Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

in the meantime, the media should be held financially accountable for the mass psychosis they’ve whipped up.

Because they...

They only heard that in Western media.

For eight years as the top story.

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Contrary to what you have implied, the result of these planned actions will be increased individual freedom, and more direct involvement of the Democratically elected representatives in our government -- all as specified in our Constitution.

"Increased individual freedom" – this nostrum sounds so sunny while actually being a prescription for ceding more power to the wealthy, who will use their power to limit the ability of government to respond to inequalities caused by increased economic concentration of power in the hands of the owning class.

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The recent restrictions on freedom of speech and information have all been initiated by the Biden Administration and its supporters with their campaign against "misinformation" - a thinly disguised attack on our Constitutional freedom of speech which establishes no a priori test on accuracy

What "recent restrictions on freedom of speech and information" are you referring to? Do you not see the danger posed by deliberate misinformation posted on digital platforms? This isn't the late 18th Century. Do you not accept that social media companies have the right to moderate content as they see fit? As is done on this very platform?

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The supreme Irony in all of this is that it has long been the Left wing in contemporary American politics which in fact persistently seeks an authoritarian state and restrictions on our freedom of expression...

Can you illustrate what you mean? What "Left wing" are you talking about? I don't recall any mainstream candidates campaigning on these issues.

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The oddly named "inflation Reduction Act" of 2022 gave President Biden an enormous trillion dollar slush fund which he could with very few constraints on almost anything he wished, while adding to the national debt.

A total misrepresentation of the IRA (other than the dig at the name of the bill ) which completely ignores the importance of government investment in our country's infrastructure, developing industrial policy, and promoting new technology. And, by the way, thanks to the actions of the independent Federal Reserve, inflation has come down without the country suffering a recession.

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The surge in government spending that quickly followed ended a twenty plus year period of low inflation (less than 2% annually) and within five months inflation was approaching a 9%/year peak.

No mention of the worldwide effects of Covid on the international economy.

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The "Biden Brand", as son Hunter's associates called it, was the source of millions in payoffs from Russia China and Ukraine that flowed through Hunter's Burisma Board salary, various Family capital investment Firms and a maze of LLCs to the pockets of Biden's brother and son, and, of course "the Big Guy" himself.

This was never confirmed. The case fell apart in the hapless attempt to impeach Biden.

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The recent election appears to have started some realignments in the American electorate which may yield lasting changes.

This remains to be seen.

Implicit in your statement is the assumption that independent authoritarian bureaucracies know better what is good for the mass of people than they do themselves.

Why do you wish to give them the power to censor the voices of individual people?

We have for some time , mostly, but not always, under Democrat regimes, seen the expansion of the reach and control of government over ever broader sectors of the lives of our people...

Without such ratification these agreements have no force in law under our Constitution. They are merely agreements between the people involved.

Very little of it so far has involved infrastructure in any form.

However by mid 2022 here the epidemic was very much on the wane...

The cumulative effects so far since then have raised consumer prices by about 25%

A large, complex collection of "investment Companies" and LLCs effective in Laundering large sums of money and "the Big Guy" was clearly involved.

I do object the censoring of some opinions, among other differing ones, and/or arguments in support of one point of view while rejecting others, particularly if it it is deceitfully done under the guise of "misinformation.

Are the road and bridge projects in your community being funded by the Federal government?

The Feds did contribute to the (...) chartering of commercial aircraft to import undocumented immigrants from Columbia, Venezuela and Honduras.

The current IPCC estimate ( so far fairly accurate) for the rate of sea level rise is 1/8 inch per year...

The average rate of GMSL rise over the full length of the altimeter record - currently 3.3 mm/year - has been a widely-used metric for tracking the changes occurring to our climate system8. This average rate defined as a linear fit to the full record, however, is increasingly misleading. Recent studies have shown a significant acceleration in GMSL rise starting in 2017/2018, the climate equivalent of putting the “pedal to the metal”9,10,11. Even higher accelerations have been estimated regionally [e.g., refs. 12,13, but these estimates are more uncertain, since they are affected by variable processes like ocean circulation, which have no influence on GMSL. The acceleration means that the long-term average is no longer representative of the current rate of sea level rise, especially when comparing the pace at which the seas are rising today and at the beginning of the record. source

But there is no evidence I know of indicating he [Trump] directly or indirectly took large sums of cash from the Governments of China or Russia...

Donald Trump, for the first time, won a majority of the popular vote. He took the US presidency with huge swings in his favour, increasing his share of first-time voters, young voters, black voters and Latino voters. And he gained among voters earning under $100,000, while wealthier voters preferred Harris – a reversal of the class alignments in 2020. Current voting tallies suggest the swing to the Republicans was largely caused by mass abstention among Democrat voters. This result echoes global trends. Trump and his new coalition will now head a loose alliance of far-right governments from India to Hungary, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, the Netherlands and Israel.

The rhythm of far-right successes began with Viktor Orbán’s landslide in Hungary’s 2010 parliamentary election. Since Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2014 Indian general election, it has scarcely paused: Trump’s first ascent to the White House, the Brexit vote and Rodrigo Duterte’s success in the Philippines all took place in 2016. Two years later, Jair Bolsonaro scored an upset in Brazil. Since the pandemic, the Brothers of Italy won the Italian general election in 2022 and Javier Milei took the Argentinian presidency in 2023. For most of this period, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has ruled Israel in coalition with far-right parties. Even where it is not in power, the far right is gaining, as in France and Germany. In the long view, the defeat of Trump in 2020 and Bolsonaro in 2022 were predictable oscillations in a general pattern of ascent.

Why does the far right keep winning? Is it “the economy, stupid”, as James Carville put it during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run? The idea that far-right voting reflects a protest by the economically “left behind” is quite popular.

There is a kernel of truth to this: the state of the economy was the single biggest motive for Trump voters in 2024. Liberals, snarking about the “vibecession” – the mistaken belief by the public that the economy is in recession – say GDP is growing and inflation is modest at 2.4%. But headline figures don’t reflect how most people experience the economy. Prices are 20% higher than before the pandemic and, more importantly, prices for essentials such as food are up 28%. Household debt was a major stress factor. Biden also cut a raft of popular benefits established during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t believe the headline figures.

Yet this narrative barely scratches the surface. First, the evidence suggests that people don’t always vote with their wallets: studies from the 20th century up to the present show that simple measures of economic self-interest aren’t a very good predictor of voting behaviour. The economy matters, of course, but not as a simple metric of aggregate wellbeing. It is a space in which people judge their personal standing relative to how they perceive the state of society. Personal setbacks are generally only politicised when they are perceived as part of a wider crisis. Second, while the far right can’t win without gaining some working-class support, in the US, Brazil, India and the Philippines, it relies on a bedrock of middle-class support. Besides, millions regularly have their economic lives wrecked without going far right: the poorest in most societies generally aren’t very susceptible to their message. Third, in strictly material terms the economic offer of today’s far right is paltry, yet incumbency has been incredibly forgiving for nationalist governments.

In India, after average consumer expenditure fell, Modi was re-elected in 2019 with a 6% swing. In the Philippines, as the number of “poor” Filipinos surged, Duterte’s successor Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr won 58% of the vote in 2022 – an increase of almost 20 points. Even in defeat, they do surprisingly well. Average incomes rose more slowly under Trump than his predecessor, yet he added 10 million voters to his base in 2020. And if people voted with their wallets, why would many working-class Americans back a candidate committed to cutting taxes onfor the rich?

The political effects of economic misery are more indirect than “It’s the economy, stupid” implies. Economic shocks are mediated by the existing emotional currents in society. The middle-class and more affluent workers can identify with the rich and resent the poor, migrants and “spongers” who threaten their lifestyle. Mostly resentment results in impotent complaint. Hit by shocks, most people are ill-placed to confront their causes and tend to withdraw from politics.

Today’s far right offers a different answer – what the political theorist William Connolly calls a “politics of existential revenge”. It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of “communist” takeover and amplifies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against “white genocide” and satanic child-molesting elites. Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism.

It runs deeper than elections. Rising from the cauldrons of cyberfascism, “lone wolf” murders have increased since 2010. Pogroms have erupted in Delhi and the West Bank. In the US, vigilantes attacked Black Lives Matter protesters. Britain and Ireland have been shaken by racist riots. And in recent years, there have been bungled “insurrections” such as the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in January 2021 and the trucker blockades intended to block Lula’s accession to power in Brazil.

This is a global social contagion. And far from being discredited by outbursts of collective violence, the new far right is galvanised by it. Modi’s rise to power began with an anti-Muslim pogrom in his home state of Gujarat. Trump’s 2020 campaign was electrified by vigilante violence. Bolsonaro came from nearly 20 points behind to almost winning after a summer of deadly violence.

Addressing economic issues will defuse some of this. David Brooks acknowledges in the New York Times that Harris’s centrism “didn’t work” and that the Democrats may need to “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption”.

But disruption isn’t just about “bread and butter”. People need something to desire, something to be excited about. That is what motivated the Democratic base in 2020, after the Sanders campaign and Black Lives Matter, and countered the right’s politics of revenge. The Harris campaign obliquely acknowledged this with its vague talk of “joy”. But with economic populism forgotten, the far right’s borders agenda embraced and the administration arming Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza, there was little scope for that.

The ruptures on the right thrive as much on the pattern of liberal decay and demoralisation as on its own toxic emotional gyrations. To break out of this deadlock, the left needs ruptures of its own.

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

I have some reasons for thinking that, as bad as the next four years will be, the "massive political realignment" may be illusory. If I can turn these musings into a coherent analysis I'll share it with you. I might even post it here.

Any one of us who kept mispronouncing a proper name, after repeated coaching on the right way, would be written off as stupid. But Donald Trump kept calling his adversaries Barack HUSSEIN Obama and Ka-MAH-la Harris as a sign to his followers that these creatures, exotically named, were not one of us. They were part of the THEM that WE must keep out. The THEM he had in mind is a large and varied lot, since the WE is such a select body. It has no room for losers, for captives or corpses or the needy­—not even for the bodies of men who died defending their country. Trump’s courtiers allegedly had to spook a battleship out of his sight because it was named for a man he had denounced for having been a captive.

All outsiders are losers. They cannot say “America first” because they are not real Americans. Anyone who needs help is a loser. Women who go out of their place are losers—they should stay to be grannies and take care of the children of other women who stay in their place. Experts and regulators, relying on fancy degrees and studies, who tell us how to live, are losers and the fomenters of losers (out of their “deep state”). The sick, the disabled, and their caretakers are losers, wasting the time and money of the winners. The needy are losers. The winners do not need them. Trump’s dictatorial buddies—Putin and Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán—do not use power to help the helpless. That is what makes them winners.

Well, Trump’s election shows us who wins. He put the losers in their place. Like women, they must learn to stay in it. Pardon me if I do not celebrate. I, like everyone I know, am a loser, in the past or future or now. I am currently losing to age, and need those expert doctors with their wasteful caretaking. I always needed regulators who kept poison out of my food, and water, and air. The THEM that Trump is extruding includes all who need or care for the needy. That is a lot of us, though at times we do not recognize our right to be in the THEM being condemned. We should not only own that right and build on it, but also see that we share it with all the losers being overlooked by Trump’s dictator pals, like the Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza with American weapons. We losers have a lot to learn. But we are doing it. Trump is our teacher. source

The backdrop for today’s news is that Republicans in the Senate will vote by secret ballot tomorrow for a new Senate majority leader. That person will control the Senate calendar, deciding what measures will be taken up by the Senate for consideration and thus wielding power over Trump’s legislative plans.

Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with MAGA leaders and influencers, are backing Florida senator Rick Scott, who has signaled a willingness to do whatever Trump wants. Senators John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are also staunch party members but are not as closely associated with the MAGA faction of the party.

MAGA control of the Senate is at stake, and Trump and his team are pushing their extremist agenda so aggressively it will be impossible for Senate Republicans to pretend they didn’t know what was at stake if they vote to empower the MAGAs.

Today the Trump transition team floated the idea that Trump could sign an executive order creating a board of retired senior military personnel that would review high-ranking officers and recommend removing any they deemed unfit for leadership. Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal that such a board would enable Trump to purge the military of the generals whom he considers insufficiently loyal to him. Generals who refused to carry out what they considered unconstitutional orders—including using the military against U.S. civilians—infuriated Trump during his first term.

The chairman of VoteVets, retired major general Paul Eaton, warned that such a plan would turn the U.S. military into Trump loyalists. Eaton also warned military personnel what that would mean for the troops, suggesting that folks should “take a look at Stalin’s officer purges in early WWII that resulted in the Soviet, now-Russian Army, enduring incompetence and the use of its rank-and-file troops as cannon meat. The American military is the envy of the world’s militaries, given its efficiency for military effect and stunningly low casualty count. Probably a good model to keep.”

Transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “[T]he American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” But Trump’s claims of a mandate are wrong. As vote counts continue to come in, it appears that Trump’s margin of victory was actually quite slim.

Trump has also vowed to eliminate the Biden administration’s policies to address climate change, promising to “drill, baby, drill” and make the U.S. energy independent by increasing production of fossil fuels. In fact, the production of oil and gas hit an all-time high during the Biden administration and the U.S. exports those products, but so long as the U.S is tied to fossil fuels, it will likely always import them because the oil it exports is a different kind than it uses.

It is not clear that even MAGA Republicans want to kill the green energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act that have brought new factories and good jobs to more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states.

Today, chair and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil Darren Woods asked the incoming administration not to change Biden’s climate policy dramatically, saying that the lack of consistency on climate change is bad for the economy. “I don’t think the challenge or the need to address global emissions is going to go away,” he said. “Anything that happens in the short term would just make the longer term that much more challenging.”

Exxon has invested heavily in the carbon capture industry. In 2023, Woods predicted that the company’s low-carbon business could generate more money than its traditional oil and gas products in as little as a decade, telling investors he expects carbon capture to be a multitrillion-dollar business.

Trump and his team, apparently led by Elon Musk, have begun to float names for different administration posts, all of whom appear to be picked to replace nonpartisan federal experts with right-wing culture warriors.

For secretary of homeland security, Trump has proposed loyalist Kristi Noem, currently governor of South Dakota. Noem had been under consideration for vice president, but fell out of the running after boasting that she had shot her dog for misbehaving. Earlier this year, Noem appeared to suggest that Texas, which became a state in 1845, was one of the original signatories to the Constitution. She has been a Trump loyalist focusing on the border.

For U.S. ambassador to Israel, Trump has picked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who denies Palestinian rights to the West Bank, instead supporting Israeli settlements in that land and saying that “Israel has title deed” there, calling the area by the biblical name “Judea and Samaria.”

For secretary of defense, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran and host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, a show Trump reportedly enjoys. As national security expert Tom Nichols points out, the Secretary of Defense has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. The secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion.

Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. He became popularly known after accidentally hitting a man with an ax on the Fox & Friends show in 2015. Then, in 2019, he regained notoriety when he volunteered that he had not washed his hands in ten years because he does not believe germs are real. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”

Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that the news that Trump has tapped the inexperienced Hegseth to run the world’s largest and most powerful military “stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world.” While some Republicans say they look forward to getting to know him better, others appear to share the Pentagon’s concerns.

But the news that Trump wants a Fox News Channel host in one of the most important positions in the United States government got overtaken quickly by Trump’s announcement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy,” an entrepreneur who challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” under his administration. Their advice will, Trump announced, “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Their project is nicknamed “DOGE,” an apparent reference to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency and meme coin, known as “Dogecoin.” That cryptocurrency surged after the announcement of the new DOGE under Trump, adding to the gains of 153% since Election Day.

By law, a president does not have the power to create a new department or agency, and participating in one would require Musk and Ramaswamy to get rid of their conflicts of interest.

Trump’s announcement said that Musk and Ramaswamy would “work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’ Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026—a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!”

Trump appears to see himself as the founder of a new United States of America while, ironically, the real winners of the chaos he is ushering into the government will be Russia, China, and the other autocratic states eager to dismantle American democracy.

Trump’s demonstration of his plans just before Senate Republicans have to choose their leader seems an attempt to jam those who might stand against him into his camp. And yet, the Framers of the Constitution believed that the Senate would be the key guardrail to stop the rise of an autocrat who would destroy democracy and install himself as a king. They expected that the determination of senators to guard their own power would protect the nation.

Almost two hundred and fifty years into their experiment, we’re about to find out if they were right.

Republican senators today elected John Thune of South Dakota to be the next Senate majority leader. Trump and MAGA Republicans had put a great deal of pressure on the senators to back Florida senator Rick Scott, but he marshaled fewer votes than either Thune or John Cornyn of Texas, both of whom were seen as establishment figures in the mold of the Republican senators’ current leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Scott lost on the first vote. The fact that the vote was secret likely helped Thune’s candidacy. Senators could vote without fear of retaliation.

The rift between the pre-2016 leaders of the Republican Party and the MAGA Republicans is still obvious, and Trump’s reliance on Elon Musk and his stated goal of deconstructing the American government could make it wider.

Republican establishment leaders have always wanted to dismantle the New Deal state that began under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continued under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower and presidents of both parties until 1981. But they have never wanted to dismantle the rule of law on which the United States is founded or the international rules-based order on which foreign trade depends. Aside from moral and intellectual principles, the rule of law is the foundation on which the security of property rests: there is a reason that foreign oligarchs park their money in democracies. And it is the international rules-based order that protects the freedom of the seas on which the movement of container ships, for example, depends.

Trump has made it clear that his goal for a second term is to toss overboard the rule of law and the international rules-based order, instead turning the U.S. government into a vehicle for his own revenge and forging individual alliances with autocratic rulers like Russian president Vladimir Putin.

He has begun moving to put into power individuals whose qualifications are their willingness to do as Trump demands, like New York representative Elise Stefanik, whom he has tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, or Florida senator Marco Rubio, who Trump said today would be his nominee for secretary of state.

Alongside his choice of loyalists who will do as he says, Trump has also tapped people who will push his war on his cultural enemies forward, like anti-immigrant ideologue Stephen Miller, who will become his deputy chief of staff and a homeland security advisor. Today, Trump added to that list by saying he plans to nominate Florida representative Matt Gaetz, who has been an attack dog for Trump, to become attorney general.

Trump’s statement tapping Gaetz for attorney general came after Senate Republicans rejected Scott, and appears to be a deliberate challenge to Republican senators that they get in line. In his announcement, Trump highlighted that Gaetz had played “a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”

But establishment Republican leaders understand that some of our core institutions cannot survive MAGA’s desire to turn the government into a vehicle for culture war vengeance.

Gaetz is a deeply problematic pick for AG. A report from the House Ethics Committee investigating allegations of drug use and sex with a minor was due to be released in days. Although he was reelected just last week, Gaetz resigned immediately after Trump said he would nominate him, thus short-circuiting the release of the report. Last year, Republican senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told CNN that “we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with. He would brag about how he would crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night."

While South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said he would be willing to agree to the appointment, other Republican senators drew a line. “I was shocked by the announcement —that shows why the advise and consent process is so important,” Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said. “I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.” Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was blunt: “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate.”

If the idea of putting Gaetz in charge of the country’s laws alarmed Republicans concerned about domestic affairs, Trump’s pick of the inexperienced and extremist Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth to take over the Department of Defense was a clarion call for anyone concerned about perpetuating the global strength of the U.S. The secretary of defense oversees a budget of more than $800 billion and about 1.3 million active-duty troops, with another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions.

The secretary of defense also has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. Over his nomination, too, Republican senators expressed concern.

While Trump is claiming a mandate to do as he wishes with the government, Republicans interested in their own political future are likely noting that he actually won the election by a smaller margin than President Joe Biden won in 2020, despite a global rejection of incumbents this year. And he won not by picking up large numbers of new voters—it appears he lost voters—but because Democratic voters of color dropped out, perhaps reflecting the new voter suppression laws put into place since 2021.

Then, too, Trump remains old and mentally slipping, and he is increasingly isolated as people fight over the power he has brought within their grasp. Today his wife, Melania, declined the traditional invitation from First Lady Jill Biden for tea at the White House and suggested she will not be returning to the presidential mansion with her husband. It is not clear either that Trump will be able to control the scrabbling for power over the party by those he has brought into the executive branch, or that he has much to offer elected Republicans who no longer need his voters, suggesting that Congress could reassert its power.

Falling into line behind Trump at this point is not necessarily a good move for a Republican interested in a future political career.

Today the Republicans are projected to take control of the House of Representatives, giving the party control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, as well as the Supreme Court. But as the downballot races last week show, MAGA policies remain unpopular, and the Republican margin in the House will be small. In the last Congress, MAGA loyalists were unable to get the votes they needed from other Republicans to impose Trump’s culture war policies, creating gridlock and a deeply divided Republican conference.

The gulf between Trump’s promises to slash the government and voters’ actual support for government programs is not going to make the Republicans’ job easier. Conservative pundit George Will wrote today that “the world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education,” suggesting Elon Musk, who has emerged as the shadow president, will find his plans to cut the government difficult to enact as elected officials reject cuts to programs their constituents like.

Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, Will notes, will run up against reality in a hurry. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense—which Trump wants to increase—is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%, and while the Republican Study Group has called for cuts to them, Trump said during the campaign, at least, that they would not be cut.

So Musk has said he would cut about 30% of the total budget from about 40% of it. Will points out that Trump is hardly the first president to vow dramatic cuts. Notably, Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, an entrepreneur, to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people” after voters had elected Reagan on a platform of cutting government. Grace’s commission made 2,478 recommendations but quickly found that every lawmaker liked cuts to someone else’s district but not their own.

Will notes that a possible outcome of the Trump chaos might be to check the modern movement toward executive power, inducing Congress to recapture some of the power it has ceded to the president in order to restore the stability businessmen prefer.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man, and in the 1930s he tried to explain to angry critics on the right that his efforts to address the nation’s inequalities were not an attack on American capitalism, but rather an attempt to save it from the communism or fascism that would destroy the rule of law.

“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system,” FDR wrote to a friend in 1935. “[T]o save it is to give some heed to world thought of today.”

The protections of the system FDR ushered in—the banking and equities regulation that killed crony finance, for example—are now under attack by the very sort of movement he warned against. Whether today’s lawmakers are as willing as their predecessors were to stand against that movement remains unclear, especially as Trump tries to bring lawmakers to heel, but Thune’s victory in the Senate today and the widespread Republican outrage over Trump’s appointment of Gaetz and Hegseth are hopeful signs.

He plans to take legal action to prevent the takeover