This is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money.
You may think there’s some kind of psychic or moral merit in jumping into every conversation and saying “No, it’s over! He said he was going to be a dictator! He said who he was! Believe him! Don’t be so naive!” But really that’s just rolling out a red carpet, the ultimate capitulation in advance. At the very least, put him to the task. Make him execute on what he’s trying to do. It won’t be easy and there are a lot of ways to make it even less easy. That’s the first role of a political opposition.
I point a lot to Josh Marshall's "Backchannel" posts, which are available to Talking Points Memo paying subscribers (the links here and above make the piece free for people who follow this newsletter, but you should subscribe to TPM anyway). I do that because he is an unusually knowledgeable and wise political journalist, and his wisdom is on display here. My own mood has ranged into ah-screw-it territory more than once since the election, I admit. Maybe Trump, his apparatchiks, and his cult will usher in the worst times. That is certainly their intention, and everything they are doing meets those expectations. But give up, now? Obey in advance? No. Never.
The roster of names has inevitably drawn comparisons with Trump’s 2016 victory, when he was reported to have devoted relatively little attention to a transition effort. Back then, his picks were described as “conventional” and the incoming cabinet was said have been broadly in line with that of a traditional Republican. Eight years on and the shape of the Trump 2.0 White House so far has spurred serious concerns about public health and reproductive rights, and left military leaders “stunned” and former intelligence experts “appalled”.
This Guardian summary of the nominations to date is a reminder that people who should have known better downplayed Trump's intentions before the election. It's also a reminder that punditry is an accountability-free enterprise. The famous members of the commentariat who get things absolutely wrong just move on and hope we'll forget. They're usually right about that.
But while these cabinet officials will attend meetings and nod their heads at whatever Trump says, the early indications strongly suggest they won’t be setting policy. That will be reserved for the czars, the internal White House appointees that Trump has made in parallel, and who are key to the emerging vision of centralizing power under the president-elect’s thumb.
Dayen's American Prospect analysis of the Trump cabinet choices is not just plausible but likely. A lot of this is just a head fake, because even if the Republican Senate makes a pretend-show of independence, the policies are going to be as bonkers as the current nominees – no matter who ends up behind the fancy desks inside HHS, Justice, the Pentagon, etc. So many of the nominees are blatantly terrible – lack of qualification, in several cases, may turn out to be good for the nation – but they could also be profoundly dangerous. The Kennedy nomination to run the government's health agency is the ultimate insult to all of us, and a message. I don't believe even the upcoming Republican Senate will confirm him, but America's adversaries are surely chortling as the Trump regime vice-signals its intention to further wreck public health. (By the way, I would urge journalists to stop calling this a "controversial" nomination. It's off the rails in every way, and maybe just this once our news media might consider saying so forthrightly, and explaining why that is the case, instead of the usual normalizing.)
Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice. All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.
The Onion's purchase of Alex Jones' beyond-disgusting InfoWars is a ray of sunshine today. And this pitch-perfect piece from the Onion's (fake) parent company's (fake) CEO should make you laugh out loud. For the actual details on what happened – most noteworthy was Sandy Hook families' backing of the Onion's bid, to ensure that Alex Jones' right-wing buddies couldn't bail him out – here's the AP story. Nothing will bring back their murdered children, but I hope the families' efforts to make Jones accountable, and their participation in this deal, will in some small way ease their enduring pain. Nothing anyone does will ever make Alex Jones anything but what he is: an evil man with a malignant soul.
Even though the right to citizen-led ballot initiatives is enshrined in Section 273 of the Mississippi Constitution, Butler and other opponents pointed to a loophole: the ballot-initiative system, adopted in 1992, requires that citizens collect a certain number of signatures from each of the state’s five congressional districts. But Mississippi lost a congressional district after the 2000 Census because of population decline and now only has four congressional districts, making it impossible to gather signatures from five. Six of Mississippi’s nine Supreme Court justices, including Beam, took a literal approach to the issue in their ruling and nullified the entire ballot-initiative system, along with overturning Initiative 65. The Legislature would later adopt a more strict marijuana program in 2022.
Sometimes, even in an extremely right wing state, an extremely right wing public official can go too far – and as this Mississippi Free Press story explains, showing contempt for the voters was too much for the state's electorate. I wouldn't read much more than that into what happened, but it's a breath of fresh air to see a former public defender ascending to any state's top court, much less that one. Maybe this will send a message.
Josh Marshall
Jonathan Yerushalmy
David Dayen
The Onion Staff
Heather Harrison
