Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.
Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.
The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.
Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.
When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.
Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”
Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.
If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.
Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.
That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.
The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.
But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.
Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”
Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.
Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.
The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.
Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”
There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.
In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”
Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.
Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.
Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.
And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”
So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.
Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.
If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.
British mobile phone company O2 has unveiled a new creation, Daisy, a chit-chat and kitty-cat loving artificial intelligence "granny" who talks to scammers to keep them away from real people.
"Hello, scammers. I'm your worst nightmare," Daisy says by way of introduction to would-be ne'er-do-wells.
In the video introduction, featuring former Love Island contestant and scam victim Amy Hart, scammers are heard feeling much of the same frustrations they put their victims through as Daisy breezily yammers on about her kitten, Fluffy, and her inability to follow the scammers' instructions.
"I think your profession is bothering people, right?" one defeated scammer tells Daisy after being given the runaround.
"It's nearly been an hour! For the love of [bleep]," another yells in frustration.
But for Daisy, time couldn't be less of a concern.
Light enters the compound eye of the fly, causing the photoreceptors to send electrical signals through a complex neural network, enabling the fly to detect motion
"While they're busy talking to me, they can't be scamming you. And let's face it, dear, I've got all the time in the world," she says.
O2, the company behind the scam-baiting granny, said the AI technology can keep scammers on the phone for 40 minutes at a time. Daisy was trained with the help of YouTuber and software engineer Jim Browning, who has made an online career exposing scammers to his community of 4.4 million subscribers.
In order to bait scammers into time-wasting calls, the company utilized the practice of "number seeding," which put the AI granny's number on lists used by scammers to find their victims. The granny gimmick's goal is twofold: to keep scammers away from real people and to raise awareness about the dangers of risky phone hoaxes.
"We're committed to playing our part in stopping the scammers, investing in everything from firewall technology to block out scam texts to AI-powered spam call detection to keep our customers safe," Murray Mackenzie, the company's director of fraud, said in a statement.
"But crucially, Daisy is also a reminder that no matter how persuasive someone on the other end of the phone may be, they aren't always who you think they are."
Allowing a dictator to overrun a neighboring country in order to reassemble a former empire and turning your back on a treaty with allies isn't really "diplomacy".
...the US just paid terrorists to overrun a sovereign country...
...those terrorists are currently slaughtering Christian and other religion-aligned citizens.
The US supplies the money, weapons, and personnel to facilitate Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians also.
Putin is JFC in comparison.
The annals of American political history are littered with the remains of once-great presidential mandates.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s smashing 1936 re-election did not, to give a famous example, give him the leverage he needed to expand the Supreme Court, handing his White House a painful defeat. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society generated immense conservative opposition, and his momentum could not survive the 1966 Republican wave. Ronald Reagan was stymied by Democratic gains in the first midterm elections of his presidency. Bill Clinton was famously cut down to size by the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994. And Barack Obama was shellacked by Tea Party extremists in 2010.
“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush declared in 2004 after he became the first Republican to win re-election with a majority of the popular vote since Reagan. By the summer of 2005, Bush’s approval had crashed on the shoals of a failed effort to privatize Social Security. In the next year’s elections, Republicans lost control of Congress.
There is no evidence that Donald Trump is immune to this dynamic. Just the opposite: His first term was a case study in the perils of presidential ambition. Not only were his most expansive plans met with swift opposition, but also it is fair to say that he failed, flailed and faltered through the first two years of his administration, culminating in a disastrous midterm defeat.
Trump has even bigger plans for his second term: mass deportations, across-the-board tariffs and a campaign of terror and intimidation directed at his political enemies. To win election, however, he promised something a bit more modest: that he would substantially lower the cost of living. According to Sam Woodward in USA Today:
“Prices will come down,” Trump also told rallygoers during a speech in August. “You just watch. They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”
Now Trump says this might not be possible. Asked by Time magazine if he thinks his presidency would be a failure if the price of groceries did not come down, he said: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
At the same time that Trump won’t commit to a key promise of his campaign, he is gearing up to deliver on mass deportations, a policy position that many voters seem to treat as just blather.
When you take all of this together with policies — such as large tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China — that are more likely to increase than lower the costs of most goods and services, you have a recipe for exactly the kind of backlash that eventually hobbles most occupants of the Oval Office.
The American public is exceptionally fickle and prone to sharp reactions against whoever occupies the White House. It wants change but continuity, for things to go in a new direction but to stay mostly the same. It does not always reward good policy, but it usually punishes broken promises and perceived radicalism from either party.
Ignore for a moment the high likelihood of chaos and dysfunction from a Trump administration staffed with dilettantes, ideologues and former TV personalities. It appears that what Trump intends to do, come January, is break his most popular promises and embrace the most radical parts of his agenda.
I can’t end this without conceding the real possibility that the basic feedback mechanisms of American politics are broken. It is possible that none of this matters and that voters will reward Trump — or at least not punish him — regardless of what he does. It’s a reasonable view, given the reality of the present situation.
And yet the 2024 presidential election was a close contest. The voting public is almost equally divided between the two parties, so Trump has little room for error if he hopes to impose his will on the federal government and make his plans reality.
If Americans are as fickle as they’ve been, then Trump’s second honeymoon might be over even before it really begins.
[Trump] has called climate science a “giant scam” and when last in office sought to gut US scientific funding and sidelined or even punished scientists deemed unfriendly to the interests of the chemical and fossil fuel industries.
Tomorrow, December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican. The measure required the Environmental Protection Agency to set maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and required states to comply with them. It protected the underground sources of drinking water and called for emergency measures to protect public health if a dangerous contaminant either was in or was likely to enter a public water system.
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment. That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The nation had dipped its toes into water regulation during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, after germ theory became widely understood in the 1880s. Cleaning up cities first meant installing sewer systems, then meant trying to stop diseases from spreading through water systems. In 1912, Congress passed the U.S. Public Health Service Act, which established a national agency for protecting public health and called for getting rid of waterborne illnesses—including the life-threatening illness typhoid—by treating water with chlorine.
It was a start, but a new focus on science and technology after World War II pointed toward updating the system. The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the nation’s water supply in the 1960s and discovered more than 46,000 cases of waterborne illness. In the 1970s it found that about 90% of the drinking water systems it surveyed exceeded acceptable levels of microbes.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Later that year, Congress passed a measure establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nixon signed it into law.
Widespread calls to protect drinking water ran up against lobbyists for oil companies and members of Congress from oil districts. They complained that the science of what substances were dangerous was uncertain and that how they would be measured and regulated was unclear. They complained that the EPA was inefficient and expensive and was staffed with inexperienced officials.
Then, in 1972, an EPA study discovered that waters downstream from 60 industries discharging waste from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River’s mouth in New Orleans had high concentrations of 66 chemicals and toxic metals. Chemical companies had sprung up after World War II along the 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, potentially polluting the water, while the lower end of the Mississippi River collected all the runoff from the river itself.
Two years later, an analysis of drinking water and cancer death rates among white men in that same area of Louisiana suggested that carcinogens in the water might be linked to high cancer rates. Louisiana representative Lindy Boggs, a Democrat, told Congress that “it is really vitally important to our region that we have controls enforced on the toxic organic compounds that come into the river from the industrial and municipal discharges, from runoffs from from agricultural regions, from accidents on the river, and from chemical spills on the river.”
Concerns about the area of Louisiana that later came to be known as “Cancer Alley” were uppermost, but there were chemical companies across the country, and Congress set out to safeguard the lives of Americans from toxins released by corporations into the nation’s water supply. The Safe Drinking Water Act, the first law designed to create a comprehensive standard for the nation’s drinking water, was Congress’s answer.
The new law dramatically improved the quality of drinking water in the U.S., making it some of the safest in the world. Over the years, the EPA has expanded the list of contaminants it regulates, limiting both new man-made chemicals and new pathogens.
But the system is under strain: not only have scientific advances discovered that some contaminants are dangerous at much lower concentrations than scientists previously thought, but also a lack of funding for the EPA means that oversight can be lax. Even when it’s not, a lack of funding for towns and cities means they can’t always afford to upgrade their systems.
By 2015, almost 77 million Americans lived in regions whose water systems did not meet the safety standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In addition, more than 2 million Americans did not have running water, and many more rely on wells or small systems not covered by the Safe Water Drinking Act.
The Biden administration began to address the problem with an investment of about $22 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems. The money removed lead pipes, upgraded wastewater and sewage systems, and addressed the removal of so-called forever chemicals and proposed a new standard for acceptable measures of them.
What this will mean in the future is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase production of oil and gas—although it is currently at an all-time high—and such projects are often slowed by environmental regulations. On Tuesday, December 10, he posted on social media, “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
“By ignoring environmental costs we have given an economic advantage to the careless polluter over his more conscientious rival,” Trump’s Republican predecessor Nixon told the nation in 1970. “While adopting laws prohibiting injury to person or property, we have freely allowed injury to our shared surroundings.” When he signed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, President Ford added simply: “Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water.”
Syria’s former leader, Bashar al-Assad, said he was evacuated from Syria by Russian forces after a rebel alliance seized the capital but had wanted to stay and fight, according to a statement that was posted on Monday to social media accounts he used while in office and reported by Russian state news media.
The statement, which said it had been issued from Moscow, contained what appeared to be the first public comments from Mr. al-Assad since his government was overthrown just over a week ago. In it, he defends his record during the country’s long and brutal civil war, criticizes the country’s new leadership and gives details of his flight from Syria. The Russian state news agency, Tass, carried a portion of the statement on its website on Monday.
Mr. al-Assad said that he had not planned to leave the country, and said he did not “consider stepping down or seeking refuge.” He said he had remained in Damascus “carrying out my duties” until early on Dec. 8, when he said rebels began to infiltrate the capital. At that point, he moved “in coordination with our Russian allies” to the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, outside of which Russia has a military base, he said.
“As the field situation in the area continued to deteriorate, the Russian military base itself came under intensified attack by drone strikes. With no viable means of leaving the base, Moscow requested that the base’s command arrange an immediate evacuation to Russia on the evening of Sunday Dec. 8,” Mr. al-Assad said in the statement, which was published in English. This account of the episode could not be independently confirmed.
The Kremlin has said that Mr. al-Assad made the “personal decision” to leave office, and that President Vladimir V. Putin had offered exile to him and his family. Dmitry S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has said Moscow will not disclose details of Mr. al-Assad’s location in Russia.
The Syrian government covertly transported millions of euros and dollars to Russia while Bashar al-Assad was still in power, according to a report by the Financial Times (FT), which cites confidential documents.
Between 2018 and 2019, Syria's Central Bank sent approximately $250 million in cash — equivalent to 2 tons of $100 and €500 bills — to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport.
This occurred despite Syria facing an acute foreign currency shortage at the time, with reserves reportedly "almost zero," according to a source cited by the FT.
Details of the Cash Transfers
The cash shipments were carried out via 21 flights between March 2018 and September 2019.
Once in Russia, the funds were deposited into Russian banks.
Additionally, the Assad family used the period to acquire luxury real estate in Russia, purchasing at least 19 high-end apartments in Moscow City, valued at a total of $40 million.
During this time, the Assad regime was heavily reliant on Russian military support to maintain control of Syria.
However, the situation changed dramatically by late 2024, as opposition forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a major offensive from Idlib province. The rebels advanced rapidly, taking Syria's second-largest city, Aleppo, and eventually Damascus.
On December 8, 2024, the rebels announced the overthrow of Assad's regime, marking the end of his presidency, which began in 2000.
Assad’s Escape to Russia
Following the fall of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, now 59, fled to Russia, where he was granted asylum.
According to Bloomberg, his escape was orchestrated by Russian intelligence, who evacuated him via a Russian airbase with his plane’s transponder turned off to evade detection.
While Assad secured refuge, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly demanded an explanation from his intelligence services for failing to anticipate the growing threat to Assad’s rule.
Initially, Russian forces launched strikes against Syrian opposition groups in an attempt to bolster Assad’s government.
But when the opposition captured key cities such as Aleppo and Hama and advanced on the strategic city of Homs, it became clear that Assad’s forces could not mount sufficient resistance. Faced with these realities, Russia concluded that it could no longer protect the regime.
Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) reposted
David Axelrod@davidaxelrod 5h
Quote:Now Trump says he's suing the Des Moines Register because their poll understated his support; 60 Minutes because of their editing of
@KamalaHarris interview; the Pulitzer committee for honoring the
@nytimes coverage of Russian election interference.
Welcome to Hungary, folks!
