’s saying to them “Don’t try to cross me, because if you do I’m going to make your life miserable in the future.  If for example you do something that causes you to receive death threats, ... I’m going to take away your security detail, or I’m not going to give you a security detail ...” In other words, this is this is all about consolidating power.

But, honestly, I think that might be a distinction without a difference.

Trump also fired a bunch of Inspectors General, without providing the requried 30 days’ notice to Congress.  Lindsey Graham was on CNN saying, sure, it was “technically” illegal, but Trump has the authority, so he wasn’t worried about it.  Weirdly, John Stewart, on Monday’s Daily Show, ended up agreeing with Graham.  Stewart’s point was that we shouldn’t be freaking out over everything Trump does; we need to save our outrage for the really bad stuff.  And this was a thing he did because we elected him, not because he’s a fascist.  But I think Stewart (uncharacteristically) misses the mark here.  IGs were invented to provide independent government oversight in the wake of Watergate.  As one acerbic Internet observer wrote, “Welp, if you’re the manager of a bank and you plan to rob the bank, firing the security guards is step one!” So I respect the point Stewart was trying make, but I think it’s a bit bigger deal than he intimated.  Also, being in agreement with Lindsey Graham pretty much always means you’ve gone wrong somewhere.

I think Stephen Colbert summed it up best this week with the story of his first car:

First car I ever owned was a 1978 powder blue Pinto.  I bought it from my brother Billy for a dollar, and I got ripped off.  But what she lacked in acceleration she made up for in rattle.  It clearly had some problems, but I didn’t have any money to fix it, and I didn’t know anything about cars.  So what I would do is, I would drive it over a shallow drainage ditch across the street from me, and I would keep it running, and I’d pull the handbrake really hard, and I’d shimmy underneath it with a hammer a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.  And then I would touch the hammer to various things under the car and, if by touching them, the rattling stopped, I would use the other tools to remove that thing from the car.  And after a while I had a beautiful collection of rusty hunks of metal on the wall of my garage.  I had no idea what they did, but the car was still running.  Until one day I removed one too many mystery parts and then it died.  So I left it on the street where it was eventually towed away to an area of Chicago you don’t want to know about called Lower Whacker Drive.  Now, I’m not saying the American government doesn’t have problems—it clearly does—what I’m saying is, if we just let Trump start firing people and cutting programs without knowing who any of them are or what any of them do, sooner or later America’s going to get Lower Whackered.

I don’t think I can put it any better than that.