Doom Report (Week 6: Gilded Oldies)

[The Doom Report now has its own home on Substack.  If you prefer, you can read this post over there instead.]

Last week, I titled my post “The Fourth Realm?”, which was a (perhaps too) subtle nod to the current Musk/Trump regime being a successor to the Third Realm—or, to use the German term, “Reich.”  So, have the white supremacists running our government backed off their Nazi leanings in the week since I last mused on this topic?  Well, they’ve taken over the White House press pool, which allows him to claim that he answers more questions from reporters than any other President.  Of course, when you get to pick the people asking the questions, it’s a bit more like he “answers” more questions from “reporters” (and perhaps I should add: than any other “president”).  They’ve also fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who, being a black man, was obviously a DEI hire—and plan to replace him with a white man whose primary qualification is that he once told Trump, “I’ll kill for you, sir.” So, they’re controlling the media narrative and purging the government of undesireables: nope, no Nazi stuff here.

And I’m happy to see other people making these points as well.  I don’t normally recommend people watch Christopher Titus’ Armageddon Update, because Titus is notoriously fond of offending everyone.  (And he also has some bad takes, at least in my opinion, such as believing that we should have stuck with Biden as the candidate last year.)  But his call to action this week was pretty inspiring:

Do not think this is over in four years, people, and do not wait until it gets deadly to react.  It took Hitler roughly seven weeks to end a free Germany.  People thought it would just go away—it didn’t.  A World War ensued and millions died.  So may I say: wake the fuck up.

Or, if you’re looking for a perspective that’s slightly more scholarly (but no less entertaining), Elie Mystal was on America Unhinged this week. I’ve been impressed with Mystal ever since I first came across him while researching my post on third parties, and then even more so when he sat in for Leah Litman on an episode of Strict Scrutiny.  Here’s how he put it:

People, I feel, are waiting for, like, the day that they wake up and they read the Jeff Bezos Post and it says “America: Under New Dictatorship Today” ...  As if it’s going to be, like, a line of demarcation, you know: Sunday we had a democracy, but Monday we’re living under a dictatorship, right?  That’s not how it works.  That’s not how it’s ever worked: any country that has lost its Republic, that has lost its Democratic institutions and ended up in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime, that happened exactly as it’s happened here: not one day, not one decision, but a number of small decisions every day and ... a lack of consequences for those illegal decisions that led these countries and led these prior regimes into dictatorship.

It’s a slow slide into autocracy.  If you act like a dictator, and nobody stops you, then you’re a dictator.

Of course, what Mystal was there to discuss was Chief Justice John Roberts overturning a lower court’s deadline for President Musk to restore foreign aid payments—not for future foreign aid, mind you: just to pay for what was already delivered.  A court told the executive branch that they had to pay their bills, and the executive branch said “Nunh uh!” and yet somehow the media is still asking the “question” of whether or not we’re embroiled in a constitutional crisis.  But apparently John Roberts said it was okay to ignore the courts, so ... there you go, I suppose.  And many are positing that that’s exactly why Roberts did it: to provide cover for what Trump was going to do anyway.  Because, if Roberts didn’t do that, and President Musk didn’t comply (which, honestly, he very well might not even be able to do, since bigballs and his pals have broken things so badly that it seems unlikely that they can be fixed at this point), then the thumbing of their noses at the judicial branch would be impossible to ignore.  I’m reminded of the days when Glen Kirschner used to show up on Brian Tyler Cohen’s channel and talk about what Roberts wouldn’t do for Trump because the one thing dictators have no use for is a Supreme Court.  Kirschner, of course, says no such thing now, and I wonder if Roberts is sweating bullets that he may have painted himself into the corner of obsolescence.

Of course, Kirschner isn’t the only person having to eat crow these days: remember back in week 1 when I was naïve enough to think that companies wouldn’t cave into Trump’s attempt to shove anit-DEI stuff down their throats, because study after study shows that diversity increases profitability?  Yeah, that didn’t age well in the intervening centuries, did it?  While many companies have continued to stand firm, including Costco, Apple, Delta, and even Microsoft (I’m old enough and tech-savvy enough to experience profound cognitive dissonance at the thought that Microsoft might be on the right side of history, even in a small way), more corporations than I expected have decided that their bottom lines are best served by getting right with the folks in charge.  DEI may increase your profits, but apparently alignment with autocracy increases them more.  Or so some think.

In an attempt to help combat that sort of thinking, which may or may not be successful, a group called The People’s Union organized an economic blackout day of this past Friday.  More are planned.  Now, my cynical side says these megacorporations won’t even notice, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad idea.  Our family participated in the first blackout, and we’ll likely participate in the future ones as well.  Might not help, but it sure can’t hurt.

In a similar vein, Jon Oliver on Last Week Tonight gave some great tips on how to keep Facebook from earning revenue off your account, which he details on his reused web site (long-time LWT fans will remember the “rat erotica” days).  I’ve done this, and I encourage all of you to do the same.  Mark Zuckerberg, he of “it’s okay to call women ‘property’ on Facebook now” fame, does not deserve to make money off you, or me, or anyone else.  Fuck that guy.

Because it’s all about the money.  You may remember two weeks ago when I pointed out that every agency—every single agency!—targeted by President Musk was investigating him, even the ones that you thought didn’t do that that sort of thing.  (Also, I missed one: USDA.)  But the conflicts of interest are getting even more blatant, as President Musk cancels a Verizon contract so that SpaceX can swoop in and grab that $2.4 billion.  Pretty sweet deal for whoever owns SpaceX.  Good thing that Trump has promised that Musk won’t be allowed to touch things which might involve a conflict of interest.

Trump, of course, seems to be truly obsessed with recreating the Gilded Age.  Here’s Brian Tyler Cohen calling out Trump saying this yet again:

You know, we were richest, the richest relatively, from, think of this, from 1870 to 1913, that was our richest ...

The Gilded Age (which Trump usually refers to as “the Golden Age,” I think because that way it will match his golden toilet) was, as Wikipedia will tell you, “a time of materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption,” so it’s easy to see why Trump finds it so appealing.  It was also a period of vast wealth inequality, widespread poverty (including two depressions), and the rise of Jim Crow laws which advantaged white people.  Sure, lots to pine for there.  Of course, the Gilded Age leads inevitably to the Great Depression a few decades later, but I don’t think Trump particularly cares about that: he’ll no doubt be comfortably dead by the time we reach that point in the cycle.  The robber barons of the Gilded Age died fat and happy and, presumably, unrepentant.  (Fun fact: while Trump’s favorite word—“tariffs”—were probably not the cause of the Great Depression, there can be little doubt that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 was the major reason that the economy could not recover as quickly as expected from the stock market crash.  It’s also worth noting that BTC posits that our era of greatest prosperity was not in fact the Gilded Age, but rather the 50s and 60s; I haven’t fact-checked him, but I suspect he and Trump are just using different definitions of “rich.”)

Of course, in between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression was a World War, but Trump seems all set to recreate that bit as well.  Both the Coffee Klatch and BTC showed clips of Trump and Vance shouting down Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a manner that can only be described as cringe-inducing.  To describe it as a performance is underselling it: Stephen King called it throwing red meat to the base, and noted “Old pro wrestling trick. Fire up the crowd.”  But don’t take anyone’s word for it: in the Reich clips, we can actually see Trump trying to work out a good sound bite in real time:

That was with Obama who gave you sheets, and I gave gave you javelins.  I gave you the javelins to take out
all those tanks, Obama gave you sheets, in fact, the statement is: Obama gave sheets and Trump gave javelins.

(Unclear if our Commander-in-Senility is referring to the first invasion of Ukraine, of if he’s just mixing up Obama with Biden again.)  It’s even more blatant in the BTC clip: “This is going to be great television, I will say that.”  To top it off, in BTC’s clip you can hear Brian Glenn (Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend and, of course, host of a right-wing podcast) asking Zelenskyy why he isn’t wearing a suit.  Um, maybe because he’s running around from bomb shelter to bomb shelter and doesn’t really have time to visit the tailor?  Maybe because he wouldn’t want to look too sartorial while his people are fighting for their lives?  Or maybe just because he had no idea that the press pool had been taken over by douchebags.

And, if there’s any doubt that the rest of the world is as embarrassed about this as I hope you are, BTC has you covered there as well with a litany of reactions from world leaders.  The knowledge that Trump has the balls to accuse Zelenskyy of risking World War III boggles the mind, especially when you consider that recent UN vote where the US voted against Ukraine alongside such bastions of democracy and free speech as Russia, North Korea, Hungary, and Belarus.  (Also in that group? Israel.  Just something to consider.)  But, sure, it’s going to be Zelenskyy’s fault.  Yeah, that tracks.

It’s BTC who’s on fire this week: I enjoyed his interview with James Talarico, a Texas state representative who happens to be a devout Christian and a Democrat, a rare combo indeed.  The perspective on how the MAGA crowd has seemingly co-opted religion, while failing to walk the walk, was pretty great:

There are so many self-proclaimed Christians serving in Congress: they’re supposed to be feeding the hungry, but they’re cutting food stamps; they’re supposed to be healing the sick, but they’re eliminating Medicaid; they’re supposed to be serving the poor, but they’re cutting taxes for billionaires.  It’s because they’re not following Jesus, they’re worshiping Donald Trump.

And, in addition to their questionable theology, the MAGA crowd’s math skills don’t seem too hot either.  They continually swear they’re not cutting Medicaid, but, as the ranking member of the House Budget Committee put it in yet another BTC interview:

The direction to the Energy and Commerce Committee is: cut spending by $880 billion.  Now, what does Energy and Commerce have control over? Medicaid.  And it has control over a few other things, but here’s the thing: if you really didn’t want to cut Medicaid and you instead wanted to cut 100% of of everything else Energy and Commerce has jurisdiction over, guess what?  That doesn’t come anywhere close to $880 billion; in fact, it only gets you about halfway there.  So even if—and they’re not going to do this—but even if they eliminated everything that Energy and Commerce has control over except for Medicaid, by definition they would have to still cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Or, as BTC puts it, “a mathematical impossibility.”  Or how about Trump’s brilliant plan for a $5 million “gold card” to replace green cards?  I mean, after all: he says we could sell 10 million of those and then we’d make $50 trillion.  Pretty sweet deal, eh?  Except that, as producer Jonathan Harris points out in this week’s Even More News, there aren’t 10 million people in the world with $5 million who don’t already live here.  And, as Cody followed up with, if your net worth was $5 million, you wouldn’t beggar yourself just to get into our country, so you’d need quite a bit more money than that.  And here’s my own personal thought: if you were a non-US citizen with so much money that $5 million seemed like chump change, would you really want to live here? right now?  I’m thinking you probably have better uses for that chunk of money.

So the Republicans’ math doesn’t math, and the Democrats are continuing to be useless.  Oh, sure Jasmine Crockett (whom I absolutely adore) continues to achieve viral moments by talking like a normal person, such as this week responding to a reporter’s insipid question of “what would you say to Elon Musk?” with a simple “fuck off.”  But in general I think Adam Conover hit the nail on the head with his video this week entitled “No one is coming to save us.” when he says to the Dems:

You’ve known Trump would be president for months.  He even gave you an instruction manual [Project 2025] for what he was planning to do.  You are failing a fucking open book test.

Adam thinks you should visit Action Network.  I think he’s probably right.

Finally, I’m still looking for hope to share with you, and here’s this week’s.  This is from a public newsletter from Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and I’ll quote a bit of it here for you.  This was written by a straight white man, and shared to me (and my company) by another straight white man.  Just so we remember they’re not all terrible.

So why do some politicians and their followers insist that DEI discriminates against white men?  Probably because DEI broadens the applicant pool for merit-based jobs by enforcing federal and local anti-discrimination laws.  When you end discrimination against groups that were formerly excluded from job opportunities, those who benefited from discrimination (white men) actually have to compete in a larger and more competitive applicant pool.  And therein lies their grievance.

Please don’t assume that I and my DEI-practicing friends don’t care about the plight of white men.  They also face challenges as a group, and we want them to thrive.  White men have a suicide rate that is double the rate of the total population in Anne Arundel County, and most involve a firearm.  Our Mental Health Agency and our Gun Violence Intervention Team are actively working to lower those numbers, including by distributing suicide prevention literature where firearms are purchased.
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Human beings are diverse.  We live in a complicated world.  We face difficult challenges, and we all need to be at our best to overcome them.

In Anne Arundel County, we will not pretend that we are all the same. We will continue to celebrate one another, lift one another up, and defend ourselves against efforts to divide us.

I encourage you to read the whole post.  His definition of “equity” is particularly trenchant.

And, really finally, if you want a succinct and also funny summary of where we are currently, I must refer you to this week’s SNL cold open.  It’s been 50 years of hits and misses—and, if I’m honest, probably more misses than hits—but it’s good to know that, even after half a century, these guys can still occasionally cut right to the heart of the zeitgeist.