Sunday, January 18, 2026

Doom Report (Week 52: Don't Look Back in Anger (as much as possible))


Just after the last presidential election, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who caused me quite a bit of surprise (and not a small amount of despair) because it indicated to me that he had voted for Trump.  And this, I felt, was disastrous.  So disastrous that it engendered first a single blog post, then an entire series, and now there’s a Substack, and that’s what you’re reading right now.

And now—or at least in a day or two—we will have had the current regime in power for a year, and so it seems like an appropriate time to look back on my original conversation, and its attendant blog post, and revisit the dismissals my friend made, and the predictions that I made, and see which ones were right.  (I’d also like to note that all the Doom Reports now exist on Substack, despite many of them predating the creation of that account, so you can read them all there if you’re so inclined.)

Now, the one thing that I didn’t mention about my friend, perhaps because I was scared of “outing” him to anyone who happens to know me personally, was that he himself actually works for the government.  (I suppose I’m no longer concerned about the outing: I don’t have too many friends who work for the government, so if you know me decently well you almost certainly now know who I’m talking about.  But it’s probably fine.)  And I could also mention that our birthdays are about 4 days apart, right around election day (in 2024, election day was actually on my birthday).  So it’s traditional for us to call each other right around that time, which is how the whole conversation about Trump happened in the first place.  This past November, however, we did not call each other.  I hope that doesn’t mean our friendship is fractured, but I will happily admit to being an utter coward when it comes to finding out.  I certainly don’t have any desire to call him up and say “I told you so”—I’ve never found that particularly satisfying anyway, and it certainly wouldn’t be constructive in this particular situation—but I also know that that if I called him and he didn’t seem to think his assessment was wrong, I would be devastated.  I’m not sure our friendship (which has thus far lasted over 40 years) could recover from that.  I think he probably does realize I was more right than he (although certainly not right in all respects), but I’m just too chickenshit to test the theory.  And why didn’t he call me?  I can’t say.  I don’t even have a wild guess.

The only contact I’ve had with him was in July, when things were sufficiently bad that I felt I needed to reach out and ask if he was personally impacted.  So I sent a text saying “Have you survived being DOGEd?”  He allowed that he had, though he now had to come into the office every day.  And, since “the office” in this case was about 4 hours away from his house, I suspect this was not a pleasant change.  Still, he made out much better than many other government workers.  But I didn’t say that.  I texted back that I was sorry to hear it, and that it sucked, and I sent some frowny-face emoticons.  I commiserated.  Because, at the end of the day, he’s still my friend, and while he may have been wrong about ... well, just about everything in that original conversation ... he still didn’t deserve getting jerked around in his employment situation.  So when I go through all the things that he said, and that I said, and talk about which of them were good predictions and which were shit, I hope that you don’t think that I’m trying to make my friend look a fool, or that I’m in any way happy about being (mostly) right.  No, this is just a reflection on the things we said, and an exploration on which were prescient, and which were hyperbolic.

Things My Friend Said:

  • Calling Trump “fascist” was over-the-top rhetoric.  Do I to have offer any proof that this myth is busted?  Fine: here’s a recent New York Times article that breaks it down pretty well.  Here’s a former Yale professor who wrote two books on fascism explaining why he lives in Canada now.  Or here’s an Australian perspective from a University of Sydney professor with a lot of thoughtful research and a balanced viewpoint.  Or maybe it’s sufficient to point out that there is a Wikipedia article called “Donald Trump and fascism” and, while the article itself doesn’t definitively take a position one way or the other (“teach the controversy,” as the conservatives are fond of saying), the mere fact that it exists at all is sort of telling.  There is no “Bill Clinton and fascism” article, nor a “Joe Biden and fascism” article, nor a “Barack Obama and fascism” article.  Heck, there aren’t even any “George Bush and fascism” or “Ronald Reagan and fascism” articles.  Just Trump.
  • Trump didn’t do any of this crazy stuff in his first term, and he doesn’t really mean all the crazy shit he says.  Well, he certainly seems to mean it now, and he’s certainly getting a bunch of it accomplished.  Everyone said he was just “trolling” when he talked about taking over Greenland.  Now NATO is sending troops there because, as the Danish prime minister put it, “there is a fundamental disagreement because the American ambition to take over Greenland is intact.”  (In regard to Trump not being able to reach this level of insanity on the first go-round, I offered this quote: “If the arsonist can’t burn your house down because he can’t figure out to work the flamethrower, that’s good, but you still don’t let him keep the thing, right?”  I know it’s bad form to quote yourself, but I’m still pretty proud of that one.)
  • He’s not actually running on Project 2025.  Well, whether we still want to believe the bullshit he spewed about not knowing anything about it or not, it doesn’t much matter: as a recent Some More News breakdown makes clear, Project 2025 is getting done, and quite effectively at that.  As the Project 2025 Tracker (referenced in the SMN piece) notes, out of 320 total objectives, 129 are already achieved, with another 68 in progress.  Which it rates as 51% complete in just the first year.  As of time of writing: if you’re too slow clicking that link, it may well be more by the time you look.
  • There are checks and balances.  Sigh.  This was really the most disappointing argument, in my book.  I’m not entirely sure who my friend imagined would be providing those checks and balances, but I’ve seen barely any.  The Republicans in Congress have provided essentially zero, and even the Democrats have caved more often than stood up.  The lower courts keep handing him losses, sure, but that doesn’t matter because the Supreme Court hands him win after win.  And the cabinet?  It’s full of two types: sycophants like Bondi, Hegseth, and Duffy who are so busy sucking up that they just don’t have time to do any checking or balancing, and puppetmasters like Bannon, Miller, and Vought who are there to steer Trump around the checks and balances.  And maybe a few people like Vance and Rubio who still haven’t decided which camp they belong to.  It’s telling when the best note of hope that people like Robert Reich can come up with is that Trump is demonstrating to us how all the checks and balances are broken.
  • We have too many government agencies anyway, so losing some is fine.  What’s “funny” about this one is how naïve I was.  I was worried about Trump causing deaths by allowing more pollution and stopping action on climate change.  (And let’s be clear: he did do those things as well.)  But that sort of slow, methodical approach to mass murder was way too inefficient for our current regime.  No, the coup de grâce was actually letting Elon murder USAID, which probably killed about a million and a half people while simultaneously stealing over $2 billion from the pockets of American farmers.  Look, no one’s saying that there’s not too much bureaucracy in the government.  But the reason that “move fast and break things” works for Silicon Valley is that the broken things are just corporate profits.  In D.C., the “things” that they’re currently breaking are often people’s lives.

So, overall, I’m going to declare that 0 for 6 for my friend’s predictions.

Things I Said:

To be fair, I wasn’t batting 1,000 on my prognoses either.

  • Among the people that were definitely not going to stop him, I listed the following: Elon Musk, RFK Jr, Herschel Walker, Steve Bannon, and Laura Loomer.  Now, Bannon and RFK have certainly fallen into the categories of puppetmaster and sycophant, as I described above, and Musk has definitely done his share of damage, though he did have at least one minor fit of rebellion.  Meanwhile, Loomer hasn’t been nearly the influence that I thought she’d be (although some disagree with that assessment), and Walker got shipped off to the Bahamas.  I’ll call this one 50-50.
  • I predicted that my grocery bill would go up in 2025, and that I’d end up with nearly every local grocery store owned by the same megacorp.  Well, according to my spreadsheet, I spent $800 less on groceries in 2025 vs 2024 (maybe due to having to get smarter about what we spent on, though that won’t make me any less wrong), and the Albertons/Kroger merger didn’t find new life under Trump, so the majority of my local stores are (still) owned by two megacorps.  But either way I’ve got take the L on this one.

So, maybe 2½ out of 4?  Could have been worse.

Putting It All Together.

I noted that I’ve never found “I told you so” particularly satisfying.  My father does.  He lives for it.  From what I could gather from his work stories, being able to tell his bosses that he had told them so was the greatest joy he ever got as an employee.  Me, not so much.  What I wrote at the end of this post that I’m reflecting on today was:

And, look: I hope I’m wrong about that. I would be very pleased for you to be able to tell me “I told you so.”

And I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that I really would be much happier today if this post were all about how wrong I was and how paranoid I was being and how Trump wasn’t nearly as bad as all the “deranged liberal loonies” said he would be.  I’m not sure I can imagine a time in my life when I would be happier to have been wrong.  But, sadly, the only way us liberal loonies were wrong was that we didn’t imagine it would be worse.  We didn’t think it could get this cruel.  This callous.  We thought the courts would provide a meaningful check.  We thought that at least some of the Republicans in Congress wouldn’t willingly surrender their power.  We thought public outcry would be greater.  We thought it would be bad, and we’d all regret it, and then we’d be able to recover.  Now ... I’m not sure that I believe we will recover.  Last week, I mentioned Kim Lane Scheppele’s guest spot on Strict Scrutiny.  Scheppele is an expert on autocracies, and the coiner of the term “Frankenstate” (meaning a government which appears democratic on the surface, but is functionally an autocracy).  Here’s a quote from her segment last week:

One thing that we know about countries that have had these episodes of autocracy is that it’s extremely hard to come back, because the supporters of these autocrats are still around.  They burrow in.  They occupy choke points.  They can still win elections.

Now, ostensibly she was talking about Brazil, whose own Trump-like figure, Jair Bolsonaro, is now in jail (you may recall that Trump threw a bit of a tariff hissy-fit over that fact).  But it’s impossible not to feel like she could be describing our own future.  Note the sober look on Melissa Murray’s face after Scheppele finishes speaking; we know what she’s thinking well before she uses the phrase “cautionary tale.”

This week The Weekly Show is back, and Jon Stewart is interviewing Fareed Zakaria.  At one point Fareed says:

And that’s the tragedy.  We had been so reliable that the world never thought—that our allies never thought—they needed an insurance policy, they needed to hedge against, you know, against our becoming crazy rogue imperialists.  And now they do.

You may remember way back in week 14 when Jon interviewed former UK cabinet minister Rory Stewart.  One quote of his that I didn’t use in that Doom Report was this one, where he discusses running through economic and military scenarios:

But nobody then, nobody 10 years ago ever said, well, wait a second: are you not taking a big risk here?  Because what happens if the US was no longer a reliable ally?  It was inconceivable.  I mean, literally nobody in that room said, well, hold a second.  You’re going to put yourself completely dependent on buying US defense equipment.  What happens if a president comes in who says he’s going to switch off the software on the F-35s?  ...  I mean, it’s maybe a silly point and obvious to listeners, but we had no doctrine.  When we went to military training or we looked at strategy, we had no doctrine for what to do if the US became an adversary.  We literally don’t have any plans for defending Greenland because it was inconceivable.

Well, I bet the UK government has scenarios for that now.  I bet every country in Europe—not to mention Canada, Mexico, Australia, and so many others—is figuring out what to do if the US ceases to be the good guys.  Because they can’t trust us to do that any more.  And trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

All of which is to say that maybe the Republicans will lose the midterms, despite everything Trump can do to stop that.  And, if we get that far, they’ll likely lose the presidency in 2028.  But that doesn’t mean that everything goes back to the way it was.  Not by a long shot.  And, hey: not everything should go back to the way it was, because the way it was was really good for billionaires and pretty shit for everyone else.  But I’m still kinda hoping—fingers crossed and everything—that we will go back to the rule of law, and the checks and balances, and a government whose job it is to help people rather than screw them over.  Or murder them in the streets.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • On this week’s first episode of Even More News, border czar Tom Homan says “We’ll stop shooting people in the face when people stop complaining about getting shot in the face”, Trump says to Iran “Stop killing innocent protesters! that’s my thing!”, and head of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell says “I’m being investigated for cost overruns on a new building; now what’s the price on that $200 million ballroom these days? $400 million? cool ...”  And the second episode this week was pretty damn good too.
  • Another interesting thing from The Weekly Show: at one point, Jon says: ”... it’s worse than oh he’s blowing past—it’s why I wasn’t so bothered by, oh he fired some inspector generals.  When he blew past norms, I kind of soft-pedalled it.  This is a different thing that is now being accomplished.  This isn’t about norms.  It’s exposing the weakness of the enforcement mechanisms of the laws that a powerful executive just decides to ignore.”  You may recall my disagreement with Stewart on this point way back in week 2 (because that’s how long ago Trump did that), and I continue to think he’s missing the point.  Technically he could have ousted the IGs the “right” way; it just would have taken longer.  But the reason he did it practically immediately (week two, for fuck’s sake) was that he needed the freedom to fuck everything up without anyone whinging about it.  So the “blowing past the norms” was a clear warning sign, and probably one that we should have taken more seriously.
  • SNL is back!  This week’s cold open has pretty solid impressions of Rubio, Vance, Noem, Hegseth, and of course James Austin Johnson’s ever-excellent Trump.  The Weekend Update was also pretty funny.
  • On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich ends with one of my favorite MLK quotes, which is extremely apropos today: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  Worth remembering.

I don’t often mention Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me in these reports, mainly because the facts you learn from them are always quick snippets.  Useful, especially if Peter Sagal and his panelists can find some humor in them, but usually I focus on things with more context.  On this week’s episode, however, one of the facts I learned was so stunning that I had to chase it down and find my own damn context: Bari Weiss, given control of CBS News along with instructions from whichever Ellison owns it now to “Fox-’News’-ify this bitch up!”, has managed to lose a million viewers in the 3 months she’s been in charge.  Now, I know I just gave a whole long speech about how, even if we do feel like the country’s finally waking up to the dangers, it’s still going to be a really horrible next few years—or decades—but I have to say I found some comfort in this story.  The reason that the news sucks so badly these days is because it’s all about advertising.  That’s the reason the news makes you feel sad and scared and angry: because the people that run the news figured out that negative emotions drive engagement long before “the algorithm” came along.  And it’s now (finally) the reason that all the good journalists are abandoning the “legacy media” for YouTube and podcasts: Mehdi Hasan and Alex Wagner and Katie Phang and Joy Reid and Don Lemon and Jim Acosta and so many more.  But you know the one good thing about it?  These “news” shows can’t survive if they lose the public’s trust and attention.  So maybe other companies will take the hint that trying to convert the “normal” news into the right-wing nutjob news isn’t profitable.  Because, if there’s one thing that right-wing nutjob billionaires care about more than their right-wing nutjob philosophies, it’s their bottom lines.

Except Elon Musk.  That motherfucker is just nuts.









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