What to expect from the Trump Reality Show, Season 2
How will S2E1 of the Trump Show do on Cabinet Picks, Mass Deportation and the Ukraine?
How are you doing? Are you recovering somewhat from the shock of the renewal of the Trump Reality Series? Are you getting antsy from sitting on the sidelines eating grief French fries? Are you ready to listen to political podcasts again? Good, good; as am I. At the outset, however, I would like to open by saying that the upcoming battle we are facing is going to be difficult and the wind will almost certainly not be at our back. This will not be a mission to #Resist — that was Season 1 — rather, we are being called upon to #Protect: our democratic norms, the guardrails and our political institutions.
So — Marshall your Chi — or Qi, or spiritus or life-force — accordingly. And if you need some extra time recovering from the two-year war we just waged and lost, dramatically, that’s swell and lovely as well. There is little that we can do right now, but gather intelligence for the coming Winter. And maybe generate enough outrage at his Cabinet picks as in the case of Matt “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” Gaetz that they might withdraw. Because Winter, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is most assuredly going to be bitter. And perambulating into outrage, something that the dying legacy media complex is expert at inspiring, only depletes us of our precious Chi, which we must preserve at all costs. We will need that for the fight that begins in earnest this January, at the swearing in of the 119th Congress, then into 2028.
First off, Trump’s Cabinet picks will continue to be naught else but retribution theater. The maliciously curated mix of qualified loyalists (Rubio) and time bombs (Gabbard) is carefully calculated to rasp, as well as to test the outer boundaries of the elasticity of democratic institutions all at once. “They are manifestly unserious — proposed nominees who are not just unqualified but aren’t even a standard deviation or two away from people would be minimally qualified,” Garrett M. Graph sniffed. “It’s telling that when John Ratcliffe was announced as the choice for CIA director — Ratcliffe who I called in 2019 Trump’s ‘most alarming personnel decision yet’ and later said was the ‘least qualified’ nominee to be director of national intelligence ever — he was actually the most qualified nominee announced yesterday amid choices like a Fox News host for Defense Secretary.” Duly noted. But with all due respect, isn’t that the point?
What if that is exactly what MAGA (and his donors) want? To smash the system altogether, leaving nothing upright in its blast radius. Install political semtex like Linda McMahon at Education, for instance, in order only to deconstruct it from within. Silicon Valley bros, MAGA ultimate fighting fans, Roganheads and, quite frankly, the FSB Directorate would probably pay to watch such an ad hoc demolition job on Pay-Per-View.
Congress will be sworn in on January 3rd, during the final 17 days of Biden’s Presidency. And though the Republicans will now control both houses, that does not necessarily mean that Trump will have the glide path to a blank check on lock. Quite the contrary, in fact, if Mitch McConnell seeks redemption. Which is a not inconceivable political phenomenon, despite how strange it sounds. Consider, for example, the possibility that Senator McConnell, newly ejected for his comfortable perch as Leader of the Republicans, might actually be a fellow traveler with Senate Democrats in providing checks to the thumotic excesses of Trump’s agenda. Philip Elliott of Time reports:
“Institutions worth preserving have to be defended. And this is the work which, by necessity, has occupied my focus during my time in Washington,” McConnell told a conservative think tank gala in his honor last week. “It’s been quite evident to me that a credible check on majority rule was worth preserving even when it didn’t serve my party’s immediate political interests. Because wild swings in policy with every transfer of power don’t serve the nation’s interest. For consequential legislation to endure, it should have to earn the support of a broad coalition.”
Which is why I offer up the word “redemption” to this admittedly long-shot scenario. Not that McConnell can atone for his sins against democracy. Multitudinous are his unspeakable acts. In allowing Donald J. Trump to escape impeachment by the United States Senate for the January 6 insurrection. By reverting to bloodless, cynical Machiavellian maneuvering of the Senate rules, he robbed President Obama of his rightful Supreme Court nominee. For which Mitch duly ought to be held in the afterlife in Circle 8 of Dante’s Inferno, among the fraudulent and divisive. In the meantime, dear reader, Nevertheless, he persists. Until January 2027, when his current term expires and he is 84 years of age.
What is to be done? Will McConnell, as Elliott relays, serve as a “credible check on majority rule” that is worth defending? Or are these just mere words, even as Trump has essentially Trumped him out of the bragging rights of his own legacy, in delivering the Court to the far-right? We will not entertain the possibility that Trump’s anti-Asian racist tirade against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, will be left unavenged. McConnell could be one of several Republican Senators — Tillis (NC), Collins (ME), Murkowski (AK), Cassady (LA) — that might band together with the Senate Democrats, should all 47 remain united in purpose, to stand athwart History and curtail the worst of Trump’s appointments. I think there is a high possibility of this happening as no one has more need of public redemption that McConnell. This is his final public act and why not spend it against Kennedy, Hegseth and “Russophile” Tulsi Gabbard. The revenge against Trump will just be lagniappe.
The Mass Deportations. Immediately after inauguration, as Trump tells it, he will begin mass deportations of illegal aliens. As this brutish policy appears to be hatching out, southwestern states like Texas and Arizona would officially declare an “invasion,” allowing the administration to take it up with a friendly Supreme Court. The Texas Land Commissioner’s kindhearted offer of 1402 acres in Starr County notwithstanding, this campaign promise would be a forbiddingly expensive endeavor. As recently naturalized citizen John Oliver reminds us, the deportation plan would tentatively cost about a trillion dollars over a decade. “And to be clear, my biggest problem with ‘We’d spend nearly $1 trillion on detention camps for immigrants’ is not the trillion-dollar part,” Oliver notes. “I don’t want to see a headline tomorrow that says ‘John Oliver Blasts Detention Camps as Too Expensive.’ But I do think it’s worth recognizing the extent to which Trump and Vance are full of shit from a practical standpoint as well as a moral one.” That does not mean that they won’t try, of course. Private prison stocks are booming at the prospect of getting some government business.
What about the Ukraine? Ukraine is probably the biggest loser of the 2024 Presidential race. President-elect Trump has said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he could end the Ukraine war in one day. This is doubtful at best, even factoring in the creepy relationship between Putin and Trump. It is a relationship so baffling that even I, a Trumpologist in good standing for two-decades, cannot make heads or tails of it. Even former director of national intelligence Dan Coats — an Indiana conservative — could not shake his ‘deep suspicions’ that Putin "had something" on the once-and-future President. Trump will not solve Ukraine in a day. But you can be sure that he will give Putin almost everything he wants, which is probably why President Biden shifted policy immediately after the election.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with a (small) ray of light in a faraway land. Former UK Conservative MP Sir Gavin Williamson has said that the Trump administration might formally recognize Somaliland’s independence.
Somaliland, at the northwest tip of Somalia, formally declared independence in 1991. Neither the UE nor the African Union has recognized Somaliland as a new African country. From Business Insider:
“One of Trump’s last orders as president was to withdraw troops from Somalia but then Biden countermanded that order. There is nothing that Trump hates more than someone overruling him so I used that to push the argument,” he added.
This information coincides with the recently held elections in the region which saw to the victory of the opposition leader Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, after amassing a 53% vote.
Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi’s mandate is independence. Presidents Obama and Biden failed to recognize the breakaway nation as independent for fear of angering Somalia. But even a broken clock — the Trump administration in this case — is right twice a day. This is one of those times. A small ray of hope, but not nothing.
“A few days ago on a Zoom webinar, I heard Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present and one of our leading scholars of fascism, make a very interesting and hopeful assertion: that the Harris-Walz campaign laid the foundation for a pro-democracy movement that will continue as we enter the second Trump administration. ‘Our organizing, messaging, fund-raising, canvassing, conversing, and strategizing was not in vain,’ she wrote the day after the election … Every big political mobilization enables activists and organizers to form new connections and develop trust, and if they’re any good and/or lucky, some of those relationships will last and become the basis for stronger work. Ben-Ghiat is also right to point out that in the final weeks of the election, we saw the emergence of something close to a cross-partisan alliance for democracy, as hundreds of Republican officials and national security professionals declared their support for Harris-Walz. That said, I think we need to recognize how little mainstream Corporate America as well as big civil society organizations chose to speak out about the Trump threat. Ever since major corporations voided their pledges to stop donating to Republican election deniers in the wake of January 6, and Big Tech companies chose to stop trying to block hate speech and political disinformation, it’s been clear that America’s capitalists, not to mention most of its leading oligarchs, were fine with the prospect of a second Trump term. And as historians Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in The New York Times two weeks before the election (gift link), the pillars of the religious community in America were also silent. Almost everyone hedged their bets.” (Micah Sifry/The Connector)
”Does the US become Europe? Linguistically, the idea of the United States as a singular entity only dates to about the Civil War. For the first 75 or so years of our country’s life, language used a plural to refer to the United States — e.g., the United States ‘are’ located in North America — implying the US first and foremost was an amalgamation of the individual states. Then as our national identity shifted, language also shifted to make the United States singular — e.g., the United States ‘is’ the world’s leading economy. But what if over the next decade we watch our country slide back to being a state-first system? At one end of the spectrum, the US over the next ten years could end up looking a lot more like Europe — a free trade and travel zone where citizens’ rights, equality, and freedoms vary widely state to state. Blue state governors and legislatures chart one course for themselves while red states chart a very different one, and in a sort of turbocharged Jim Crow-style splintering the federal government largely gives up trying to host a unified experience for American life. After all, we’re already seeing some of this drift apart: Much of the state-level work post-Dobbs has been about enshrining abortion protections at the state level in constitutions. Depending precisely on how you define it Europe has between 27 and 50 countries — you can travel across the 27 borders of the EU or the 29 borders of the Schengen region easily (though not the UK anymore!) but the experience of government, freedom, economic opportunities, and the lived experience of democracy varies pretty widely as you move from Germany to Hungary to Italy to Finland to Greece to Bulgaria and beyond.” (Garrett Graf/Doomsday Scenario)
“Today, the war in Ukraine – or at least the time since the large-scale Russian invasion of 2022 – reaches the 1000-day mark. At this point in the U.S. Civil War, the Union had gone through three commanders-in-chief and was on the cusp of launching the coordinated eastern and western campaigns under U.S. Grant. And at the 1000-day mark after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, coalition forces were at a low ebb as insurgent bombings plagued urban areas, and the President Bush admitted the invasion was based on faulty intelligence. At the thousand-day mark of this phase of the war begun by Russia in 2014, Ukraine has suffered tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties, lost and regained large swathes of territory, and seen civilian infrastructure and priceless cultural artifacts destroyed. But it has also developed world-leading drone tactics and an entirely new strategic strike complex, employed extraordinarily effective strategic influence activities, re-invigorated its defence industry, and has become the first country to invade Russia in nearly a century. And it has inspired us all with the courage and resilience of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers alike. Besides reflecting on the tremendous sacrifices of the Ukrainian people since February 2022, the thousand-day point since that awful February 2022 day should also permit a certain amount of taking stock.” (Mick Ryan/Future Doctrina)