Doom Report (Week 63: Same Ol' Story)

Happy Easter, for those that celebrate; happy Passover, for those that celebrate; and happy day-for-hiding-eggs-for-your-children-to-find, if your family, like ours, is primarily celebrating that.  And possibly day-for-overindulging-in-chocolate.  Day-for-being-inundated-by-small-egg-themed-toys, mayhap?  One or more of those, for sure.

On The Weekly Show this week, Jon interviews Heather Cox Richardson, who is always a good time: she’s articulate, extremely knowledgeable, and is quick with a historical perspective.  Early in the interview, they compare our “ship of state” to both the Titanic and the Pequod (from Moby-Dick).  For me, I feel like it’s a combination of both.  Trump is a bit like Captain Ahab spotting the iceberg and shouting “there’s the white whale: ramming speed!”

At one point, Jon points out that the founding fathers could not have foreseen “that political parties might abdicate all responsibility of power just to hold on to power.”  And, to me, that just exposes the absurdity of it all.  It reminded me of this extended quote from Mark Twain:

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation.  They pay this price for health.  And health is all they get for it.  How strange it is.  It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

Likewise, if you give up all your power in order to maintain your grip on power ... what do you actually have?

---

Other things you need to know this week:

• In a time when the courts are the last bulwark against a lawless regime, you need to find yourself a good legal YouTube channel.  And I continue to recommend Legal Eagle.  This week, Spencer the Scowl Owl does a great breakdown on the questionable legality of the new betting sites like Kalshi and Polymarket, while Chaos Lawyer Liz Dye exposes the regime’s clever plan to pay money to settle cases they’ve already won.

• Or, if you prefer longer videos less often, Strict Scrutiny is generally an hour a week, thought they sometimes have shorter videos when there’s breaking Supreme Court fuckery.  As there was this week: Leah Litman and guest Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, cover the Court’s bonkers decision on conversion therapy.

• Another co-host of Strict Scrutiny, Melissa Murray, joined Jane Coaston on What a Day to talk about Trump’s elevation to the office of Jesus.

• I mentioned two weeks ago that Kat Abughazaleh had lost her bid to be the Democratic candidate for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district.  This week, she talks about what she plans o do next.  Even in defeat, Kat continues to be inspirational.

---

I suppose the major news this week was Pam Bondi getting fired.  My favorite coverage of this was, once again, from the Even More News crew, though Alex Wagner also had a good show on it.  But I think the best take came from Cody and Katy and Jonathan (and their guest, Some More News head writer David Bell), who noted that Bondi was only the second high-profile firing this time around, after Kristi Noem, and that Trump is already making noises that he might need to replace press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and there are now rumors that he’s questioning Tulsi Gabbard.  And what do all these people have in common?  Jonathan comments: “Kelly Loeffler at the Small Business Administration has to hope that Trump does not remember who she is” (to which Cody responds “I promise you that he does not”).  But Katy really captures the essence of the issue thusly:

Katy:  And we’re going to be talking about this more in an episode in the future.  About the dynamic of MAGA women.
Cody: Is it good?
Katy: No!  You get these ladies out here and trot them out to carry water for this administration while they’re working against their own best interests and they are the first to get thrown under the bus.  It is, I mean ...
Cody: Predictable?
David: A pattern?
Katy: It’s predictable, it’s a pattern, it’s pathetic—I don’t have sympathy or empathy, but if they were any other type of people, I’d be like: you’re victims of this machine!  But you are perpetrating this machine.

And I feel like Katy was channeling my own feelings on Noem from back in week 57.  You can never have sympathy for these people, because you can never excuse them for the horrific things they’ve done.  But you could almost see the shape of who they might have been, if they had not taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line.  Now, personally, I’m even less of a fan of Bondi than I am of Noem, even though rationally that makes no sense.  Noem is personally responsible for ruining hundreds if not thousands of lives, including several outright murders.  Bondi, meanwhile, has been coldly inhuman to the Epstein survivors, and she has tried to make lives miserable for people like James Comey and Letitia James and Jerome Powell, but that latter group at least is composed almost entirely of public figures, and they had to accept a certain amount of mistreatment when they agreed to do their jobs.  And Bondi is probably not directly responsible for any murders—certainly not at the scale that Noem can lay claim to.  And yet ... somehow I feel that the Bondi biopic will not be nearly as interesting as the Noem one.  Not sure what it is about her that rubs me the wrong way, but something surely does.  I think perhaps there’s a fanatic’s light behind her eyes that I don’t see in Noem’s.  I think Noem’s guilt mostly stems from her ability to close her eyes to the suffering she’s causing, but I feel like Bondi is staring directly into it ... and smiling.  All of this is just projection on my part, I’m sure: I don’t know these people.  But, vindictively, I feel much better about Bondi’s firing than Noem’s.

And, should the rumors turn out to be true and Lee Zeldin is Trump’s pick to replace Bondi, then we will continue our pattern of not only firing all the women, but inevitably replacing them with men.  And that is the real tell, I think.  It says to me that Trump never wanted these women around in the first place—and, in my mind, the word “women” is spoken with a tone of utter disdain—and he’s only too happy to finally get rid of them all and replace them all with men.  White men.  Of a certain class.  Who look like they’re from “central casting.”

But I’m not sure anyone should be surprised at this point.  We know how Trump feels about women: he keeps on telling us—over, and over, and over again.  Was there ever any doubt that the MAGA women, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Pam Bondi and beyond, would be first on the chopping block?  Well, some of them seem surprised, I suppose.  But for the rest of us, it’s misogyny as usual.