Sunday, March 1, 2026

Doom Report (Week 58: Of Leopards, Plumbers, and Ranty Ranty Confessions)


This week, Trump delivered a long, rambling, incoherent monologue which I certainly did not watch—and hopefully you didn’t either—which some are generously calling a “State of the Union address.”  There were lots of people covering that and telling you how useless it was, but, at the end of the day, it was so utterly useless that even knowing how useless it was is fairly useless.  But I will point you at the Zeteo response, which includes not only Mehdi Hasan, but also all of the other 3 Zeteo correspondents: Prem Thakker, Swin Suebsaeng, and John Harwood.  Now, I don’t always watch all of these fine gentlemen, because they are serious newspeople and I don’t do a lot of serious.  Mehdi himself is a bit of an exception: he can be funny, but, even when he’s not doing that, he’s still remarkably entertaining—he has a “no bullshit” style that’s just really refreshing.  So I thought I’d give this video a try, and it’s pretty good overall, but it was this incisive exchange that ultimately made me glad I watched.  At one point, Mehdi says this:

Historians will look back and look at this carnival barker; they’ll look at this guy from Home Alone 2; they’ll look at the damage he did.  But fundamentally, he took the Republican party with him and they allowed themselves to be taken for this ride.

And Harwood responds:

That’s right.  And they were on this ride before Donald Trump came along.  The Republican party’s moral and intellectual collapse has been going on for quite a long time.  You know, the root cause was the decision during the height of the civil rights movement to embrace white Southerners’ resistance to civil rights and milk that for votes.  And as the country has drifted closer and closer to becoming a majority minority country, which is going to happen, the intensity of the political exploitation—the demagoguery—has increased.

And this struck me as practically epiphanous: the Republicans decided to trade on the fears of white people.  First it was their fears of black neighbors, and then (perhaps after getting trounced twice in a row by Obama), they just switched wholesale to capitalizing on fears of brown immigrant neighbors.  And this is how the Republicans have managed to stay in power, despite decreasing membership numbers.  They’re not the party of small government, they’re not the party of fiscal conservatism, they’re not the party of gun rights or abortion restrictions or family values—they’re the party of pitting white people against other people and praying they found somebody sufficiently scary to demonize this time around.

Of course, I wrote all that stuff above before Trump started indiscriminately bombing Iran, including at least one elementary school.  But we (apparently) killed the Ayatollah, so it’s all worth it, right?  You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.  Or killing a few little girls.  Or a hundred.

Really good coverage of this from (again) Zeteo; the first half is commentary, while the second half dives into some more details with a couple of Middle East experts.  But the big quote for me was this one from Mehdi Hasan:

Every Republican president does this, right?  Every Republican president comes to office, cuts benefits for the poor, cuts taxes for the rich, raises prices, and then bombs a Middle East country.  Ronald Reagan did it, George Bush Senior did it, George Bush Jr. did it, and Donald Trump has done it.

And I’m old enough to have known all that, but I guess I’ve just never heard it put put into such stark terms before, so I guess I never connected the dots before.  It’s a bit chilling.  But I’m glad we have Zeteo to point out the historical throughlines.  For further coverage, let me point you at Brian Tyler Cohen, who has a great parade of Trump clips from 2012 claiming that Obama was going to start a war in Iran because he didn’t “know the first thing about negotiation” and his approval numbers were “in a tailspin” and that was “the only way he can get elected.”  Man, when they say “every accusation is a confession,” they aren’t kidding.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • On The Weekly Show this week, Jon interviews Ali Velshi.  I found his take on independent news media interesting: basically, he says that courting eyeballs is not the sin of corporate media—he actually thinks that part is fine—but rather it’s the fear of offending the administration that makes corporations unfit to present us news.  Not sure I entirely agree, but I appreciated the discussion nonetheless.

This week, two of my worlds collided when Anthropic, the company that makes the AI tools we mostly use at work, had a kerfuffle with the Department of Defense.  I actually got that story in my company Slack well before it started showing up in my YouTube feed.  And, look: I’m not necessarily defending Anthropic here—I enjoy using their products, sure, but the fact that they are willing to work with this regime at all is a bit suss, not to mention that anyone who intentionally uses the wrong names for any of the myriad of things Trump has tried to rename without any authority to do so (in this case, “Department of War”) always comes across as sycophantic to me.  But I also think it’s good to notice when even the capitulators hit a red line they won’t cross, and we should probably support them in their too-little-too-late efforts.  That red line in this case?  That their AI could not be used for spying on Americans, or for making the decision to employ lethal force without human intervention.  As red lines go, it’s actually pretty weak.  But still too much for drunken sockpuppet Pete Hegseth, who promptly cancelled Anthropic’s contract, gave it to OpenAI, and declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation which has never before been applied to an American company.

My response to this story in Slack was a mix of “curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” and “I never thought leopards would eat my face”; in olden times, we might have said that when one lies down with dogs, one gets up with fleas, but these days we have more hip pop culture references.  Also I think we probably like dogs better now.

While I was searching for the best link to explain the Leopards Eating People’s Face party (and refusing to pick the one that goes to Twitter, because I will never point anyone there), I came across this article from the Progressive Democrats of America.  It’s from last year, just a month after Trump took office, which was plenty of time to see just how bad shit was going to get (that was week 6 from our perspective).  After a brilliant 3-paragraph opening that eerily echoes my own contemporaneous post, it goes on to talk about reaching out to Trump voters and, instead of saying “I told you so,” to “persuade them to vote for candidates courageous enough to stand up to oligarchs and corporatists.”  Of course, it doesn’t really go into much detail on where we’re going to get such candidates from.  But it’s a nice sentiment.

So what’s my note of hope for the week?  Well, over in the UK, a 34-year-old plumber just won a seat in Parliament.  Why should you care?  Let me see if I can explain it.

I’ve often said that the UK politics is something of a mirror of our own—not exactly the same, of course, especially because they have viable third parties, but there are analogs.  So, when I give you the background, make these mental substitutions: when I say “Labour,” think “Democrats”; when I say “Conservatives” (or “Tories”—same thing), think “Republicans”; when I say “Reform,” think “MAGA Republicans”; when I say “Greens,” think “Progressive Democrats.”  Again, not perfect analogs, but similar enough for us to draw correlations.

So there’s a constituency (that’s like a Congressional district) called Gorton and Denton.  This a working class urban area (it’s part of Manchester, which is a city with about the same population as Chicago, though it’s physically bigger, so the population density is lower).  And, you know how there are districts in places like Massachusetts that have voted Democrat since the 50s?  Well, the last time Gorton elected someone from a party other than Labour was 1931.  This is the very definition of a “safe seat.”  But Labour (just like the Democrats) is pretty unpopular these days: they came into power on the grounds that the Tories sucked (which they did), and they’ve spent the last couple of years coddling big donors and shitting on the working class ... sound familiar?  They’re a few years behind our cycle, but it’s weirdly similar.  So here comes Reform, taking over the job of being rightwing nutjobs from the Conservatives, and promising the working class all sorts of things they both can’t deliver and also have no intention of delivering, because they’re even more tied to the billionaires than Labour, and also blaming immigrants for everything.

So when the current Gorton and Denton rep (a member of Labour, of course) stepped down after some embarrassing texts came out, it triggered a by-election (what we would call a “special election”).  And the Reform challenger was a rightwing nutjob of the highest caliber, a GB News presenter (think “Fox ‘News’ anchor”) who was supported by Elon Musk—not the UK equivalent of Elon Musk, the actual Elon Musk.  And he was polling pretty high.  So the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham (also a member of Labour), said he would step down to run for the seat, but Labour wouldn’t let him.  There were excuses, but most people believe that the Prime Minister Kier Starmer was scared of Burnham getting into Parliament and becoming so popular he might take Starmer’s job.  So Labour put up some rando (not to be mean to her, but she’s so little known that she literally has no Wikipedia page at all).  Because, it’s a safe seat ... right?

Except here comes Hannah Spencer, the aforementioned plumber and local councillor.  And she stepped up to run for the Green party.  And Labour told everyone that a vote for the Green was a wasted vote.  And the Reform nutjob literally drove around yelling over a loudspeaker that the Greens would legalize crack.  Even the Greens themselves didn’t think they had much of a chance: they listed it as 127th on their list of seats to go after.  And the “wasted vote” argument is strong: while there are more than 2 parties in the UK, it’s certainly the case that the system is dominated by Labour and the Conservatives.  The Greens currently hold less than 1% of the seats in Parliament, and that’s the highest level they’ve ever achieved.  And yet ... Hannah was charismatic, and knows what it’s like to have to work for a living, with just enough experience in local government, and new Green Party leader Zack Polanski decided to back her to the hilt.  And the bookies (you’re absolutely allowed to bet on elections over there) suddenly started giving better odds to the Greens than to Reform, with Labour in a distant third.  Labour, who thought this was a safe seat.

And, on Thursday, Hannah won.  No, wait: I misspoke.  She destroyed her competition, beating Reform by 12 points and Labour by 16.  If you want even more details than I’ve given you here, Owen Jones has a great summary of all the implications.  But the real upshot of it all is that the wasted vote argument is now completely neutralized.  This means that Green campaigns will start to snowball: instead of just ignoring the Greens and assuming that progressives are a locked in constituency (because who else are they gonna vote for?), Labour now has to worry about serious threats from Green candidates.  And voters now see the Greens as a viable choice, and many who were unenthusiastically voting Labour—or had just given up and stopped voting altogether—will now have someone to rally behind.  Owen’s joy in that video is a bit infectious.

So what does that mean for us here in the US?  Well, just like Mamdani’s victory in New York, it proves that progressive candidates can win, despite what the consultant class has been telling Democrats for years.  Remember when a Bernie run for President was considered a joke?  Even Colbert would just make jokes about Bernie’s crazy hair instead of seriously considering his political positions.  But those days are gone.  Now Bernie is an elder statesman, and some people are even wishcasting an AOC presidential run.  Our 2-party system won’t allow the US Green party to make any inroads, but the progressive wing of the Democratic party is gathering power, and that: that right there is hope.









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Sunday, February 22, 2026

Doom Report (Week 57: Speedrunning Old Yeller)


This week, CBS—now owned by right-wing billionaires—decided to censor Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico.  Now, to be clear, this is their right: CBS is a corporation, and corporations are not bound to honor the First Amendment (that only applies to government agencies).  But the fact that they had the right to do is doesn’t make it okay that they did so.  They gave Colbert a bogus reason, laundered through FCC chair Brendan Carr, then told him not to talk about it.  Naturally, he decided to talk about it.  I mean, what are they gonna do? fire him? again?  The interview was also made available on YouTube, where it’s currently sitting at well over 8 million views, on course to break 9 million.  As Colbert joked, that’s easily far more than would have seen it on CBS.  But, to some extent, the point was to show that they could.  And so they did.

Additional coverage by Adam Kinzinger, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewing Kara Swisher, and Jane Coaston on What a Day.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Stephen Colbert interviewed Kaitlan Collins this week, who was the female journalist that asked a question about sex abuse survivors to which Trump responded that she should smile more.  I was pleased to see that she made the same point I did 2 weeks ago: above and beyond the gross misogyny of the remark, it’s really insane to ask people to smile while talking about underage girls who were raped.
  • The Supreme Court ruled against Trump on tariffs, and everyone is claiming this as a victory, from Adam Kinzinger to Robert Reich (and that’s a hell of a broad spectrum).  Thankfully, a Strict Scrutiny emergency update explains why it’s not as good as they all say, and why your enthusiasm should be very well tempered.
  • On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse talk to David Hogg, Parkland school shooting survivor and, now, political activist.  He’s the founder of Leaders We Deserve, a PAC which supports young candidates standing in primaries to replace older Democrats.  The conversation is well worth watching; note that the link jumps right to the start of the interview, as the beginning discussion wasn’t up to the usual standards (including the aforementioned bad take on the tariff decision).  While I’m not a big fan of the Democrats, what David says here is pretty powerful: “We’re the party that actively works to make government work.  After all, we’re the party that helped to create Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  And, we also need to acknowledge and be honest with voters and say, ‘Look, our job is a hell of a lot harder than it is for Republicans.’  Because, unlike them, we don’t run on the idea that government is terrible, it never can do anything right, and then get elected and make it terrible and make it not do anything right, and then repeat that cycle every election cycle.  It is always going to be harder to make something work.”  Can’t really argue with that.

Since CBS is so anxious to censor Colbert this week, I’ll point you at another of his monologues: this one from Monday, where he covers the fallout from the BTC Obama interview I pointed you at above, and also covers the whole, deeply weird Krist Noem blanket story that I told you to check out on Even More News.  Colbert covers it more quickly, of course, so that’s an advantage, but I really felt the extended discussion by Katy and Cody and Jonathan was the superior take.  And, if you still didn’t have enough, you could even check out the Jane Coaston coverage.

This particular story has struck me for multiple reasons.  First and most obviously, it’s a completely ridiculous story about a completely petty, meaningless thing, so it’s one of the safest things to laugh about: it’s a piece of government incompetence that isn’t hurting anyone other than the morons themselves (although my apologies to the pilot if he ended up coming out of it worse off than before).  So it’s the perfect story to let you roll your eyes and say “these fucking idiots” and move on with your day.  But I think it also struck me as something more, and I’m not sure it’s easy to describe, but let me give it a shot.

You know those movies about serial killers where they show you all the awful abuse they suffered as children?  And the point is not to make you feel sorry for them, because they’re going around killing people and you can never excuse that, but it’s still an interesting poing of view.  You can somehow sympathize with who they used to be, if not what they have become.  And I think I’m feeling the same way about Kristi Noem this week.  The extreme amount of pain she’s caused to people—including the many number of outright murders she’s overseen—can not be excused, or overlooked, or rationalized.  But, at the same time, I can almost see the outline of her origin story: a pretty woman, thinking this is how she needed to change herself to be on an even playing field with the cruel men whose favors she curried.  I’m going to point you all the way back to week 11 when Have I Got News For You did its piece on “Mar-a-Lago face”: go watch that again, and look what Noem did to her own face, thinking it would make her more attractive, more acceptable, to the rightwing nutjobs she thought she needed to court.  Now she’s apparently becoming paranoid, trying to make sure she’s on TV more often than Tom Homan, desperately trying to make sure Trump still likes her, still wants her to be where she is, still sleeping with Corey Lewandowski despite the fact that both are married to other people, perhaps because nothing really matters except whatever tiny bit of pleasure you can manage to eke out to tamp down the pain of living before the cold embrace of Death claims you.  If one day we get a biopic about Noem where she starts off sweet and innocent and suffers a long, slow slide into depravity and madness, I will not be surprised, and I’ll watch the hell out of it.  Not with sympathy—never with sympathy—but with the kind of sick, unable-to-look-away fascination that one reserves for roadside accidents, or for people who shoot their dogs for misbehaving, then grow up to treat human beings like dogs.









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Sunday, February 15, 2026

Doom Report (Week 56: The Pendulum, and the Pit of Accountability)


This week I had a long talk with my children about the economy.  Now, my children (that still live with me) are almost-20 and almost-14, so you might think that the economy would be a very boring topic for them.  But here’s the thing: they have to consider whether they’re ever going to be able to move out; whether they’re ever going to be able to afford to buy their own house.  And, I gotta tell you: they don’t think they will.  And I can’t really argue with them either.

This week on the Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews conservative economist Oren Cass.  And he gives lots of interesting historical perspective: for instance, he thinks the New Deal swung too far in one direction.  And I don’t necessarily agree with that—of course: I’m a pretty hard progressive—but it’s easy to see the point.  First there was the Industrial Revolution, and all the rich people made all the poor people go work in the factories—men, women, and children—and then all the poor people kept dying or getting mangled in those factories, so there was no one to buy all the products being produced by the factories, so then we introduced labor laws, instituted the weekend and got the kids out of the coal mines, and then the rich people got really rich, and we had the Gilded Age and the robber barons, which of course led inevitably to Black Tuesday and the Great Depression, so then FDR comes in with the New Deal and jobs programs and the Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities Exchange Act and appointing trustbuster Thurman Arnold.  Now, Cass’s point is that the regulations fixed things, but the Democrats took from that the wrong lesson: they thought that, if some regulations were good, more regulations must be better, right?  So they overregulated.  Then along comes Reagan and starts deregulating.  And, again, the Republicans took the wrong lesson: if some deregulation is good, then more must be better, right?  And now here we are in the 21st century, with the 2008 financial crisis and wealth inequality that puts the Gilded Age to shame.  The crux of Cass’s argument is that the pendulum had swung too far, so it swung back; now it’s swung too far in the other direction, and must, inevitably, swing back towards equality.  So, maybe, by the time my children are ready to move out, that swing will be in progress.

This is what passes for hope in our house these days.

Last week I tried to articulate why I think it’s important to include videos from Adam Kinzinger alongside those from Mehdi Hasan and the Some More News crew.  With further time to reflect, I think it may be best summed up by Kinzinger himself, who is fond of saying that, if we guesstimate that people don’t start paying to politics until they’re around 15 or so, that means that every single person in America today under the age of 25 doesn’t know politics without Trump.  They don’t understand what it means to say, yeah, this person is on the “other” side, but they still make some good points.  They don’t realize that this—what we’re living through today—is not normal.  And that makes me sad.  It just occurred to me this week that my children have grown up thinking that I sure must like the news a lot, because I listen to so much of it.  And I hate the news.  I successfully avoided watching nearly all of it until 9/11 happened, and then I (like many of us) went crazy for a while, and then I scaled back for my own sanity and refused to watch any news that didn’t have a humourous angle, and then ... Trump.  And, while I still desperately try to focus on news that can make us laugh while we learn, even when we’re learning about the horrors, there’s just too much.  I dream of a time when watching The Daily Show will be sufficient again.  I dream of my children saying, “hey Dad, how come you don’t watch the news all the time any more?”

So I think that’s why I love it when I can point you to Adam Kinzinger, or Tim Miller, or, this week, to Oren Cass, who is absolutely a conservative, and you (if your political viewpoint is more or less aligned with my own, and I assume it is if you’ve lasted this far into these reports) will absolutely yell at your screen at least once or twice when listening to him describe something.  But here’s Jon Stewart, every bit as progressive as I, also disagreeing with Cass, and yet ... there is so much they do agree on.  I want us to get back to that place.  That place where the Democrats and the Republicans, the conservatives and the progressives, can all talk to each other, and maybe they fight a little, but, at the end of the day, they still shake hands and smile at each other.  Because this bullshit demonization of the “other side” is completely manufactured: it was wholly invented by rich fucking assholes who want to make damn sure we don’t pay attention to how much money they’re siphoning off us, because last time that happened, they ended up with tax rates over 90%.  And I want my children (as well as my readers) to embrace that.  The “other” side is fine.  We can talk to them.  They, like us, believe in democracy, and the rule of law, and basic human dignity and equality.  And the people who don’t believe in those things are not a different side—they’re a whole different species.  And one we should probably not be looking to preserve.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • I suppose the big news of the week was the Epstein Files (again) and the MAGA meltdown over Bad Bunny’s superbowl performance.  For a capsule view of both topics, try Kimmel’s monologue from Tuesday.
  • How does deep red Kentucky wind up with a Democratic governor?  On Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews governor Andy Bashear to find out.  Note Bashear’s emphasis on making working people’s lives better: every time Jon asks “how did you get Republicans to vote for you?” this is the answer: if you make their lives better, they don’t care which letter is next to your name.  Other Democratic candidates damned well better be taking notes.
  • Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is perhaps not quite as indispensable this time around, but still good.

So my talk with my children about the economy sort of devolved into a history lesson.  And my kids are homeschooled (for non-religious reasons), so we’ll take any excuse at all to be educational.  And for me, a person who see connections in everything, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed by how much all this stuff fits together, and how much of what’s happening today is inextricably entangled with what went on 20 years ago, 50 years ago, a hundred years ago ... notice how Oren Cass’s pendulum swings took us backward all the way to the Industrial Revolution, and that was about 250 years ago.  But another thing we had to talk about was accountability.  Because, if the Democrats can successfully take back the government at some point—and, if they don’t quickly wake up to the plans to cheat and start preparing better than Jamie Raskin, they might not—but, presuming they can, they’re going to have to hold some people accountable.  And that’s going to be tough, because, historically, it just isn’t done.  And some people point to Obama’s refusal to prosecute anyone in the Bush administration for their blatant lies about Iraq—and, you know: all the torturing—but what I pointed out to my children was this goes back way farther than that: after Watergate, Ford pardoned Nixon.  And whether your excuse is that we need to be looking forward instead of back, or that we need to maintain the dignity of the office, or whatever else bullshit you can come up with, the truth is, if we never hold anyone accountable, then they’re just going to keep on doing it, over and over again, forever.  And, while we were talking about that, we touched on impeachment: Nixon wasn’t actually impeached, of course, but he’s one of the five cases where the Articles of Impeachment were drafted and approved ... he just resigned before they could be voted on.  In the other four cases—Johnson, Clinton, Trump, and Trump—the votes all passed.  But, while I was explaining all this, it occurred to me: does the lack of accountability go back even further than Nixon?  Because Johnson (who, by the way, came within a single vote of being convicted of the crimes for which he was impeached: the closest any President has ever come) is a study in this as well: he pardoned 7,000 former Confederates and allowed them to regain political power.  Is this cycle of refusal to hold the political class—or, to adopt Jon Ossoff’s clever coinage, the Epstein Class—accountable that we’re currently locked in really 160 years old? or more?

If an 18 year boy shoots someone, we lock them in prison for life, because we want to make sure people know they can’t do that sort of thing again.  But if a 78 year old banker steals billions, we give them a slap on the wrist (or, if Trump happens to be in office, a full pardon) ... why?  Do we not want to let other people know not to do that again?  Or do we just not care?  And, if a 78 year old billionaire—who may not have been a billionaire before but damned sure is now—grifts the entire country, and indeed the entire world, out of billions of ill-gotten gains, do we want to let other poeple know that that’s not okay? or just encourage more people to try?  Accountability is going to need to be a major plank in any next candidate’s platform, or else I fear my granchildren will be writing Doom Reports about how they can trace their own current horrors back 50 years to some guy named Trump ...









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Sunday, February 8, 2026

Doom Report (Week 55: Mountainish Inhumanity)


This week a lot of the focus has been on the latest release of the Epstein files:

  • Seth Meyers has a “Closer Look” segment that covers this as well as a few other tidbits that this tried to push out of the news cycle.

Over in other countries, politicians are being held accountable.  Not so much here.  Here, Trump says that the 3 million documents released so far totally exonerate him, despite his being mentioned thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times.  And his minions wander around saying that he’s answered enough questions about Epstein, while all the answers he gives are just that people need to move on and journalists need to smile more.  And I know that many are focussing on the rank misogyny in this comment, and that’s a fair thing to focus on, but I wish more people would ask what kind of psychopath smiles while asking questions about underage victims of rape and abuse?

And there are still 3 million more documents to come.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Stephen Colbert talks to “Melania Trump” about her new movie opening.  Laura Benanti’s Melania impression is one of the most brilliant bits of personification I’ve ever seen, and this piece is one of her best.  There are at least 3 times during this 7 minutes that I laughed out loud at disturbing volumes.  Laura nails the insouciance, the apathy, and the casual disdain for Trump along with the whole rest of the world.  Melania is often seen as a somehow sympathetic figure, as if she’s being held hostage or something.  But, as Josh Johnson noted this week, she’s a grown-ass woman who both seems to hate Trump as much as we do and also is fully in it for the money just as much as he is ($28 million of the documentary’s $40m price tag went straight into her pocket).  Two things can be true.
  • Sir Ian McKellen was on Colbert this week, and he did an insanely amazing (and amazingly topical) speech from Shakespeare that somehow captures our current zeitgeist perfectly.
  • Why do I keep on pointing you at Adam Kingzinger’s week in review even though he’s a conservative and I disagree with him at least once in every appearance he’s ever done?  Because he’s smart and articulate, because knowing that even conservatives are not okay with the current regime helps keep us sane, and because it’s crucial to remember that, no matter how much they try to frame it so, this is not a debate of Democrats vs Republicans.  This is Democrats and Republicans—and independents, and libertarians, and progressives—vs crazy MAGA rightwing nutjobs.
  • I’m surprised we didn’t get more coverage about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that MAGA was “all a lie.”  I suppose that’s Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy showing some successes.  But Jane Coaston over on What a Day has you covered.
  • The arrest of Don Lemon should also probably not be overlooked.  Legal Eagle’s Devin Stone has a pretty great summary.
  • There was a bit of coverage of the regime’s ridiculous “coal mascot”; wanna know why coal is never coming back?  Hank Green has you covered in his aptly titled video “Coal Is Extremely Dumb”.

If you didn’t listen to that Ian McKellen speech I linked above, first of all, what’s wrong with you?  It’s a brilliant performance, even impromptu as it was.  It’s a speech about “strangers,” which is Elizabethan-speak for foreigners—immigrants.  In the scene, Sir Thomas More (lawyer, judge, philosopher) is trying to calm a mob who are ready to drive out the strangers from their country, at the point of a knife if necessary.  At one point, he asks them: should you succeed, what would that get you?

What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Or, to sum up: violence breeds violence.  What you give out will surely come back to you.

More continues the metaphor.  What if you were evicted from your country, and you found yourself in a foreign land, now yourself the stranger, now yourself chased by an angry mob ...

That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

“Mountainish inhumanity” seems like a pretty good description of the Trump regime.  And, you know, when Shakespeare himself is calling you out, using the voice of Gandalf, that might be a pretty convincing sign that you’re on the wrong side of history.









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Sunday, February 1, 2026

Doom Report (Week 54: In Memoriam)


The last words of Renee Good: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

The last words of Alex Pretti: “Are you okay?”

These are the people your government is murdering.


This week, a spate of heartfelt tributes and incisive discussions about the execution of Alex Pretti, and other ICEscapades.

  • An excellent, impassioned summary from Jon Stewart on Monday.  “And maybe that, more than anything, explains why Alex Pretti really was a threat.  Because he was brandishing a weapon: a handheld, aluminum, 1080p, 60 FPS weapon of mass illumination.  Because there is nothing more dangerous to a regime predicated on lies than witnesses who capture the truth.”
  • An excellent, thunderous summary from Stephen Colbert on Monday.  “Yes, do not compare ICE or Border Patrol agents to the Nazis.  That’s an unfair comparison.  The Nazis were willing to show their faces.”
  • An excellent, emotional summary from Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.  “And to the people of Minneapolis, to the Pretti family and the Good family and these people who were looking out for their neighbors, we want you to know that we are with you and you are not alone.”
  • As per usual, a more angry take from Christopher Titus on Tuesday.  “Alex Pretti never went for his gun—his legal to carry gun.  He never tried to punch an officer.  He was protecting a woman these cowards had pushed to the ground.  He was blind, unarmed, face down, and they shot him 10 times.  They murdered him.  So, I guess this ICU nurse who took care of veterans and whose first instinct was to protect someone else instead of himself was the definition of ‘worst of the worst’.”
  • A very passionate speech from Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, who is herself under indictment for her efforts protesting ICE.  “This is not a stepping stone in my career.  I want this seat because I want to do what I’m good at: help others, fight Nazis, and go back home to hang out with my cat.  If you’re angry, stay angry.  I’m angry, too.  And we’re in this together.”
  • The first 19 minutes of this week’s Strict Scrutiny is dedicated to covering the incident from both a legal and human perspective, including some chilling witness statements.  “We just want to suggest the radical idea that it cannot be that everyone is allowed to carry a gun for their safety, but the government can still murder you in the streets if you lawfully possess a gun.  Having a gun, we are told, does not make you a criminal, except, apparently, when you are protesting the government.  Even more maddening is that the Republican party and this court have attempted to justify the Second Amendment right to carry and possess a firearm by saying that people have a right to defend themselves—wait for it—from the government.”
  • More Jon Stewart: on The Weekly Show, he interviews 404 Media co-founder Joseph Cox and civil liberties journalist Radley Balko about ICE surveillance and enforcement.  The best part was probably a discussion of how the current situation with ICE is so reminiscent of the conditions that led to the American Revolution.  ”... the tension in Boston of having those soldiers there are why it eventually will lead to the Boston Massacre.  But it is specifically why we have a Second, Third, and Fourth Amendment, because you had soldiers who had these general warrants.  They had the power to break into anybody’s home at any time to look for untaxed goods, right?  Well, what’s ICE trying to do now?  They’re claiming they can break into anybody’s home at any time without a warrant to look for undocumented people, right?  I mean, the parallels are so incredible.”
  • On this week’s first Even More News episode, Katy Stoll does a great job pointing out that “killed while resisting arrest” is such a bullshit rationale because a) he wasn’t resisting—flailing around while people beat the shit out of you is not resisting—and b) even if he was, he wasn’t under arrest, because ICE aren’t cops, and they can’t arrest you, and c) even if he had been, you cannot be executed for resisting arrest.  Not legally, anyway.
  • I often point you at Adam Kinzinger, a never-Trump Republican, but it’s not because I always agree with him.  In point of fact, I often disagree with him, including at least some of what he says about this incident.  But I think it’s important to know that even lifelong conservatives are not okay with this bullshit, and Kinzinger’s words are sincere and heartfelt.
  • On the What a Day coverage, Jane Coaston not only has a good summary of the incident; she also interviews Laura Jedeed, a journalist who applied for a job with ICE for a story and somehow ended up getting the job, despite the fact that she never submitted any paperwork and utterly failed the drug test.  Her insight into the ICE hiring process is really revelatory.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • A pretty good cold open from SNL again this week.  It is often so hard to find any humour at all in these types of situations, but SNL has still got it, even after 50 years.  Pete Davidson’s Tom Homan impression is not particularly accurate, but it’s funny, and the ICE agents portrayed by Kenan Thompson (SNL’s longest-serving cast member) and James Austin Johnson (taking a break from his Trump impression) are spot-on.
  • Graham Platner has been a controversial figure, but I still think he’s an excellent candidate to supplant Susan Collins in Maine: younger than the current governor (who’s running against him), an oysterman and veteran, and a self-described “New Deal Democrat.”  He explains what that means in this campaign video.

Kat Abughazaleh, who I’ve mentioned many times in these reports, released an attack ad ... against herself.  It is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen all year (and I know that’s a low bar, but still), and you simply must watch it.  At only a minute long, it captures the utter absurdity of the criticisms against her—and against any of the crop of strong new progressive faces we’re (finally) seeing, such as Mamdani, AOC, Jasmine Crockett, and Ilhan Omar.

Omar, of course, got a lot of press this week because one of the rightwing nutjobs sprayed her with apple cider vinegar, for some unknown reason (other than just Trump being in his head—I think that might be the real “Trump Derangement Syndrome”).  Rather than shrinking back and/or freaking out, Representative Omar stepped to the crazy man, fist cocked back.  The really stupid thing—even stupider than squirting vinegar at someone—is that it’s likely that almost no one outside her native Minnesota would even know her name, except that Trump cannot help himself when anyone brings up a strong woman of color, and he goes on and on about how terrible they are, how dumb they are, and how he’s so much smarter than they are.  I myself was barely aware of her as one of the original members of The Squad, but knew almost nothing beyond that.  But now Trump and his big mouth have ensured that she’s receiving national attention, with people on the left praising her and those on the right having to make shit up to discredit her.  (Best coverage on this is likely the Even More News segment on it, which has the added bonus of Matilda star Mara Wilson weighing on the sexual abuse generation machine that is Grok.)  But now I, and just everyone else in the country, know her name, know her face, and know that she don’t take no shit.  To say that Trump is an idiot is underselling it a bit; more fair to say he’s a toddler, with a limited grasp of object permanence, who lacks the self-control to keep his mouth shut even when it would benefit him to do so.  That and the toxic narcissism, of course.

So Abughazaleh and Omar are my hope for this week.  Strong women, and especially strong women of color, are the one thing Trump can’t handle, and maybe that’s exactly what’s going to save us all.









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Sunday, January 25, 2026

Doom Report (Week 53: What if the answer isn't to run faster?)


On this week’s final Daily Show episode of the week, Josh Johnson discusses some of Trump’s campaign promises, and how he seems to have kept them all ... but only if he was talking to himself and not to the American public.  The most stunning one was how he promised everyone that his administration would make them rich.  Whereas, in reality, he’s managed to enrich himself to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars.  Billion.  With a “B.”  That’s over 18 thousand times the average annual salary of Americans that live in my state; it’s closer to 30 thousand times the average salary of Americans in Mississippi, which happens to have the lowest average salary in the country.  Now, on the one hand, that’s nothing compared to how much Elon Musk made in 2025.  But Musk’s “job” is billionaire, so that’s what you’d expect.  Trump’s job—ostensibly—is to be our president.  Traditionally, we haven’t thought of that as a get-rich-quick scheme.  But leave it to Trump to change those expectations.

The real story, of course, is the shooting of a second bystander in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti.  The absolute best coverage of this, in my opinion, was from an unexpected quarter: Legal Eagle has a video from just earlier today where Devin breaks down while breaking down the incident.  Powerful, emotional, and excellent legal perspective.  Journalist Jamelle Bouie also has an excellent summary (including some historical context) on his new “Takes” series.  Much like the shooting of Renee Good, I’m sure you’ve seen the video by now: it’s everywhere on the Internet.  Pretti is the fifth person shot and killed by ICE agents while observing or fleeing from them.  He is the second white person, and, unlike Renee Good, the die-hard MAGA supporters can’t even claim lesbianinsm or “pronouns in her bio!” as justifications for the murder.  He was a VA hospital intensive care nurse, which has had the adminstration really scrambling to figure out how to make him out to be the bad guy.  The only thing they’ve been able to settle on is that he was carrying a concealed weapon, but this is even more problematic for them that in the Renee Good case: he had a permit for the weapon, and he never unholstered it.  And the MAGA base are Second Amendment fanatics: being able to be armed in order to protect yourself from being attacked by tyrannical govermnent overreach is what they fucking live for.  So this is a death that has even the NRA on the side of the victim, and maybe that finally signals some changes on the horizon.  It’s disgusting to me that it’s only once the white people starting getting killed that anyone payed any attention, but that’s the country we live in, so maybe it will finally make a difference.  But let’s not also forget the 3 people killed by ICE last year: Silverio Villegas González and another Mexican immigrant whose name was never even released, and Keith Porter, a black man shot on New Year’s Eve.  As Devin says: “they’ll come for the best of us, but ... we can fight back.”

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Let’s also not forget that this week was the Davos debacle, where Trump told German-speaking Swiss onlookers that if it wasn’t for the United States they’d all be speaking German now, and also called Greenland “Iceland” about 4 times in a row.  Seth Meyers has a pretty good summary in his first Closer Look on the topic.  He followed that up with second Closer Look later in the week, where he notes that, after all that bluster, we now appear to have “made a deal” which is exactly the same deal we had before all the insanity started.  But, seeing as how that’s exactly what he did with China and Canada and Mexico, I’m not sure why we should be surprised.
  • Owen Jones also covered Davos, including Candian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s incredible speech declaring the end of American hegemony.

Over in the UK, the Greens are now the third largest party in the country, beating the Conservatives (a.k.a. the Tories), who used to be one of the two largest parties by a large margin.  But the Greens are on the way up and the Tories are on the way down, and they apparently just passed each other.  Now, before progressives get too excited, the Reform party (that’s the one that’s even farther right than the Tories) has become number one, so it’s not like it’s progressive utopia over there.  But (as I’ve said before), if Labour is the Democrats and the Conservatives are the Republicans, then Reform is the MAGA movement: it’s just that they can actually have a separate party over there rather than having to hollow out the Repubs/Tories from the inside out.  So the UK is lagging a bit behind us, but they’re well on their way to getting there.

Except ... what the UK has that we don’t, apparently, is a corresponding movement on the progressive side.  And their new(ish) leader, Zack Polanski—who I talked about back in week 39—is a dynamic, interesting figure who has the charisma of an AOC or a Mamdani, but has the infrastructure of a whole party behind him.  They just released a new ad (what they call a “political broadcast” across the pond), and it’s stunningly good.  Seriously; go watch it.  It’s under 3 minutes long, and it’s all the hope I’ve got for you this week.









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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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