Where is the president?
Where is the vice president?
Who’s running this aggression to WWIII?
Since the night of the November 5, election, Trump and his allies have insisted that he won what Trump called “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” But as the numbers have continued to come in, it’s clear that such a declaration is both an attempt to encourage donations— fundraising emails refer to Trump’s “LANDSLIDE VICTORY”—and an attempt to create the illusion of power to push his agenda.
The reality is that Trump’s margin over Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris will likely end up around 1.5 points. According to James M. Lindsay, writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, it is the fifth smallest since 1900, which covers 32 presidential races. Exit polls showed that Trump’s favorability rating was just 48% and that more voters chose someone other than Trump. And, as Lindsay points out, Trump fell 4 million votes short of President Joe Biden in 2020.
Political science professor Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, told Peter Baker of the New York Times: “If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition” On the other hand, she added, “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”
Trump’s allies are indeed setting out to do big things, and they are big things that are unpopular.
Trump ran away from Project 2025 during the campaign because it was so unpopular. He denied he knew anything about it, calling it “ridiculous and abysmal,” and on September 16 the leader of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, said there were “Absolutely zero. No connection. Zero” ties between the team and Project 2025. Now, though, Trump has done an about-face and has said he will nominate at least five people associated with Project 2025 to his administration.
Those nominees include Russell Vought, one of the project's key authors, who calls for dramatically increasing the powers of the president; Tom Homan, who as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) oversaw the separation of children from their parents; John Ratcliffe, whom the Senate refused in 2019 to confirm as Director of National Intelligence because he had no experience in intelligence; Brendan Carr, whom Trump wants to put at the head of the Federal Communications Commission and who is already trying to silence critics by warning he will punish broadcasters who Trump feels have been unfair to him; and Stephen Miller, the fervently anti-immigrant ideologue.
Project 2025 calls for the creation of an extraordinarily strong president who will gut the civil service and replace its nonpartisan officials with those who are loyal to the president. It calls for filling the military and the Department of Justice with those loyal to the president. And then, the project plans that with his new power, the president will impose Christian nationalism on the United States of America, ending immigration, and curtailing rights for LGBTQ+ individuals as well as women and racial and ethnic minorities.
Project 2025 was unpopular when people learned about it.
And then there is the threat of dramatic cuts to the U.S. government, suggested by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, headed by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are calling for cuts of $2 trillion to the items in the national budget that provide a safety net for ordinary Americans at the same time that Trump is promising additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Musk, meanwhile, is posturing as if he is the actual president, threatening on Saturday, for example: “Those who break the law will be arrested and that includes mayors.”
On Meet the Press today, current representative and senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) reacted to the “dictator talk,” with which Trump is threatening his political opponents, pointing out that "[t]he American people…voted on the basis of the economy—they wanted change to the economy—they weren’t voting for dictatorship. So I think he is going to misread his mandate if that’s what he thinks voters chose him for.”
That Trump and his team are trying desperately to portray a marginal victory as a landslide in order to put an extremist unpopular agenda into place suggests another dynamic at work.
For all Trump’s claims of power, he is a 78-year-old man who is declining mentally and who neither commands a majority of voters nor has shown signs of being able to transfer his voters to a leader in waiting.
Trump’s team deployed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance to the Senate to drum up votes for the confirmation of Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. But Vance has only been in the Senate since 2022 and is not noticeably popular. He—and therefore Trump—was unable to find the votes the wildly unqualified Gaetz needed for confirmation, forcing him to withdraw his name from consideration.
The next day, Gaetz began to advertise on Cameo, an app that allows patrons to commission a personalized video for fans, asking a minimum of $550.00 for a recording. Gaetz went from United States representative to Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general to making videos for Cameo in a little over a week.
It is a truism in studying politics that it’s far more important to follow power than it is to follow people. Right now, there is a lot of power sloshing around in Washington, D.C.
Trump is trying to convince the country that he has scooped up all that power. But in fact, he has won reelection by less than 50% of the vote, and his vice president is not popular. The policies Trump is embracing are so unpopular that he himself ran away from them when he was campaigning. And now he has proposed filling his administration with a number of highly unqualified figures who, knowing the only reason they have been elevated is that they are loyal to Trump, will go along with his worst instincts. With that baggage, it is not clear he will be able to cement enough power to bring his plans to life.
If power remains loose, it could get scooped up by cabinet officials, as it was during a similarly chaotic period in the 1920s. In that era, voters elected to the presidency former newspaperman and Republican backbencher Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who promised to return the country to “normalcy” after eight years of the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the nation’s engagement in World War I. That election really was a landslide, with Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, winning more than 60% of the popular vote in 1920.
But Harding was badly out of his depth in the presidency and spent his time with cronies playing bridge and drinking upstairs at the White House—despite Prohibition—while corrupt members of his administration grabbed all they could.
With such a void in the executive branch, power could have flowed to Congress. But after twenty years of opposing first Theodore Roosevelt, and then William Howard Taft, and then Woodrow Wilson, Congress had become adept at opposing presidents but had split into factions that made it unable to transition to using power, rather than opposing its use.
And so power in that era flowed to members of Harding’s Cabinet, primarily to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who put into place a fervently pro-business government that continued after Harding’s untimely death into the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, who made little effort to recover the power Harding had abandoned. After Hoover became president and their system fell to ruin in the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took their lost power and used it to create a new type of government.
In this moment, Trump’s people are working hard to convince Americans that they have gathered up all the power in Washington, D.C., but that power is actually still sloshing around. Trump is trying to force through the Senate a number of unqualified and dangerous nominees for high-level positions, threatening Republican senators that if they don’t bow to him, Elon Musk will fund primary challengers, or suggesting he will push them into recess so he can appoint his nominees without their constitutionally-mandated advice and consent.
But Trump and his people do not, in fact, have a mandate. Trump is old and weak, and power is up for grabs. It is possible that MAGA Republicans will, in the end, force Republican senators into their camp, permitting Trump and his cronies to do whatever they wish.
It is also possible that Republican senators will themselves take back for Congress the power that has lately concentrated in presidents, check the most dangerous and unpopular of Trump’s plans, and begin the process of restoring the balance of the three branches of government.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has attacked several key US alliances such as Nato, allied countries such as Turkey and international institutions such as the United Nations in two recent books, as well as saying US troops should not be bound by the Geneva conventions.
At the same time, the man who would head America’s gigantic military has tied US foreign policy almost entirely to the priority of Israel, a country of which he says: “If you love America, you should love Israel.”
Elsewhere, Hegseth appears to argue that the US military should ignore the Geneva conventions and any international laws governing the conduct of war, and instead “unleash them” to become a “ruthless”, “uncompromising” and “overwhelmingly lethal” force geared to “winning our wars according to our own rules”.
... ... ...
Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”
“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.
Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.”
He noted that more than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created over the last four years and that “our investments are making America a leader in clean energy and semiconductor technologies that will protect our economic and national security, while expanding opportunities in red states and blue states.”
In a White House memo, White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian wrote: “The progress we've made...represents only a fraction of the full impact of this agenda. If future Administrations continue to implement at the pace we have, people across the country will enjoy the benefits of safer water, cleaner air, faster internet, and smoother commutes.”
But the incoming Trump administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, Trump’s team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations.
The argument behind this approach to the economy is that concentrating wealth in the hands of investors will spur more investment, while creating an environment that’s “friendly” to business will create jobs. Jack Brook of the Associated Press reported that earlier this month, the state of Louisiana illustrated what this policy looks like to ordinary people when it cut income taxes to a flat 3% rate, reducing revenue by about $1.3 billion. They made up that revenue by increasing the sales tax to 5%, thus shifting the burden of taxation to lower- and middle-class families. “Louisiana just became a much more attractive place to do business,” Louisiana economic development secretary Susan Bourgeois told Brook.
It is becoming clear what Trump’s economic policy will look like at the national level. Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments.
As activist Melanie D’Arrigo put it on Bluesky: “‘Secret donations’ are bribes. The hundreds of millions he received from Elon Musk and other billionaires are also bribes. There’s a reason Donald Trump isn’t signing ethics pledges.” Indeed, after his first term, the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington concluded that “there is absolutely no doubt that Trump tried at every turn to use the presidency to benefit his bottom line,” and noted that those who spent money at Trump’s properties often received favorable policy decisions from the administration.
During the campaign, Trump promised to fight for ordinary Americans, but many of Trump’s picks to fill offices in his administration are notable for their extreme wealth. His pick for treasury secretary is billionaire Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive who invested money for philanthropist George Soros for more than ten years. To head the Commerce Department, Trump has tapped billionaire Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald.
Trump’s choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, and his choice for Interior Secretary, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, are both billionaires. And then there are the two men Trump tapped for his Department of Government Efficiency. Former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy is worth around a billion dollars, but Elon Musk is usually at the top of the list of the richest people in the world. He’s worth about $332.6 billion. Trump is expected to tap donor Kelly Loeffler, who is married to billionaire Jeff Sprecher, the chair of the New York Stock Exchange, as Secretary of Agriculture.
Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report today estimated the worth of Trump’s current roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number does not include Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find. In comparison, Mannweiler notes, the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million.
Economist Robert Reich noted yesterday that the wealth of America’s 815 billionaires grew by nearly $280 billion after Trump’s reelection, and the president-elect is promising to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025. Now, after all their complaints about the budget deficits under Biden as he invested in the country, Republicans are, according to Andrew Duehren of the New York Times, considering rejiggering the government’s accounting so that extending the tax cuts, which will create about $4 trillion in deficits, shows up as not costing anything.
Deregulation, too, is on the agenda. It’s a cause close to the heart of Elon Musk, who frequently complains that unnecessary regulations are making it impossible for visionary entrepreneurs to develop the technological sector as quickly and efficiently as they could otherwise.
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Susan Pulliam, Emily Glazer, and Becky Peterson noted that although Musk says his goal is to “protect life on Earth,” his companies “show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again.” The authors report that Tesla’s facility in Fremont, California, has received “more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California,” 112 of them. Federal regulators recently fined SpaceX for dumping about 262,000 gallons of wastewater into protected wetlands in Texas. Tesla, too, has dumped contaminated water into public sewer systems.
One staffer for environmental compliance told the Environmental Protection Agency that ““Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls.”
People who have worked with Musk “for years” told Pulliam, Glazer, and Peterson that they expect Musk will try to cut environmental regulations, especially the ones that affect his companies. After Trump announced that he was creating DOGE and putting Musk in charge of it, Musk posted: “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
Musk’s companies have brought in at least $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the past decade, and his companies have been targeted in at least 20 government investigations recently. Eric Lipton, David A. Fahrenthold, Aaron Krolik, and Kristen Grind of the New York Times note that Trump’s victory and his appointment of Musk to an oversight role in the government “essentially give[s] the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.”
Today, Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes, and Kate Sullivan of CNN reported that Trump’s lawyers have conducted an investigation into whether top Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn has been selling access to Trump. Payments for his promotion of candidates for administration positions or access to administration officials were as much as $100,000 a month. The lawyers recommended that the Trump team should jettison Epshteyn, but it has apparently decided not to.
“I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” Epshteyn said in a statement to CNN. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from Making America Great Again.”
Today, special prosecutor Jack Smith moved to drop both federal cases against Trump: the federal election case for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and the case concerning Trump’s retention of highly classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump had said he would break the usual norms around special counsels when he returns to office—Biden retained the special counsel investigating his son, Hunter—and fire Smith.
But Smith pointed to the position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted as a reason for the cases’ dismissal. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” he wrote. “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed.” Smith left open the possibility that the charges could be brought again in the future after Trump leaves office.
Trump’s approach to the cases was to delay and delay and delay in hopes voters would return him to the White House, and it appears his strategy worked. As democracy lawyer Marc Elias wrote: “Justice delayed was justice denied.”
the US is collapsing, like NATO, Germany and the rest of the so-called West.
You may find this in your version of what we call news:
_________________
Kamala Harris could potentially...
Bad Hombre@joma_gc
Woah! Kamala Harris is not unburdened. She could potentially be facing legal issues with the FEC, aside from her $20 million debt. Reports reveal that internal polling from the Harris campaign never showed her in the lead or even with a viable chance of winning.
Despite this, the campaign hid this from top donors, defrauded and misled them by falsely claiming she was ahead, and continued soliciting contributions under false pretenses to the tune of over $1 Billion.
Bad Hombre@joma_gc
Kamala just released a video message of encouragement to her supporters 21 days after the election, and as you’d expect, she’s drunk.
Bad Hombre@joma_gc
Trump hasn’t been inaugurated yet and so far:
- Stocks and 401ks are soaring.
- Gas prices are down to their lowest per gallon average since 2021.
- Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire.
- Hamas is asking for peace talks.
Bad Hombre@joma_gc
Thank you President Trump for mediating peace between Israel and Hezbollah.
Promises made. Promises kept.
Today presented a good example of the difference between governance by social media and governance by policy.
Although incoming presidents traditionally stay out of the way of the administration currently in office, last night, Trump announced on his social media site that he intends to impose a 25% tariff on all products coming into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” Trump claimed that they could solve the problem “easily” and that until they do, “it is time for them to pay a very big price!”
In a separate post, he held China to account for fentanyl and said he would impose a 10% tariff on all Chinese products on top of the tariffs already levied on those goods. “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he added.
In fact, since 2023 there has been a drop of 14.5% in deaths from drug overdose, the first such decrease since the epidemic began, and border patrol apprehensions of people crossing the southern border illegally have fallen to the lowest number since August 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. In any case, a study by the libertarian Cato Institute shows that from 2019 to 2024, more than 80% of the people caught with fentanyl at ports of entry—where the vast majority of fentanyl is seized—were U.S. citizens.
Very few undocumented immigrants and very little illegal fentanyl come into the U.S. from Canada.
Washington Post economics reporter Catherine Rampell noted that Mexico and Canada are the biggest trading partners of the United States. Mexico sends cars, machinery, electrical equipment, and beer to the U.S., along with about $19 billion worth of fruits and vegetables. About half of U.S. fresh fruit imports come from Mexico, including about two thirds of our fresh tomatoes and about 90% of our avocados.
Transferring that production to the U.S. would be difficult, especially since about half of the 2 million agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented and Trump has vowed to deport them all. Rampell points out as well that Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the visa system that gives legal status to agricultural workers. U.S. farm industry groups have asked Trump to spare the agricultural sector, which contributed about $1.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2023, from his mass deportations.
Canada exports a wide range of products to the U.S., including significant amounts of oil. Rampell quotes GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, as saying that a 25% tax on Canadian crude oil would increase gas prices in the Midwest and the Rockies by 25 cents to 75 cents a gallon, costing U.S. consumers about $6 billion to $10 billion more per year.
Canada is also the source of about a quarter of the lumber builders use in the U.S., as well as other home building materials. Tariffs would raise prices there, too, while construction is another industry that will be crushed by Trump’s threatened deportations. According to NPR’s Julian Aguilar, in 2022, nearly 60% of the more than half a million construction workers in Texas were undocumented.
Construction company officials are begging Trump to leave their workers alone. Deporting them “would devastate our industry, we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools,” the chief executive officer of a major Houston-based construction company told Aguilar. “Housing would disappear. I think they’d lose half their labor.”
Former trade negotiator under George W. Bush John Veroneau said Trump’s plans would violate U.S. trade agreements, including the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) that replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement that Trump killed. The USMCA was negotiated during Trump’s own first term, and although it was based on NAFTA, he praised it as “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law. It’s the best agreement we’ve ever made.”
Trump apologists immediately began to assure investors that he really didn’t mean it. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted that Trump wouldn’t impose the tariffs if “Mexico and Canada stop the flow of illegal immigrants and fentanyl into the U.S.” Trump’s threat simply meant that Trump “is going to use tariffs as a weapon to achieve economic and political outcomes which are in the best interest of America,” Ackman wrote.
Iowa Republican lawmaker Senator Chuck Grassley, who represents a farm state that was badly burned by Trump’s tariffs in his first term, told reporters that he sees the tariff threats as a “negotiating tool.”
Foreign leaders had no choice but to respond. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum issued an open letter to Trump pointing out that Mexico has developed a comprehensive immigration system that has reduced border encounters by 75% since December 2023, and that the U.S. CBP One program has ended the “caravans” he talks about. She noted that it is imperative for the U.S. and Mexico jointly to “arrive at another model of labor mobility that is necessary for your country and to address the causes that lead families to leave their places of origin out of necessity.”
She noted that the fentanyl problem in the U.S. is a public health problem and that Mexican authorities have this year “seized tons of different types of drugs, 10,340 weapons, and arrested 15,640 people for violence related to drug trafficking,” and added that “70% of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from your country.” She also suggested that Mexico would retaliate with tariffs of its own if the U.S. imposed tariffs on Mexico.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau did not go that far but talked to Trump shortly after the social media post. The U.S. is Canada’s biggest trading partner, and a 25% tariff would devastate its economy. The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, seemed to try to keep her province’s oil out of the line of fire by agreeing with Trump that the Canadian government should work with him and adding, “The vast majority of Alberta’s energy exports to the US are delivered through secure and safe pipelines which do not in any way contribute to these illegal activities at the border.”
Trudeau has called an emergency meeting with Canada’s provincial premiers tomorrow to discuss the threat.
Spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington Liu Pengyu simply said: “No one will win a trade war or a tariff war” and “the idea of China knowingly allowing fentanyl precursors to flow into the United States runs completely counter to facts and reality.”
In contrast to Trump’s sudden social media posts that threaten global trade and caused a frenzy today, President Joe Biden this evening announced that, after months of negotiations, Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a ceasefire brokered by the U.S. and France, to take effect at 4:00 a.m. local time on Wednesday. “This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” Biden said.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah attacked Israel shortly after Hamas’s attack of October 7, 2023. Fighting on the border between Israel and Lebanon has turned 300,000 Lebanese people and 70,000 Israelis into refugees, with Israel bombing southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah’s tunnel system and killing its leaders. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, Israeli attacks have killed more than 3,000 people and injured more than 13,000, while CBS News reports that about 90 Israeli soldiers and nearly 50 Israeli civilians have been killed in the fighting. Under the agreement, Israel’s forces currently occupying southern Lebanon will withdraw over the next 60 days as Lebanon’s army moves in. Hezbollah will be kept from rebuilding.
According to Laura Rozen in her newsletter Diplomatic, before the agreement went into effect, Israel increased its airstrikes in Beirut and Tyre.
When he announced the deal, Biden pushed again for a ceasefire in Gaza, whose people, he said, “have been through hell. Their…world is absolutely shattered.” Biden called again for Hamas to release the more than 100 hostages it still holds and to negotiate a ceasefire. Biden said the U.S. will “make another push with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and others to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza with the hostages released and the end to the war without Hamas in power.”
Today’s announcement, Biden said, brings closer the realization of his vision for a peaceful Middle East where both Israel and a Palestinian state are established and recognized, a plan he tried to push before October 7 by linking Saudi Arabia’s normalization of relations with Israel to a Palestinian state. Biden has argued that such a deal is key to Israel’s long-term security, and today he pressed Israel to “be bold in turning tactical gains against Iran and its proxies into a coherent strategy that secures Israel’s long-term…safety and advances a broader peace and prosperity in the region.”
“I believe this agenda remains possible,” Biden said. “And in my remaining time in office, I will work tirelessly to advance this vision of—for an integrated, secure, and prosperous region, all of which…strengthens America’s national security.”
“Today’s announcement is a critical step in advancing that vision,” Biden said. “It reminds us that peace is possible.”
That’s precisely why I introduced it as I did.
Re: blatham (Post 7384949)
Ever notice how Lash claims that there's no such thing as "misinformation" no matter how often her claims are exposed as propaganda and outright lies?
A Funny Thing Happened on The Way To Your Phone: Thinking About Bluesky
Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter two years ago, those who despise his evolving mix of predatory trolling, stunted emotional development and right-wing extremism have been hoping for an alternative. There was “Post”; Meta got into the act with “Threads”; another entity of at first uncertain origins actually got its start with one of Twitter’s former CEOs, Jack Dorsey. That was Bluesky. There was also Mastodon, a sort of Linux of social media networks. Part of the problem there was that you may not be familiar enough with Linux to understand the analogy. And if you do, you’re part of a potential community not nearly big enough to sustain a mass adoption social media platform. Each in succession thoroughly failed to dislodge or even make much of a dent in Twitter’s disordered and Frankensteinian dominance. It’s the power of network effects. Everyone can want to leave (or at least a big chunk of users can want that) and yet everyone is simultaneously trapped. It’s a collective action problem.
But then something seemed to shift all at once in the immediate aftermath of the November election. Bluesky had built a small but real community since its incremental launch more than a year earlier. Its growth, which had been gradual through the summer and into the fall, suddenly surged more or less immediately after the election. The site now has just under 23 million users and has been adding a million a day on some days since November 5th.
Now at this point you may be thinking: “Josh, I’m here to get my footing on our unfolding national crisis, not hear about the latest Twitter clone.” But I want you to hang on a minute and stick with me for this one. Because this is actually part of that bigger story. I don’t have much patience for niche social media stories either.
Now back to our discussion.
Let’s go back to the collective action problem.
I spend an obscene amount of time on Twitter. A decent amount of that is tied to underlying personality defects, a barely concealed pugilism and inability to let people have the last word. But Twitter’s real use case for me has always been as a source of news. People constantly either urge or demand that I leave the platform out of some point of principle or to not underwrite Elon Musk’s bottom line or whatever else. I don’t think like that, and don’t do performative defiance or declarations on principle or whatever. For two years I have wanted the entirety of Twitter to cease to exist, crater into oblivion. But until it did, there was this thing I need and that’s where it was. Even in Twitter’s degraded, Musk-era form, by carefully curating lists, I am able to get updated on real news on the subjects of most interest to me very quickly. Absent that, a social network is of very little use to me. I’d already been spending a bit more time on Bluesky over the past few months. But in roughly the week after the election, suddenly that thing I just described was there too: a critical mass of the people who, when organized together, give me that real-time access to what’s happening. Because of that, I’ve largely left Twitter and now spend the time I used to spend there on Bluesky — not to make a statement but because it has most of that thing I need. I check in on Twitter too. But my current use is about 10 to 1 in Bluesky’s favor, about the inverse of what it was a month ago.
Most users don’t have the professional need for this kind of social network that I do. But some form of what I’m describing is why most other people are moving over too: a critical mass that makes it a real competitor to Twitter. Enough of the people you’re there to hear from or be heard by are there.
Before going further, why did this happen at all and why in a rush just after the election? First of all, it’s not just politics Twitter. Every major media publication has run some story about liberals wanting to retreat to a safe “bubble.” This, frankly, is as tired as your standard “Dems in disarray” laziness. Twitter is actually lots of different communities. Moving all around the same time aren’t just politics Twitter but Black Twitter, sports Twitter and a bunch of others. The reality is that Musk’s management of the space has vastly degraded its basic functionality and made it increasingly toxic even for people who aren’t that focused on politics. But clearly the election was some pivot point and that’s about politics. So why did this happen now?
My sense is that it’s a couple things in tandem. One is that Musk’s increasingly direct and over-the-top role as part of the Trump campaign, almost like a co-president, was just finally too much for people. He was making the whole space into a Trump propaganda engine. Trump winning the election was a breaking point. At the same time, you had a lot of people who were tired of Twitter but as long as the election was going on they stayed to find out what was happening in the election. No election, no refreshing Twitter. This happened just as Bluesky was developing enough momentum to offer a potential alternative.
What this leaves still unanswered is the movement of communities, at pretty much the same time, not as tightly tied to politics. I don’t have as clear a sense of why and how that happened. But it did. With Black Twitter, the adjacency and overlap with politics speaks for itself. With sports and other communities, less so. Perhaps it’s a mix of a heavily politicized society and Musk’s increasingly untrammeled behavior. Or perhaps it’s something simpler: late 2024 Twitter is a lot like living in the home of an emotionally stunted, middle aged egomaniac with more money than he knows what to do with. And I think we all know what that home looks like on the inside.
When I realized this was real and not just Bluesky hype I’ve been caught up in is when I heard that Meta and its “Threads” Twitter competitor were starting to roll out features and changes to deal with competition from Bluesky. Those are largely tied to allowing users to opt out of some aspects of its algorithm. I was even more interested when I saw this report this morning that Chinese state media is concerned about Bluesky’s rapid growth relative to Twitter. Like other state actors, China has invested huge resources into amplifying its voice on Twitter, Facebook and other networks — most of all on TikTok, which is a Chinese company with close ties to the government.
The key issue here is the algorithm. That’s what makes this potentially more than just another story about Bluesky emerging as a rival to Twitter. After all, the Chinese state has a lot of resources. So, fine, what’s the problem? They’ll just build up on Bluesky, right? But again, the algorithm is the key.
Twitter was never a particularly large social network. It was totally dwarfed in the old days by Facebook. And it wasn’t profitable. That’s the reason Musk was able to buy it. What made it important and worth buying was it packed way more influence over media and communications than its size suggested. A big factor underlying Bluesky’s recent growth is that its use of algorithms is very light. The big move Meta/”Threads” just made to compete was — breaking all Meta business doctrine — allowing users a bit more ability to opt out of its algorithm. There’s a reason that’s Meta business doctrine. Social media platforms harvest engagement like mines harvest coal from the ground. More engagement, more money. That’s the role of the algorithm. It’s the drilling machinery of social media platform wealth. The pre-Musk Twitter absolutely used algorithms but not as effectively or with as expansive a social grid as Facebook. That’s why it was never that successful as a business.
Bluesky is trying to make that light use of algorithms its secret sauce. And it’s an open question whether that’s going to be possible since, as I said, that’s where the money is. We’ll see on that front. But here’s where this comes back to the role of political and state actor propaganda. In that Semafor piece I linked above and in the underlying article it builds on, they talk about the core issue in modern political communications. The algorithms, which are the central profit drivers of all contemporary social media platforms, are also what makes them so useful for state actors. As that article argues, Bluesky’s light algorithmic structure may make it harder for China, Russia and everyone else operating on these platforms (very much including domestic actors) to turn it to their purposes.
That’s interesting.
I’m not trying to get all Empire and Rebel Alliance about this. The platforms have hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal. And they have all the smart people money can buy to maintain the dominance of their commanding-heights companies’ power. On the other side of the equation, Bluesky’s current path of running a social network with only a light use of algorithms has a pretty obvious problem built into it: where does the money come from? Even the recent rush to Bluesky has that network effect tipping point dimension to it. For the moment, if you want off Twitter and its toxicity, Bluesky is offering enough to make it plausible. But to sustain the movement it will probably have to keep growing. If some critical mass of the power users people want to hear from decide Bluesky doesn’t have quite enough juice, the whole thing could roll back in Twitter’s direction. Meta’s “Threads” is of course also in the mix, though I think Meta’s corporate reflexes and the growing disenchantment with platform oligarchs will likely make that a hard sell.
Still, billionaire oligarchs and the tech platforms which drive a good bit of their wealth — and also give them outsized political power and a potential stranglehold on political communications — are all key elements of our political moment. So these techie developments are worth keeping track of.
You automatically think because this person has an opinion about one thing that none of us agree with, that means his statement about Kamala Harris and donor complaints about her 1 billion dollar campaign MUST BE AUTOMATICALLY DECLARED MISINFORMATION??
Thank you President Trump for mediating peace between Israel and Hezbollah.
A Democratic megadonor has suggested that the huge amount of money donors poured into Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign may have been "legally" stolen through mismanagement.
