Things are gonna have to get much worse

 Things are going to have to get much worse before they get better. The perversely good news is, it is highly likely that much worse times are on their way. 

As horrified as I was on January 6, 2021, I was also happy about the assault on the Capitol. This might just be bad enough to break the fever, I thought. Trump all but explicitly endorsed the murder of his Vice President. He incited a riot, then sat by for three hours while his followers assaulted police officers and ransacked the United States Congress. This had to be the death rattle of Trumpism.

Not so. 

Within a month, McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago and kissed the ring and McConnell engineered Trump’s acquittal in the Senate. Four years later, the American people re-elected Trump as President. 

For clarity, I’ll describe what I mean by Trumpism and limit myself to one example of each trait. He didn’t invent these traits and habits, but he–like the party he leads–does embody them:

• Demagoguery. Poster Child: “They’re eating the dogs.”

• Gaslighting. Poster Child: Calling legitimate prosecutions “weaponization” of justice while using DOJ to go after the people he has a grudge against–James Comey, Letitia James, Mark Kelly, Jerome Powell.

• Contempt for the rule of law. Poster Child: Illegally firing inspectors general.

• Lies, lies, lies. Poster Child: Calling the Mueller report a “complete and total exoneration.”

• Celebration of brutality. Poster Child: Sending detainees to CECOT and praising it as “great” and a “very strong” facility.

• Contempt for human rights. Poster Child: Utter unconcern at the murder and dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

• Favoring dominance over cooperation. Poster Child: Abandoning the rules based international order for spheres of influence.

• Celebrating dictators. Poster Child: Fawning praise for Putin, Kim, Xi, Duterte, Bukele.

• Contempt for science. Calling climate science a “hoax.”

• Abjectly unqualified appointees. Poster Child: Pete Hegseth.

• Corruption and self-dealing. Poster Child: $TRUMP memecoin.

• Contempt for democracy. Poster child: Pushing states to intensify their gerrymandering.

I could go on, but none of this is news. Plus, it’s too hard to limit myself to one example in each of these categories. The short version: Trumpism is the antithesis of what we have held out as the American ideal for at least the last 75 years–it is the abandonment of democracy and the rule of law in favor of a mercurial brand of authoritarianism.

Our problem is that all these things were widely known in November, 2024, and easily knowable by anybody with a whiff of interest in our world and access to a phone, TV, or computer. But a plurality of our voters did not find these traits disqualifying. They were concerned about the price of eggs, transgender athletes, and/or immigration. 

Since taking office again, Trump’s net approval rating per Nate Silver’s average of polls has dropped from +11.7 when he was inaugurated last year to -19.6 today: a drop of 41.3 percentage points. This drop has come as Americans increasingly feel the squeeze of inflation, have recoiled from ICE brutality on the streets, and are deeply divided over the Iran war.

It’s not enough. 

Barring a sea change, voters will vote widely for Democrats in the mid-terms. But Republicans may retain control of both chambers of Congress due to the idiosyncrasies of the Senate and steroidal gerrymandering in the House. That may be the best outcome for our country. Here’s why:

The electorate needs to clearly see how Trumpism harms us–that its violations of laws, ideals and norms aren’t bad only in the abstract, but that they concretely hurt regular people. In 2024, voters’ perception of their circumstances in the moment overrode any concern for the rules and norms that define the American ideal. And so, I reason, the electorate will not reject Trumpism until we feel a lot of pain and attribute that pain to Trump and the Republican Party. If the Democrats take one or both chambers of Congress, our pain will be less clearly attributable to Trumpism.

It took Hungary sixteen years to vote Viktor Orbán’s party out of office for a second time. Orbán degraded Hungary’s democracy and rule of law in a manner that the US Republican Party adopted as a model. JD Vance went to Hungary last month to campaign for Orbán’s re-election. But the people had finally had enough. 

Eventually we’ll get there, too. When we do, I hope we find a renewed appreciation for democracy, rule of law, truthfulness, cooperation, human rights. If these qualities aren’t important in their own right, perhaps we will rediscover how they contribute to our material well-being.

[By Dan T. I'm also going to post this over on that other site.]

Trump’s pro-pollution policy

Mining bitcoin is claimed to be a nation security concern that justifies breaking pollution law

Last March, Trump announced that polluting businesses could get a 2-year exemption to Clean Air Act regulations. The exemption could be requested by email. Thousands of exemptions were applied for, and apparently nearly all were granted with no science review impacts on public health or the environment. Lawsuits challenging the legality of the exemptions are pending. Science was not any part of the pollution waiver program.

To implement this gutting of the law, Trump had the EPA set up an email address where companies just had to send an email to make their waiver request. An EPA spokesman said that EPA played no role in the determinations set out in the statute and specifically vested in the President. All waiver requests were forwarded to the White House from the EPA.

Trump claims his waivers are legal based on on Section 112(i)(4) of the Clean Air Act. That law permits the President to exempt stationary pollution sources from compliance for up to two years if two conditions are met: (1) the technology needed to comply is unavailable, and (2) granting the exemption serves national security interests. This provision was nvere used by any president in its 55-year history.

The lawsuits argue that Trump’s justification is baseless because pollution controls were already in use at various facilities. That directly contradicts claims that the technology is unavailable.  Some of the utilities that got waivers publicly stated they were already implementing the pollution controls required by existing regulations. That further undercut Trump’s claim that necessary technologies don’t exist.

In its waiver application, one company that burns coal waste claimed that a significant portion of the electricity it generates is used to mine bitcoin. Keeping the cost of environmental compliance low was claimed to be important for the security of the United States. Needless to say, bitcoin mining is not related to national security. Trump granted the waiver anyway.

Also, a medical sterilizer company Sterigenics, asked for a waiver for nine facilities to continue emitting the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide. The facilities include ones near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Atlanta. More than 45,000 people, most of them not white, live within a mile of these facilities, according to federal data. Trump granted that waiver too.

What about the flow of wealth & power?

As with essentially all Trump/MAGA policies, wealth and power is affected. In this case, wiping out pollution regulations strips protections from the public interest. That opens the way for wealth and power to flow to the deregulated businesses. The cost and damage to public health and the environment are socialized for taxpayers to bear. Wealth and power flow from us to the deregulated special interests. By now it is clear that transfer of wealth and power from us to special interests is normal and routine for MAGA policy. It can be called trickle-up economics.

When industries are significantly deregulated, most of the benefits flow to the people who control where the benefits go. No surprise there. At most, the public and public interest rarely sees much benefit. Usually net damage is what the public gets. Deregulation doesn’t help us, but it sure does make the elites happy, and richer. Link, link, link

For what it’s worth, contrary to MAGA demagoguery on the point, the Clean Air Act generates approximately $30 in economic benefits for every $1 spent on compliance. That’s a 30:1 return on investment. EPA’s comprehensive analysis found that in 2020 alone, Clean Air Act Amendments prevented over 230,000 premature deaths, with about 85% of economic benefits attributable to reduced mortality from particulate matter. Through 2020, these regulations were projected to deliver more than $2 trillion in health savings at a compliance cost of $65 billion. Link, link

Because of the high level of public benefit from pollution laws, Trump ordered the EPA to stop calculating health-related monetary benefits when setting pollution limits. Now only economic costs to industry are considered. This tactic conveniently ignores high public benefit-cost ratios. Link, link

Q: Is Trump and MAGA’s pro-pollution deregulation good for the public interest, or does it mostly just transfer wealth and power from us to the few people in power at our expense?

Biggest Con of All: The Genuinely Staggering Scale of Trump’s Robbery

The Trump grift-o-meter, at this link!

As time passes, more people are noticing how much of a corrupt politician and thief that Trump is. The take of grifting for Trump and his family is estimated at well above $2 billion since Jan. 2025. That’s a really big pile of grift! One commentator notes that deflections and deceit shield and normalize Trump’s corruption. The MAGA demagoguery war is a deliberately constructed, dense fog of lies and grievance. The purpose is to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms, brown-skinned invaders, tyrannical socialists and other MAGA myths and lies. Meanwhile elites in power and their allies rob us blind.

A former MAGA influencer is talking about how most influencers were paid under secrecy agreements that kept MAGA’s pay-for-demagoguery scheme quiet. Apparently the influencer, Ashley St. Clair, wasn’t on the payroll. She demagogued for free. So, now she is talking about MAGA’s war fog that has kept us distracted and disinformed from the galaxy-scale corruption now well underway with the elite feeding frenzy on our federal government and us.

Why Ms. St. Clair decided to turn against Trump and MAGA isn’t fully clear. Apparently it had mostly to do with her making a baby with Elon Musk, followed by a nasty dispute. Maybe Musk refuses to change smelly diapers. Some reporting had it that Musk allegedly tried to keep the child secret, then a custody and support fight followed. Then St. Clair was targeted by a wave of pornographic AI‑generated images on X. She responded by suing xAI. In return, xAI sued her. It sounds awfully tawdry and messy, sort of like Musk himself. But she does have evidence that most online MAGA influencers are paid by wealthy MAGA operatives or funds. Link, link

She refers to the MAGA man system as a “cult”. Publicly, she says she turned against Trump and MAGA because she hit personal rock bottom, became disillusioned with the movement’s abuses, especially toward women and minorities, and wants to expose a cult‑like, pay‑to‑play propaganda machine she once helped power. What a whacky world we live in!

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms, some of which are some run by former White House officials, run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or GOP legislative messaging for a flat fee, or on a per-click basis. Capitalism is wonderful, isn’t it? One could think this is an example of pay-to-play politics. Rich MAGA people are paying a small army of morally rotted people to keep us all riled up and distracted from the real job of MAGA governance, i.e., taking as much wealth and power from us and the public interest as they possibly can. Not legally can, possibly can.

Don’t forget, Trump was corrupted and weaponized the FBI and DoJ to shield and serve his crimes. They shield his corruption and that of his donors and allies. There’s a feeding frenzy going on and we are the food. That includes crime victims that Trump shafts for profit.

The Committee for Public Information

Lest we forget, there have been times when our federal government employed massive scale propaganda to con us into sacrificing our literal lives for a cause we didn’t want to support. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), or Creel Committee, was a U.S. government propaganda agency created in 1917 to mobilize American public opinion in favor of entering and fighting World War I.

The CPI used every major medium, newspapers, posters, films, pamphlets, and 75,000 “Four‑Minute Men” speakers, to constantly hammer home pro‑war messages and demonization of Germany. Its propaganda saturated public life with officially approved information. Historians generally judge the CPI effort to be highly effective. A Council on Foreign Relations study said it was possibly the most effective con job of large‑scale war propaganda the world had seen until that time. CPI propaganda successfully conned the American people by changing and minimizing public anti-war and neutrality sentiment. Link, link

CPI propaganda vs. MAGA demagoguery

How do the two compare? They are quite similar, but with (1) modern social media replacing the CPI’s 75,000 Four‑Minute Men speakers, and (2) the goal of hiding Trump and MAGA elites stealing from us by keeping us mostly distracted from what they are doing to us and our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties. In general, CPI propaganda stuck closer to truth by exaggerating it instead of fabricating lies out of nothing, which is standard MAGA demagoguery.

Reading MAGA USSC opinions as propaganda, not law

A great way to get lost in USSC (US Supreme Court) commentary is to argue endlessly about whether the six Republican justices are being consistent textualists, principled originalists, or cautious institutionalists. That gives them too much credit. Based on their track record, a more realistic description is that their opinions are primarily propaganda. The opinions are designed to provide elite cover, manage internal USSC politics, and preserve plausible deniability while advancing MAGA’s corrupt authoritarian, oligarchic, and Christian nationalist theocratic agenda.

That is why the Court’s splintered treatment of the major questions doctrine (MQD) in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump matters. The case was about whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorized Trump’s sweeping tariffs. The court said no. But the opinion also exposed something broader and more revealing. Even inside the authoritarian MAGA bloc, there is no stable, coherent account of what the MQD actually is.

The major questions doctrine is a new USSC rule that says agencies need especially clear authorization from Congress before taking actions on issues of “vast economic and political significance”. The court has used that to strike down major regulations by simply saying that the underlying statute is too vague for such major regulatory decisions. And simple as that, an federal agency is mostly gutted. Protections for consumers, workers, citizens and the public interest get stripped away, leaving the deprotected open for special interests to freely exploit.

On paper, the splintering looks like ordinary disagreement among the MAGA judges. But in reality, it is authoritarian legal performance. It’s theater. Law experts note that Learning Resources produced multiple distinct versions of the MQD. Roberts, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh gave a materially different accounts of when it applies and what work it is supposed to do. That is not a principled legal doctrine. It is what happens when doctrine functions as a flexible partisan tool instead of a binding rule.

The key point is not that one should trust any of these justices to be speaking honestly. Quite the opposite. The MAGA bloc is authoritarian, shamelessly outcome-driven, and unbound by rational consistency. Its opinions should not be read as sincere explanations of legal principle. They are partisan propaganda pieces calibrated for specific target audiences.

One opinion gives lower courts and elite lawyers citations and jargon they can repeat with a straight face. Another lets a justice preserve a preferred personal brand—textualist, originalist, minimalist, institutionalist—while still joining an outcome that serves the same partisan agenda. Different paths lead to the same authoritarian destination.

That explains why the judge’s splintering should not reassure anyone of good faith or principled reasoning. It is tempting to look at fractured concurrences and believe there are serious internal legal principles at work. But the fragmentation easily and effectively serves the authoritarian agenda. It provides cover for MAGA elites by allowing legal commentators and the public to talk about complex doctrinal disagreement instead of wealth and power politics. In other words, fragmentation is a means deflection from MAGA authoritarianism.

It manages the coalition by letting each justice maintain a separate identity and audience while staying aligned on the larger goals of gutting the administrative state and growing and preserving authoritarian power. It also preserves plausible deniability. Nakedly political outcomes are masked by enough technical fog that most non-experts are led to believe they are watching principled hard law disagreements instead of than strategic manipulation.

The MQD is a particularly good example because it was unstable right from the get-go. Even its defenders acknowledge that the “doctrine” is new and contested. Critics have reasonably argued that it operates as a judge-empowering rule that can be switched on or off depending on the Court’s appetite for blocking regulation. From West Virginia v. EPA to Biden v. Nebraska to Learning Resources, the MQD has been used not as a neutral principle with clear boundaries. It is used as a flexible weapon against disfavored exercises of power that serve democracy, honest government and the public interest.

The lesson here is pretty simple. Don’t ask whether the six MAGA judges are really textualists or really disagreeing in good faith. That keeps the debate trapped inside MAGA mythology. The real question asks what function does this opinion, or this split, serve in the larger project of legitimizing MAGA judges, coalition maintenance, plausible deniability, and the transfer of wealth and power from us to authoritarian elites. In the current Court, that is usually the shortest path to understanding what is actually going on.

Info sources:
The Degradation of American Democracy – And the Court
Tallying the Votes from Learning Resources, the Major Questions Doctrine Remains Relatively Confined
Special Analysis: Major Questions Remain About the Major Questions Doctrine
What critics get wrong — and right — about the Supreme Court’s new ‘major questions doctrine’
Getting Right What’s Wrong with the Major Questions Doctrine
The Major Questions Doctrine: Origins, Development, and the Road Ahead After Learning Resources
LEARNING RESOURCES, INC., ET AL. v. TRUMP