Masquerading
A lot of what’s happening is theater, but as The Boss said, there’s some serious shit going on
The president surrounded himself with law enforcement officials this week to reinforce – as if any further emphasis were needed – his control over policing in the nation’s capital.
He brought them pizza – from a place called Wiseguy, no less – but some of the props for his photo-op looked about as happy to be there as the Juventus players had been at a Fifa stunt in the Oval Office a few weeks ago.
There is always something underlyingly threatening amid the constant throwaway nonsense. After bizarrely boasting that he knows more about grass than any human being, the man who paved over the White House Rose Garden said he would “straighten out” Chicago next, a move that the Washington Post reports has been in the works for some time.
“The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States.
“The mission, if approved, would have parallels to the polarizing operation that Trump ordered in Los Angeles in June, when he deployed 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 active-duty Marines despite the protests of state and local leaders.
“The deployment would come as federal authorities look for new ways to intensify the identification and deportation of undocumented immigrants, including an expansion of ICE and efforts to challenge “sanctuary” policies, as they seek to meet a directive from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to make at least 3,000 arrests per day.”
Leaders in Chicago and other cities are, obviously, pushing back. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said Trump was “stoking fear and division while criminalizing poverty,” while Boston Mayor Michelle Wu told the president to “stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.”
At home and abroad, this administration’s first six months have been hugely theatrical – what Jonathan Chait called “performative imperialism”. We knew they would be.
But amid the intimidating stagecraft there is, as Bruce Springsteen famously said in what almost seems now like a quaint understatement, “some weird, strange and dangerous shit” going on, every single day.
Whether it’s the plan for more regional detention centers under ICE’s “breakneck expansion”; or the ramping up of actions against Trump’s personal perceived enemies (including his former National Security Adviser John Bolton) designed “pour encourager les autres”; or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest purge, this time firing the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency – the man who had the audacity to suggest that maybe the US attack on Iran in June had been less successful than Trump continues to claim – or maybe even just the ten per cent stake the president has decided to take in Intel – none of this is “normal”.
The administration even thought it would be punching down when it decided to take aim at another guitar hero, Jack White, accusing him of “masquerading as a real artist” after the singer called out the “vulgar” redecoration of the White House.
White responded, in part: (and you can read the whole thing on his Instagram)
“He’s masquerading as a Christian, as a leader, as a person with actual empathy. He’s been masquerading as a businessman for decades as nothing he’s involved in has prospered except by using other people’s money to find loophole after loophole and grift after grift.
“That orange grifter has spent more tax payer money cheating at golf than helping ANYONE in the country. Improve. Anything. There is no progress with him, only smoke and mirrors and tax breaks for the ultra wealthy."
But maybe the most important big picture this week was around the future of voting, with the inevitable launch of the redistricting arms race. As Texas approved their Trump-inspired plan, California responded, with other states poised to get involved ahead of next year’s midterms.
Trump himself, meanwhile, said he was preparing an executive order to “eliminate corrupt voting by mail” claiming that Russian president Vladimir Putin had told him he should get rid of mail-in voting when they met last week.
Trump also has voting machines in his sights, and even “joked” with Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy about suspending elections if the country is at war.
And with Steve Bannon calling for the presence of ICE agents at polling places, it’s no wonder observers have called what’s happening now a “trial run for Stop The Steal 2.0”.
As Ed Kilgore wrote recently at New York Magazine:
“Perhaps the most predictable feature of any post-election period during the Trump era has been unsubstantiated claims of votes being illegally cast for Democrats or illegally taken away from Republicans. Trump claimed illegal voting robbed him of a popular-vote plurality in 2016, though he won the election. Congressional Republicans claimed fraudulent mail ballots in California cost them the House in 2018. And most famously, virtually the entire GOP has now bought into the Trump fable of the stolen 2020 presidential election.
“If control of the House in 2026 comes down to a relative handful of close contests, and particularly if most of them are in states where Democrats control the election machinery (which is almost guaranteed to be the case, considering the importance of marginal seats in California, New York, and Pennsylvania), Trump will certainly claim Democrats have stolen or are in the process of stealing the election. Anyone who remembers late autumn 2020 can easily imagine the wave of White House-generated protests, lawsuits, investigations, “audits” and conspiracymongering in store for us in late autumn 2026.”
See Also:
Fight Fire With Fire Until The House Burns Down – The GOP’s Texas power-grab goes national. The consequences could be momentous.
Shooting The Messenger – How the trustworthiness of government data is undermined.
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‘No List, No Suicide,’ Claims Maxwell
As the DOJ began turning over files subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee, they also stole the headlines by releasing transcripts and recordings of the recent interview between Ghislaine Maxwell and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Apart perhaps from Maxwell saying she did not believe Epstein committed suicide, nothing in the 300-odd redacted pages appeared to be particularly surprising under the circumstances.
“The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects,” Maxwell said.
Despite claims among Trump supporters that this proves there’s “no there, there,” this story likely still has some way to go. For now, whatever is public is what the Trump administration wants to be public. There are still questions that will need answers, and the families of Epstein’s victims will undoubtedly continue to make their voices heard. There’s also the matter of a $10billion lawsuit brought by Trump against the Wall Street Journal.
See Also:
Whether It’s Right or Wrong, It’s Time To Go After People
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Ukraine Defiant Amid US Inaction
Today is Ukrainian Independence Day. President Zelenskyy marked the occasion with a defiant address to his nation.
Ukraine would continue to fight for its freedom “while its calls for peace are not heard,” he said.
“We need a just peace, a peace where our future will be decided only by us," he said, adding that Ukraine was "not a victim, it is a fighter".
He continued: "Ukraine has not yet won, but it has certainly not lost."
On Thursday, just a few days after the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska – and the subsequent White House gathering of European leaders including Zelenskyy – Russia bombed a factory belonging to a US-owned electronics company in Ukraine as part of one of its largest airstrikes of the war.
The next day, Trump was asked if he had spoken to Russia’s president about the incident.
“I told him [Putin] I'm not happy about it," Trump claimed. "And I'm not happy about anything having to do with that war.”
The Kyiv Independent reported:
“Trump had not previously announced a conversation with Putin between the time of the attack and his White House briefing. Immediately before being questioned about Russia's strike on the U.S. factory, Trump showed reporters a photograph of him and Putin at the Alaska Summit that he said Putin sent.
"He's been very respectful of me and of our country," Trump said, adding that Putin was "not so respectful of others."
“Trump also said he expected to know within two weeks how the U.S.-brokered peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine would unfold.”
Two weeks, huh…?
The status of any progress towards resolution of the conflict or a potential Zelensky-Putin meeting appears, at the very least, uncertain, despite previous claims from the White House, which now seems more engaged on domestic matters.
On Meet The Press today, though, VP JD Vance seemed to suggest there had been “significant concessions from both sides.” He said that Russia has “actually been willing to be flexible on some of their core demands” despite signs from the Kremlin of little, if any, movement.
Retired Lt Gen Mark Hertling wrote at The Bulwark, “A principled ceasefire and negotiation require hard work. Trump prefers a fantasy peace.”
“The Alaska summit confirmed what many of us feared: Trump is susceptible to Putin’s framing, eager for shortcuts, and inattentive to the hard realities of what a nation will continue to fight to defend. Trump’s meetings with Zelensky and the Europeans risk becoming more empty, self-defeating spectacles unless Zelensky and his European partners can anchor the discussion in principles that matter. Sovereignty should not be negotiated away. Freedom should not be bartered.”
It seems that Trump might have an even loftier goal than just that Peace Prize; his comments about getting into heaven led inevitably to speculation about his health.
For now, though, there are some hats you really have to see…
See Also:
A Blood Red Carpet – Trump needs a deal on Ukraine. Putin does not.
Of Bombs and F-Bombs – Can we really *know* anything anymore, or just what Trump says?
What Is It Good For? - Absolutely nothing. Say it again.
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As always, thanks for reading. I aim to write a baseball-related post midweek – the most recent one was about the perpetually thorny issue of realignment – and then a politics wrap at weekends.
Usually, one is substantially more sane than the other. But I’d love to hear what you think about either or both.
Also, I mentioned in Wednesday’s post about what’s happening with the project moving forward. You can read about that here and I hope we can catch a game together soon.
You can find a full States of Play archive here.
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