“trickle-down bigotry” and “servility to power”

The great danger is that this time, Trumpism starts making sense | Randeep Ramesh | The Guardian

Trump aligns directly with billionaires, promoting a culture where justice serves the wealthy, prejudice is trivialised and power diminishes equality. This trickle-down bigotry will ultimately create a system where servility to power and social division become normalised, eroding fairness for everyone. …

Trump’s aim isn’t to lift all boats, but rather to lift enough to convince voters to tolerate the corruption, consumer scams and environmental degradation that enrich a plutocratic class. This strategy, boosted by a pliant mediasphere, enables him to present a party of private power as the voice of the ordinary voter.

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The Imperial Executive

The Trump transition has begun — and it’s even stranger than the first time around | The Independent

To start, a 501(c)(4) organization, named for the section of the Internal Revenue Code that authorizes such “social welfare” organizations, aren’t required to publicly disclose their donors. And by keeping the transition off of any official government email systems, the Trump team can evade having their emails requested by any Democratic or nonpartisan transparency groups under the Freedom of Information Act. …

Reporting from The New York Times and other outlets has also indicated that Trump and his team are strongly considering skipping the process by which administration officials normally obtain security clearances after FBI background checks. Instead, Trump aides have reportedly argued for the president-elect to unilaterally grant clearances to top aides based on private background investigations done by a firm contracted by the transition. …

Because security clearances are an executive function, the president can grant anyone a clearance at any level for any reason, even over the objections of the national security professionals who assess whether a given individual can be trusted with the nation’s secrets. And as an elected official, Trump himself is exempt from clearance requirements despite his long and documented history of mishandling and allegedly unlawfully retaining national defense information.

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Make the trains run on time!

There is an anomaly in all election analysis: Trump. The question is if anyone after will lie as shamelessly as he does. Will the whole nation ever agree on Reality again? 

Opinion | The Trump voter shift that should alarm Democrats most – The Washington Post

If Democrats can’t again appeal to non-White and working-class voters in cities, this election may signal the start of a long deterioration in the party’s voter base.

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Cold comfort in the capacity of time to bury kings

Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Source: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (1977)

Ozymandias | The Poetry Foundation

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Blame everyone

Detailed graphs. Worth a read. So, nobody wants to be taken for granted or to be predictable. 

How shifts among key demographic voting groups sealed Trump’s 2024 election victory | The Independent

Exit polls have given us some insight into how different groups voted — and there have been some drastic shifts since 2020. At first glance, the expected gender divide between men and women was less drastic, but strong splits emerged among Black and Latino voters. Latino men leaned Republican overall for the first time, and 1 in 5 Black men voted for Trump.

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Considering all explanations, Covid is hard to accept as a plus for Trump

Covid figures in both of these yet Trump’s ineptitude and willfulness killed millions. And weeks before the election, we learned he sent rare equipment to Putin that was needed here. 

None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny | Ben Davis | The Guardian

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.

The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it? | Donald Trump | The Guardian

It broke all over again during the Covid pandemic, when the economy ground to halt, unemployment rocketed and prices of everyday goods spun alarmingly out of control. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 16 years, yet their idea of consensus has failed to reach much beyond the big-city limits. Trump’s ‘golden age of America’ could be an unrestrained imperial presidency Read more More appealing by far to those on the outside looking in are Trump’s promises of retribution, of tearing down the entire system and starting again. Those promises may also prove to be hollow over time, but to people only intermittently focused on politics as they struggle to put food on the table for their families, they feel at least fleetingly empowering. In a zero-sum world, blaming migrants for the country’s woes feels like its own kind of victory. It means some other group is at the bottom of the social heap for a change.

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Latinos for Trump? Sure, the ones who think he won’t deport them.

How Trump won over Latino and Hispanic voters in historic numbers | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

His victory was fueled largely by the support from Latino and Hispanic voters, particularly Latino men, that was repeated in county after county in swing states elsewhere as the Democratic party’s blue wall crumbled and the former president was elected to also be the next. Fear in undocumented communities over Trump’s mass deportation threats Read more In Pennsylvania, hordes of Puerto Ricans who saw their homeland demeaned as a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally barely a week before, flocked to give him their vote. In Wisconsin, exit polls showed a six-point rise from 2020, to 43%, in Trump’s Hispanic support, despite his condemnation of certain immigrants as “drug dealers”, “murderers” and “rapists”, and promise to conduct the largest deportation effort in US history soon after he takes office.

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"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." — Sam Adams