Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

People are weird.

So many bastards, so little time.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

The willow is too close to the house.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

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Why We Fight

So Glad That Paul Krugman Left the NYT

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… because if he hadn’t I doubt that he would have been permitted to write this article, which should be a wake-up call to all of us, even those who are already paying attention.

I’ll share several snippets here, but you really should read the whole thing.

This Is Not a Drill

There are two disastrously wrong ways to read the news from Los Angeles right now, and the rest of America over the next few days. The first is to believe that there is actually anything resembling an insurrection underway. The second is to believe that the Trump administration’s response to the nonexistent insurrection is simply cynical politics, an attempt to gain Donald Trump a few points in the polls.

What we’re actually seeing is much worse: An attempt to end politics as we know it, to deploy force to suppress dissent. Not eventually, but right now.

On the first point: No, LA isn’t a city in chaos, wracked by devastating riots requiring military intervention.

…

The chief of the Los Angeles Police Department issued a statement practically pleading with the Feds to stay out of the situation:

The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively.

Of course, Trump ignored that plea. He federalized part of California’s National Guard despite the opposition of the governor — something that hasn’t happened since 1965, when Lyndon Johnson mobilized part of the Alabama National Guard, basically to protect civil rights protestors. And Trump sent in some Marines, too, which would be completely crazy if the goal was to defuse tension and prevent violence. After all, the mission of the Marines, what they’re trained to do, is to deliver deadly violence.

It’s easy to see how this could spin out of control. Which is, of course, what Trump is hoping for.

But why does Trump want chaos? Many pundits and, I’m sorry to say, all too many Democrats assume that performative cruelty, both in the form of those ICE arrests and in roughing up demonstrators, will work to Trump’s political advantage. After all, isn’t immigration one of the few issues on which he polls positively? Doesn’t acting tough make him look strong?

Narrator:  No!  That’s not what the polls say.

And for those who don’t trust polls, Democrats keep beating expectations, often by very large margins, in special elections.

So have Trump and his advisers simply misjudged the politics here? No. The militarized response to the LA demonstrations and Trump’s warning that anyone protesting his military birthday parade (which millions probably will) will be “met with heavy force” aren’t about moving the poll numbers. They’re all about rejecting the idea that Americans have a right to oppose Trump policies. In the same interview Morris says it’s

part of his destruction of mutual tolerance for the party system, which is classic authoritarianism. And that’s it. That’s the motivation, and everything else circles around that.

In a follow-up note on Bluesky, Morris — who is hardly a wild-eyed radical — added this:

If Trump gets away with this, he will absolutely do the same thing during the 2026 & 2028 elections. He will manufacture unrest just like in LA and send federal troops to every major city as a way to intimidate voters and decrease turnout. Functional end to fair elex.

And Trump’s highly partisan speech to the troops at Fort Bragg — a name change the administration pretends is to honor a World War II hero, but is obviously a reversion to the old practice of naming forts after Confederate generals, that is, traitors — was a naked attempt to coopt the military in his tyrannical project.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, gets it. I’ve never had strong views about Newsom, one way or the other, but this line from his big speech Tuesday was what everyone who cares about this nation should be saying right now:

Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.

If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand.

This is the moment. Everything is on the line, right now.

This is why we fight.  But how?

This should be a hair on fire moment.  June 14 is in two days.  What can we do right now, and on Friday and over the weekend, that will have an impact?

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Steve Vladeck on Federalizing the National Guard

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I don’t have much to add here, except to share information and link to the source.  While not at all surprising, this is a distressing turn of events.  He is dancing on a very dangerous line.

I. What Trump Did (and Didn’t) Do

There are a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation out there about what Trump has and hasn’t done, and given that I’ve covered these topics before, it seemed worth a quick explainer on why this move is a big deal—but why it also is not as drastic an escalation (or abuse) as many had feared, at least not yet.

The TL;DR here is that Trump has not (yet) invoked the Insurrection Act, which means that the 2000 additional troops that will soon be brought to bear will not be allowed to engage in ordinary law enforcement activities without violating a different law—the Posse Comitatus Act. All that these troops will be able to do is provide a form of force protection and other logistical support for ICE personnel. Whether that, in turn, leads to further escalation is the bigger issue (and, indeed, may be the very purpose of their deployment). But at least as I’m writing this, we’re not there yet.

II. Why the Memorandum is Still Alarming…

That said, there are still at least three reasons to be deeply concerned about President Trump’s (hasty) actions on Saturday night:

First, there is the obvious concern that, even as they are doing nothing more than “protecting” ICE officers discharging federal functions, these federalized troops will end up using force—in response to real or imagined violence or threats of violence against those officers. In other words, there’s the very real possibility that having federal troops on the ground will only raise the risk of escalating violence—not decrease it.

Second, and related, there is the possibility that that’s a feature, and not a bug—that this is meant as a precursor, with federalizing a modest number of National Guard troops today invoked, some time later, as a justification for more aggressive responses to anti-ICE protests, including, perhaps invocation of the Insurrection Act. In other words, it’s possible that this step is meant to both be and look modest so that, if and when it “fails,” the government can invoke its failure as a basis for a more aggressive domestic deployment of troops. What happens in and around Los Angeles in the next few days will have a lot to say about this.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, as I wrote in April, “domestic use of the military can nevertheless be corrosive—to the morale of the troops involved, all of a sudden, in policing their own; to the relationship between local/state governments and the federal government; and to the broader relationship between the military and civil society.” Even uses of the military for relatively modest purposes can have those corrosive effects—especially where, as here, it seems so transparently in service of the President’s policy agenda, and not necessarily the need to restore law and order on the streets of America’s second largest city.

Even as someone who thinks the federal government has both the constitutional and statutory authority to override local and state governments when it comes to law and order (see, e.g., President Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock to enforce Brown), it seems to me that there is something deeply pernicious about invoking any of these authorities except in circumstances in which their necessity is a matter of consensus beyond the President’s political supporters. The law may well allow President Trump to do what he did Saturday night. But just because something is legal does not mean that it is wise—for the present or future of our Republic.

A lot depends on what happens next. For now, the key takeaways are that there really isn’t much that these federalized National Guard troops will be able to do—and that this might be the very reason why this is the step the President is taking tonight, rather than something even more aggressive.

THE MEMO.

Steve Vladeck on Federalizing the National GuardPost + Comments (56)