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T R E 4 5 O N

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This really is a full service blog.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The willow is too close to the house.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Friday Afternoon Distraction Open Thread: Get the Passport Stamped with All the Right Signals…

Friday Afternoon Distraction Open Thread: Get the Passport Stamped with All the Right Signals…

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Really doesn’t matter in itself but was weird that he kept lying about this www.occrp.org/en/news/excl…

[image or embed]

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 2:13 PM

As far as I can tell, the question of Gor’s loyalties went full social media last month, when he managed to get Elon Musk’s choice for NASA head cancelled. Per the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project:

When he was named director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under U.S. President Donald Trump, a media report called Sergio Gor “maybe the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.”

Gor’s public profile has increased more recently, as he continued his work overseeing appointments of thousands of officials for the Trump administration. Media coverage has since filled in much of his biography with one glaring exception — his birthplace.

Now, the Times of Malta and OCCRP have obtained a notarized Maltese property record that shows Gor’s origins. He was born Sergio Gorokhovsky on November 30, 1986, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time…

Gor had previously declined to say where he was born. The December 2024 profile of Gor by the Washington Post — which noted his low public profile, despite becoming a “powerful man” in the Trump administration — skirted the question of his birthplace entirely. It called him an immigrant from the Mediterranean island nation of Malta.

Gor’s Maltese background has since been cited in other media, including a New York Post story in June that garnered widespread attention. Gor declined to reveal his country of birth to the newspaper, saying only that it was not in Russia…

When he was a boy, Gor’s family emigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizen. His path to politics led him eventually to a job with Republican Senator Rand Paul, and then into Trump’s orbit.

One of his activities with Paul was a trip to Moscow in 2018 funded by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in D.C. The visit was characterized as a “fact-finding trip to research, discuss and explore issues related to Russia and the U.S.”

Gor had also traveled to Moscow the year before, according to leaked Russian border records. He flew from Washington D.C. to Moscow with the Russian state carrier Aeroflot, and left the next day for Rome. The border records provide no indication of what Gor did in Moscow, and there is no evidence that his visit was connected to any improper activity.

Garson explained that Gor is “an avid traveler.”…

Gor left Paul’s office in 2020 to work as chief of staff on the Trump Victory Finance Committee for the failed re-election campaign. He also co-founded a conservative publishing company with Donald Trump Jr. called Winning Team Publishing.


My emphases, of course. Nothing wrong with being an immigrant — no matter what all Gor’s fellows might be saying — but the man does have a suspicious history for someone supposedly in change of picking who gets to work in the current misadminstration.

Gift link to that December WaPo article — “Is this publisher/DJ the most powerful man in Trump’s transition? Sergio Gor, incoming director of the Presidential Personnel Office, is managing the installment of some 4,000 Trump appointees.”

… “I imagine he’s had dinner more in the last year with my father than I have,” says Donald Trump Jr.

“He knows more people than almost anybody I know,” says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). “Once I went to dinner at his house and I looked at his wall and said, ‘Sergio, is that a picture of you and the pope?’”

“Sergio has a very easy personality,” says Jared Kushner, who rarely comments on the record about anything or anyone, but was happy to have a 20-minute phone conversation about how great Sergio Gor is. “And people trust him.”

Gor is the next director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, an unglamorous position with vast power to help find, vet and hire around 4,000 officials — giving the administration its new shape.

“He’s going to be like the general manager of the government,” says former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz.

Gor’s previous jobs include booker at Fox News, spokesman for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), and officiant of Gaetz’s wedding on Catalina Island…

Gor might not be known to the public at large, but he’s well known in Trumpland. He has been dubbed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago” (due to his time spent at Trump’s Florida club) and the “Patio Panhandler” (due to his time soliciting super-PAC funds from fellow club members). He referred to Trump as “my friend” at the infamous Madison Square Garden pre-election rally, and he’s known as one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers.

“Even during that exile period after 2020, Sergio was right by the president’s side,” says Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist with close ties to both Gor and the Trumps. “Sergio was there when other people ran away.”…

“It was nice of Sergio to come visit me in prison,” says Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, via email. “But even more thoughtful how he helped my fiancé through our prison time.” (When asked, Navarro did not elaborate).

“A fun presence would be an understatement,” Don Jr. says.

Kellyanne Conway says that President-elect Trump “describes Sergio as a guy who makes things happen.”…

Before he became a MAGA man, Gor worked at Fox News, then for a handful of House conservatives — including Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), known chiefly for incendiary rhetoric — before landing in the office of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) in 2013. With all his media connections, Gor was wildly successful getting Paul booked for TV and radio interviews, and he quickly earned his boss’s trust…

During Trump’s first transition, Kushner says, the director of PPO faced a huge obstacle: People didn’t want to come work for Trump’s nascent government, which seemed accidental and haphazard.

“We could barely give away ambassadorships,” Kushner says. But now, “there are basically 20 people competing for every job” — and it will be up to Gor to determine who’s worthy and loyal.

“The benefit of him having a strong relationship with Donald Trump,” Kushner says, “is that he knows him well enough to know what he’ll care about and what he won’t care about, so he doesn’t have to go to him with every little decision.”

Gor knows what Trump is looking for — because, in a lot of ways, Trump is simply looking for more Gors.

Reader Interactions

100Comments

  3. 3.

    ExPatExDem

    Kazakhstan friend of all except Uzbekistan.  They very nosy people with bone in their braaaaains!

    -Kazakhstan National Anthem from Borat

  4. 4.

    Steve LaBonne

    There have been a lot of stupid bad people in charge of things through the ages, but I wonder if the world has ever seen a more thorough and systematic implementation of kakistocracy.

  5. 5.

    chopper

    “It was nice of Sergio to come visit me in prison,” says Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, via email. “But even more thoughtful how he helped my fiancé through our prison time.” (When asked, Navarro did not elaborate).

    nudge nudge wink wink, say no more

  6. 6.

    trollhattan

    @chopper: Jesus Christ, these people.

    I’d love Navarro to get roughed up by his parole officers. How does this fucker even have a jerb?

  9. 9.

    rikyrah

    Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) posted at 11:09 AM on Fri, Jul 11, 2025:

    BREAKING: Cal State LA just moved classes online and let faculty work remotely, not for a storm, not for COVID, but because ICE is in the area.

    Let that sink in, an entire university is treating immigration enforcement like a public health crisis.

    A country built by immigrants is now treating its newest class of immigrants like second-class citizens. From Ellis Island to ICE raids, the flag waves the same, but the welcome mat keeps getting pulled.

     t.co/6lJZzXeuL6
    (https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1943704319682912644?t=lLnRUlogqzR9hkYP8sbMSw&s=03)

  14. 14.

    bbleh

    Honest to dog, if I were in a responsible position at an intelligence agency in any other country (not to mention this one), I would make it a working presumption with at least moderate confidence that the Orange Guy administration is thoroughly and completely compromised by adversarial intelligence agencies, definitely Russian but possibly also Chinese.

    How much more evidence does one need?

  15. 15.

    Archon

    @rikyrah: I don’t quite know what the endgame is as this is too much even for alot of the racists,

    Are Republicans really prepared to face the voters in 2026?

  16. 16.

    JoyceH

    Come on. Gor is Trump’s handler and contact with Putin. Let’s not even pretend he’s anything else.

  17. 17.

    Martin

    @rikyrah: You can also grow it in Puerto Rico, but that would probably require we stop completely treating the island like shit and recognize that it is part of the US.

  20. 20.

    Gin & Tonic

    Gorokhovsky as a surname is *not* ethnically Uzbek, of course – it is russian.

  22. 22.

    Bupalos

    @JoyceH: Probably not. Like, extremely improbable. His history looks absolutely nothing like the characters in Putin’s orbit that he uses outside the borderless empire.

    Which doesn’t mean he isn’t a “traditional values” Russiaphile like about half of the Republican coalition.

  25. 25.

    Betty

    @JoyceH: Certainly sounds like he is very good at his job of cozying up to the Trump clan and their cronies. Almost sounds like a babysitter. And now filling important government jobs. Not at all worrying.

    This strategy of changing by your name and coming to the destination country via a third country seems a specialty of the Russians. Here in Dominica we have a “Canadian” who used the same approach and is the Prime Minister’s bestie.

  26. 26.

    Bupalos

    @Captain C: The regime is citing this “sexual favors” thing because it creates attention.

    They’re better than us at hot-wiring the media to deliver their message. The message here is that the government is out to get you, and so needs to be dismantled by an authoritarian strongman. When we don’t read the message but just do this reflexive “OH HO, Kristi Noem looks like SHE’S the one that does the sexual favors” we’re actively cooperating with their project.

  28. 28.

    zhena gogolia

    @Bupalos:

    They’re better than us at hot-wiring the media to deliver their message.

    B–s–t. The media WANTS to hotwire their message. “We” don’t own the media, they do. They’re not better than “us” at anything. If we owned the media, they’d be talking about our issues.

  30. 30.

    ColoradoGuy

    So, so much of the KGB/FSB is all over this Administration. They destroy the scientific base of the USA, and get into the Murdoch media empire, which controls about 30% of the public. And their biggest, most reliable asset, DJT.

  31. 31.

    HinTN

    @Archon:

    Are Republicans really prepared to face the voters in 2026?

    No! See @rikyrah: at 13. They’re terrified and we need to get every eligible voter (re)registered.

  32. 32.

    RaflW

    @Archon: So far I think they’ve drunk so much of the koolaid that they think they’re doing what a slim voting majority wants in their states. For House members, the gerrymanders probably mostly make that true.

    Senate, not so sure. But the maps are fairly hardened and sorted so that Dems are at disadvantages. Unless they’ve overshot badly.

  33. 33.

    JoyceH

    Through most of the 20th century, we in the west tended to use the terms “USSR” and “Russia” interchangeably, forgetting that there was a whole host of other Soviet socialist republics. And I think Russia, the real power in the USSR, moved a lot of ethnic Russians to the outer republics to make them over so that the entire USSR would be essentially Russian. (Was I the only person who was surprised to realize that the big horrific nuclear plant catastrophe that I thought happened in Russia because it happened in the USSR actually happened in Ukraine?)

  34. 34.

    RaflW

    @Martin: When i’ve bought coffee in P.R. I’m pretty sure even that is a blend of local and imported beans. Maybe if every appropriate acre of P.R. that could grow coffee did grow coffee, it’d make a small dent in demand?

  35. 35.

    Suzanne

    @JoyceH: I read an interesting thread on Xhitter this week by a Kazakh man (he spelled it in English as “Qazag”) about the shame and racism he experienced from Russians when Kazakhstan was one of the SSRs. I’m sure there’s so many dynamics we don’t know about like that.

  37. 37.

    WTFGhost

    @rikyrah: Of course it was never about crime. Trump kept talking about “migrant crime” which is less than “native crime” but, he insisted that no, they take over city blocks, small towns, burn down major cities, so he needed the biggest deportation operation in US history, to fix it. It was always about bigotry to anyone who cared to think about it.

    Hell, shipping immigrants to sanctuary cities proves it was never about crime. Why put fearsome criminals someplace where it will take longer to notice they really are horrible criminals with calves the size of cantaloupes, and according to the President, they’re used to throwing 500 pound bags of drugs over a 20 foot fence, and, you know, if you just happened to be walking on the other side of that fence, that would kill you, so you need see-through.

  39. 39.

    Martin

    @zhena gogolia: The media are a business – they are care about money more than anything.

    Now, we’re currently in an environment where the administration can overcome that by blackmail so it is changing in the direction you are indicating, but fundamentally the media just want advertisers and subs and whatever sensational shit happens they’ll tune in for. They won’t tune in for an ICE raid, but they will tune in for a standoff between protestors and ICE because the protesters create the potential for conflict and that brings in an audience.

    Trump is exceptionally good at grabbing attention in that way. So much so that this blog has a hard time turning away from it. Every post today so far has been about Republican antics. Your suggestion is that we’re also in the tank for the GOP.

  40. 40.

    Professor Bigfoot

    @Martin: But that doesn’t preclude the possibility that media enterprises might make objectively bad business decisions for OTHER reasons.

    Faceless corporations aren’t. There are owners, there are CEOs, there are senior managers and their decisions don’t always align with what might increase revenue.

    There’s a reason why retailers in the Jim Crow era accepted the loss of Black customers because they too wanted to enforce Jim Crow.

  41. 41.

    Jeffro

    @Steve LaBonne:There have been a lot of stupid bad people in charge of things through the ages, but I wonder if the world has ever seen a more thorough and systematic implementation of kakistocracy.

     

    It’s a shame that only smart folks and patriots would have responded to “you can’t POSSIBLY put trump back in the WH – he’ll be surrounded by the most malicious, incompetent, and Russian-owned cretins you can imagine!” back in 2024

    But by the time we’re all done here?  It might be a decent argument in future presidential campaigns!

  42. 42.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Professor Bigfoot: You only have to look at universal health care. Their companies would benefit from being relieved of the burden of employer-provided health insurance. The reasons they don’t support it have nothing to do with the best interest of their businesses. It’s the same with racism.

  44. 44.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @Omnes Omnibus: So a misogynist white male supremicist sexual sadist who believes women’s true nature is to want to be slapped around and  dominated as sex slaves. Yeah, that tracks for MAGA.

  45. 45.

    Martin

    @RaflW: Yeah, I don’t think they grow a lot of coffee in PR, but PR is not a terribly small place, and they do need economic help.

    My point is that if the tariffs were a component of an economic plan, you’d expect to see the administration seeing PR as an opportunity for domestic production and put resources and policy in that direction (Jones Act). But since we don’t see that we can conclude two things:

    1. They aren’t a component of an economic plan, or
    2. We are too racists toward brown people to even support US citizens/nationals doing the jobs we proclaim we want Americans to do

    Or almost certainly both. It may be helpful to point out to some people that PR could be at least a partial solution.

  47. 47.

    JoyceH

    @Suzanne: they have tours now of the “five Stans”. It’s basically the “colorful” ones, the old Silk Road territory. I kind of yearn over the descriptions, always wanted to see Samarkand, but I think it might be a bit too strenuous for my current fitness level (said the lady who broke a bone stepping up onto a treadmill).

  48. 48.

    Chetan Murthy

    @rikyrah: ICE has been instructed to leave cases of ACTUAL CRIMINALS alone

    I feel like channelling your “uh huh uh huh”.  B/c sheeite, they did this -last time- too!  I remember reading about it back in 2017, how Obama’s ICE had prioritized finding and deporting criminals, but Trump’s ICE was deprioritizing that, b/c it was easier to go after law-abiding undocumented immigrants with ties in the community — they couldn’t run, hide, etc, when they had families to support!

  49. 49.

    Suzanne

    @JoyceH: I would love to take a tour like that. I have a suzani from Uzbekistan and it is one of my absolute favorite things in my home. I worry that I would go and not be able to resist buying everything.

  51. 51.

    Wilson Heath

    Interesting that he entered Trump world after the prosecution of Maria Butina.

  53. 53.

    JoyceH

    @Chetan Murthy: Hey, arresting criminals takes a lot of time, and criminals tend to be armed. If the bosses are screaming to get those numbers up, it’s a lot easier to round up the middle-aged lady who changes granny’s bedpan. Safer too.

  56. 56.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Suzanne: ​

    Reminds me of a guy who was born in the USSR with the surname Kasparian. Better known to the world as former world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

  57. 57.

    Jeffro

    @Baud: I know it’s a Friday, but whew…when Monday rolls around, I sure hope to heck that Democrats at all levels just go nuts pounding the Epstein stuff.

    The list of benefits to the Democratic Party and damage to trumpov & Co is loooooooong

    Just do it.  Do it in between calls for ICE to de-mask.  But DO. IT.

  58. 58.

    Martin

    @Professor Bigfoot: Oh, sure – I don’t discount that at all. Of course Fox News is going to be in their pocket even if it cost them money. But that’s a far cry from saying that’s true in an overall sense. And every time we deny that the ability to grab attention is really important to shaping public opinion, we undermine our own efforts by not seeking that out as a goal.

    And we know they aren’t entirely in the tank of the GOP project because advertisers have been ‘going woke’, putting resources behind advertising to and attracting other communities. That’s what rainbow capitalism was. That’s why Target is in such trouble because they were really good at pursuing that customer base and then threw it out the window and they’re paying the price (they’re down 31% since the election). Nike didn’t make Colin Kapernick the face of their media campaign to celebrate athletes for no reason – they did it to piss off conservatives which caused the conservatives to generate the attention that Nike wanted. Every dipshit that burned their Nike sneakers because they were woke was a free ad for Nike. And Nike is the money the media are chasing. Fox may care about the politics of the advertisers, but for the most part nobody else does. Again, all of this is changing under Trump as he’s willing to punish corporations for disloyalty, but previously that wasn’t broadly happening. Even under Trump 1.0 it wasn’t broadly happening. Again, Murdoch being a political entity was doing it, but CNN really wasn’t. WSJ editorial page was, but their main reporting wan’t. And a lot of these biases are hard to differentiate between one for the GOP and one for their own profitability. Them being a capitalist enterprise naturally puts them in a certain place on the political spectrum on certain issues – to the right on issues like markets and to the left on issues like speech.

    The ability to grab attention is really important now. And attacking things – the government, groups of people, etc. is pretty effective at that. Much of the mistake the media mades is by trying to fact check and debunk the attack because it’s unfair, but that doesn’t take the attention away. It’s still giving them the attention. They don’t always mean to carry water for Trump, but even when they’re opposing him they’re helping him because of the way they do it. I believe they would do the same for the left if the left behaved that way. When would Katie Porter go viral and get coverage? When she was attacking witnesses. It’s a very different kind of attack than the GOP normally do, but it worked. If all she did was defend Democratic policy, none of y’all would ever have heard of her. And the WSJ would try and debunk her and that wouldn’t deny her the attention either.

  59. 59.

    NutmegAgain

    Totally nitpicking here… when did good old “installation” become “installment”?? Probably around the same time that good old “coronation” became “coronated”.  I don’t mind a good, useful neologism, but these both scan as simply illiterate to me.

    /ok, grouch mode off/

  61. 61.

    Josie

    @Bupalos: ​
     

    When we don’t read the message but just do this reflexive “OH HO, Kristi Noem looks like SHE’S the one that does the sexual favors” we’re actively cooperating with their project.

    I don’t understand this. Can you explain further?

  62. 62.

    Eyeroller

    @Martin: Trump is definitely a media star, but Josh Marshall pointed out years before Trump got into politics that the media is “wired for Republicans” (he was writing specifically about the DC political press but I think we can generalize it safely) and they have been since the 1980s.

    The Trump Show is a matter of degree, not kind.  (An outlier, to be sure, but still not sui generis.)  The media has long boosted Republican talking points over Democratic ones.  The term “puke funnel” was also coined well before Trump was a factor.

  63. 63.

    Baud

    Biden generated plenty of media by being old. It’s not the amount of coverage that matters.

  64. 64.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: Did you happen to see a couple Osprey vertical take-off planes fly by yesterday? Fucking Netanyahu and Lady MacBibi were flown to Monticello in one of them for a private tour.

  65. 65.

    Martin

    @Steve LaBonne: I don’t think that’s true at all. There are two big points when employers expanded employer provided healthcare – during WWII and during Nixon, both times when there were pay freezes in the US. They added healthcare because it was a competitive advantage, and it remains a competitive advantage. Pay is commoditized and easy to evaluate, but benefits aren’t nearly so much. So the ability to offer some Cadillac package is really valuable (particularly when you as an individual cannot replicate it), and you lose that under single payer. They’re pretty good at minimizing/avoiding coverage for other workers. Single payer means they lose control over it, which is worse than saving a few bucks by paying the government to provide it, and it means that a lot more of the competition for workers needs to come through salary.

    Consider that employers pay less for a group policy than I would pay on the exchange for the exact same policy at most income levels (because my employers group policies were identical to exchange policies by design and because I knew what we paid for those, I can assure you that’s true). If you have a lot of low-wage employees like Walmart, then single payer probably would help them overall, but the NYT doesn’t have a lot of low-wage employees. Nor does CNN. Walmarts value is in the minimum wage greeter. Medias value is in talent, and you gotta compete for talent. Employer provided coverage is a pretty cheap lever there.

    That doesn’t mean that media isn’t ideological in that way (like I noted above, they are capitalists and will have certain biases around that) but they don’t need to be biased to not champion single payer. I doubt it would save them a penny in the grand scheme if we adopted it. You want a corporate champion for single payer – Walmart is kind of the poster child for what that looks like. Enormous numbers of low wage employees. They too may be ideologically opposed to it but that’s what such a champion would look like, not NBC or The Washington Post.

  66. 66.

    hells littlest angel

    Lots of good, loyal Americans — Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, for instance — have been less than forthcoming about being born in the Soviet Union.

  71. 71.

    flower

    @WTFGhost: For Trump, I don’t think it’s even about immigration. He is racist to the core, but he doesn’t have an ideological bone in his body. It’s about exercising his power for revenge, for personal gain, and for the sheer thrill of power. That’s all he’s ever been about, and it’s reflected in everything he’s done. He’s much more Mussolini than Hitler – Mussolini thought Hitler’s anti-semitic obsession was ridiculous, but it was also useful to him in riling up his Blackshirts and consolidating absolute power. This is all useful for vile people like Stephen Miller, for whom it IS the exercise of racist ideology. They all win, and everyone targeted pays.

  73. 73.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Martin: Your argument may have held water once, but not in this era of rapidly rising costs. The squeeze on small business is especially widely discussed, but it’s a real headache and competitive disadvantage even for big corporations. It’s true that many in the CEO class like the way it binds their employees, but that’s often not in the best interest of the business. Keeping the CEO’s taxes low is DEFINITELY unrelated to the interests of the business.

  74. 74.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud: I always liked David Gergen.  Thought he was a class act.

    Lewy Body Dementia.  But he saw TRUMP for the awful liar and bully he is.

    Gergen article in CNN after a May 2023 GOP Town Hall in NH:

    … Trump was a force of nature against [CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins].  He is a bully — mean, nasty and disrespectful of anyone in his way. To him, the facts didn’t matter; he was there to assert male dominance. He didn’t choose to have a meaningful conversation. He chose to deny reality.

    What was equally disturbing was the reaction of the audience members. They had been carefully screened to represent a cross section of New Hampshire voters who say they intend to vote in the coming Republican primary. Historically, such New Hampshirites have been closer to the politics of former President George H.W. Bush than to Trump.

    … Re-watching the video of this town hall should be a requirement for Republican activists across the country. These were mainstream Americans in New Hampshire who were literally laughing and jeering when women’s rights were on the line. The Trump supporters seem to have conquered the soul of the party.

    …  As a nation, we don’t talk to each other very much about the dark side of our public life. We like to emphasize good will, freedom and hope for a better life. But the ugly truth is that too often, many of us also want our leaders to be tough, unsparing bullies who are unafraid to exercise power. Many of our fellow Americans believe the world is a nasty neighborhood, and they expect our national leaders to keep a club in the closet.

    Trump is one of the only people in either party who fits that bill these days.  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another — and that accounts to a significant degree for his upward rise. If the Trump candidacy does collapse, DeSantis has all the makings of a very smart — and very tough — Trump.  [Well ….]
    As much as I hate to admit that Trump is effective at anything, I don’t see anyone else in either party who keeps a club in the closet and enjoys wielding it as much as he does. His bullying qualities are extremely unattractive on a personal level, but to many Americans, they are also an asset.

    Bottom line: I grew up in an era — the 1950s and 1960s — when Trump’s behavior would automatically disqualify him from national office. No longer. The cycles in our politics are still swinging toward leaders like Trump. Political life could easily become worse before it becomes better. Keep your seat belt buckled.

    Biden talked plenty about that dark side of American life.  He warned Americans that “democracy is on the ballot.”  Too many of the fuckers could not be bothered.  And here we are.  Hanging on by that seat belt.

  79. 79.

    Martin

    @Eyeroller: I didn’t take that as them being wired for Republican policies, rather they are wired for Republican antics because the antics are easy stories to write and the policy ones are hard stories to write. The Columbia U Gaza protests weren’t worse than the other ones in the country, but they got the focus because they were two trains away from every reporter in NYC. The media will take the lazy story over the tryhard story every fucking day of the week – and Republicans flood the zone with lazy stories. You gotta do research for stories the left want you to write.

    The puke funnel is just lazy reporting – it was scandals drummed up by right wing tabloids that got reported on because someone was talking about them. It was Fox opinion reporting like Tucker Carlson accusing Democrats of something he made up that morning while taking a shit, and the Fox factual reporting repeating it ‘people are increasingly raising this issue’. Yeah ‘people’ being the guy who hosted the hour before you. Reporting on reporting is the laziest of it all.

    But Democrats can play that game too, if we want. It sucks, and it doesn’t improve the landscape, but how fucking well are we doing improving the landscape with the strategies we’ve been employing? We’re a big fan of LBJ pigfucker politics – it comes up favorably in the comments often – which was the precursor to Rush Limbaugh. The left used to do this. And we don’t need to do it as crass a way.

    That said, it’s increasingly clear that the traditional media don’t matter. Mamdani won in NYC with almost no money and a traditional media landscape that fucking hates his guts. He won by grabbing attention on social media. You can argue that the traditional media were wired for republicans there (they weren’t – they were wired against the DSA – they are not about to shill for Silwa) but I’m arguing we shouldn’t complain about traditional media biases as much as we need to figure out how to win in the place where more of the attention lies – traditional media cannot compete with social media on attention. That’s where we have the greatest opportunities. And I would argue that Democrats are not bad in that space, but Democrats don’t have a project in that space the way Republicans do. They outright own two social media networks and arguably a third given Zucks leanings. Dems have no structural projects there at all that I can think of.

  81. 81.

    Jackie

    Caught this comment on CNN:

    Trump’s former administration communications official Alyssa Farah Griffin expressed her surprise at the rapidly unfolding chaos over the Justice Department’s announcement that they have concluded their review of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, and that that there’s no “clients list” – which kicked off a revolt of MAGA loyalists, and reportedly has FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino thinking about resigning.

    “This is the first time I can really remember that Trump is sidestepping his base and not doing what they’re very vocally asking him to do.”

    I laughed out loud! FFOTUS’s MAGA voters are finally learning they’ve been used. MAGA voters got him elected and he doesn’t need them anymore. This could get interesting and very entertaining!

  82. 82.

    Martin

    @Steve LaBonne: Is NBC a small business now? C’mon – don’t move the goalposts here. The discussion was around the media, presumably the usual suspects. They’re pretty big organizations.

    And rising costs isn’t really relevant? Because a move to single payer doesn’t get them out of costs, it means they no longer control the costs – they can’t go to worse coverage in a downturn – only Congress can do that. And it’s also not clear what the costs are levied against. One of the reasons why Social Security is in trouble is that the inputs are indexed against wages and the outputs (what a dollar of SS benefits can buy) against GDP, and the gap between wages and GDP has been accelerating since the 1970s. Had we indexed SS inputs against value-add, or something proportionate to GDP rather than payroll, it’d be in great shape today. Basically, the value-add generated through automation and computing don’t pay into SS, and they need to.

    So if we did single payer, what would the revenue for that be indexed against? Payroll taxes? Maybe? But we’re already in trouble because that got disconnected from costs. Value add? How that’s done could raise or lower their costs depending on the nature of the business.

    Media are very labor driven, and their primary means to control cost are things around labor, which they have control over. And their labor isn’t cheap, so their expenses related to healthcare are relatively low because they are more dominated on the wage side of things. Anderson Cooper makes $18M a year. His health care package is probably expensive relative to some camera operator, but it’s maybe 3x as much, not 200x as much.

    Like I said, Walmart with an army of cheap labor benefits the most because there’s pretty much no way you could tax them more than they’re already paying. You’re almost certainly going to tax CNN more than they’re paying because this is going to be redistributive.

    If we’re arguing that the media are controlling the narrative based on self-interest, which was what you asserted, it doesn’t matter what the Italian restaurant up the street thinks about the matter (I agree it would probably benefit them – doesn’t matter by the constraints you set). It also doesn’t matter what the CEOs taxes are. It matters what the corporations tax exposure would be to pay for single payer – because it will likely be paid primarily by employers, because they’re the ones paying now – and the tax exposure options are very dependent on the shape of the business. And again, it will be redistributive so businesses with low health care expenses relative to revenue, profits, value-add, wages are likely to oppose it. All of those apply to most media outlets, from what I’ve seen of their finances.

  83. 83.

    Martin

    @flower: I think even that is too generous to him. I think it’s a project he’s delegated to Stephen Miller so he can go off to the golf course. He’s happy to take credit for it, but he could care less one way or another so long as someone he cares about isn’t screaming at him. Remember the 36 hours where he said they’d call off raids on farms based on complaints by GOP business owners and now they’re doing even more of them and justifying it that medicaid recipients can do that work? That’s him hitting the links and his staff making shit up. Ukraine shipment pause that he knew nothing about and then immediately reversed. Same thing. He is checked all the fuck the way out.

  84. 84.

    Eyeroller

    @Martin: Most media doesn’t do policy. You can’t really distinguish being wired for Republican “talking points” from being wired for Republican “policies.”  You can take it up with Josh Marshall but I think most of us know what he meant, and media is his business so I think he knows what he’s talking about.  Similarly with the puke funnel.  To be a little more delicate, we might regard them as nestlings of some bird families/genera (parrots, herons, etc.) that regurgitate food into their chicks’ mouths.

    Agree on the need to advertise on nontraditional platforms.  Suzanne especially and I’m sure others have made this point repeatedly.

  87. 87.

    TS

     

    @Archon:

    As noted by @rikyrah

    BREAKING NEWS: Starting today, Georgia is canceling nearly half a million voter registrations in one of the largest voter roll removals in U.S. history.

    This is how the GOP wins in 2026 – there is always a way.

  88. 88.

    Jackie

    @Geminid: I read that Patel is also considering it. Only saw it on Mediaite, so rumor only – unless it pops up on more reputable sources.

  90. 90.

    Geminid

    @Jackie: Kash Patel is pretty expendable too. He and Bongino got their jobs because they were loyal to Trump, but now they need to be loyal to Trump’s administration. I don’t think boat rockers will be tolerated.

  93. 93.

    Jackie

    @Geminid:

    got their jobs because they were loyal to Trump, but now they need to be loyal to Trump’s administration.

    Being loyal to FFOTUS is mandatory beyond all else. Being loyal to both FFOTUS and Bondi is??

    Noem and Miller are also loyalists, but they’re pushing back against FFOTUS’s attempt to keep his millionaire/billionaire farmers and hoteliers happy by trying to give undocumented immigrants in those fields an amnesty of sorts. And Trumpy is getting grumpy about it. <shrug>

  95. 95.

    Ruckus

    @rikyrah:

    This.

    I wasn’t sure shitforbrains was going to any better than his first run at being the human in charge but I also wasn’t sure that he’d be this shitty this quick. I mean I guess I should have expected it, I mean he has easily earned what I call him – several times over.

  97. 97.

    Ruckus

    @bbleh:

    He doesn’t need foreign help, he’s this shitty all on his own. Of course he’s moving in the very smelly direction – so far and so fast that I should be able to smell him and my sense of smell has left the building.

  99. 99.

    Ruckus

    @Eyeroller:

    Rich people will spend money if they think it will make them more money. MONEY being a thing that a lot of people think is the most important thing in life. Now don’t get me wrong, money is nice, more money is nicer, but getting higher than heroin gets you isn’t a side effect.

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