It is not as if Donald Trump’s administration had been subtle about its intentions. For weeks, if not months, members of Bigot Bardot’s team told anyone who would listen that the strategy for the beginning of the new presidency was “shock and awe.” Or, if you prefer, flooding the zone with shit.
The mechanism was that, as soon as Trump’s hand came off the Bible after he took the oath of office (which, it turns out, didn’t happen because he never put his hand ON the Bible, presumably because it would have been scorched like one of his well-done steaks), his team would unleash a gazillion executive orders, each one overturning an old policy or law and establishing a new one at a rapid-fire pace. The orders would be so outrageous and paradigm-shifting that anyone paying attention would feel completely overwhelmed.
The opposition would not know what to fight first. The opposition would look up after a couple of days and see an America fundamentally altered, or well on its way. A right-wing America where hard-won rights for minorities had been rolled back at the stroke of a pen, where programs Americans relied on for food and medicine and disaster relief and a million other things vanished into the ether like Thanos had just snapped his fingers at them. An America where the sitting president freed and all but endorsed the paramilitaries who had tried to kill people (including his own vice president) as thanks for their loyalty.
And that is exactly what has happened in this first — good God, has it been not even a week yet?
Trump has signed executive orders crippling the federal government, pardoning and setting free insurrectionists, and arbitrarily rewriting parts of the Constitution he finds inconvenient, such as the 14th Amendment and its guarantee of birthright citizenship, and he has dared anyone — the courts, Democrats — to do anything about it.
The courts have pushed back already. The Democrats? Eh. Sure, there have been a few who have said the right things. There have also been a whole bunch making noises with their coward-holes about working across the aisle and finding common ground and doing the business the American people sent them there to do, and OH MY GOD, SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU CANDYASSES.
This is an example of what we’re talking about. Here are three Democratic leaders making mealy-mouthed statements of resistance so anodyne that they might very well have been written by a chatbot, and one Democrat showing some actual goddamn fight (you’ll need to click through to read them, we ain’t transcribing those jpg’s!):
Yes, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, yes and thank you! AOC has been one of the very, very few Democrats in Congress that we have seen so far who has shown any moral clarity over the last week. The rest of them are going to turn yr Wonkette into a Slack room full of anarchists. Robyn’s been waiting so patiently for us all these years.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are busy voting with Republicans to confirm Trump’s moronic Cabinet choices. We mentioned Marco Rubio and the 99-0 vote that made him secretary of State the other day. He immediately carried out Trump’s directive to ban all American embassies and consulates in the world from flying Pride flags. So much for the US trying to set an example of tolerance for other nations.
A couple of days later, 25 Democrats voted to make John Ratcliffe, a Trump lackey with no non-Trump experience or background in intelligence work, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Four years ago, when Trump nominated Ratcliffe to be his DNI, he squeaked through on a 49-44 vote. This time he sailed through easily.
This is no time to help Donald Trump confirm his Cabinet. You are confirming people he is putting in place to carry out executive orders in which he has arbitrarily rewritten or ignored laws that Congress has passed! You get nothing from helping him. The Republicans will still call you a bunch of woke Marxists during your re-election campaigns, and your own voters will feel discouraged and check out accordingly.
Trump is charging forward in his quest to turn the federal government into an instrument of his revenge. This week, he yanked the protection details of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. He yanked a security detail the federal government had been providing Anthony Fauci. He yanked the security clearances of 51 mostly retired intelligence officers who had signed an open letter in 2020 saying they thought the Hunter Biden laptop leak might very well have been a foreign disinformation operation.
Now, no matter what you think of Bolton and Pompeo, and we think very little of them, those details were assigned because of assassination threats made by foreign enemies. But because Bolton and Pompeo had fallen out with Trump, he left them unprotected out of spite. As for Fauci, he needed that security detail largely thanks to threats generated by Trump constantly trashing him. It’s a neat trick: Rile up the nuts, release 1,500 of your violent followers from prison, then yank the security detail of one of the people you had riled them up against.
And Chuck Schumer is putting out milquetoast skeets about declassifying UFO files. He’s going to the floor of the Senate and giving speeches so mild that he all but validates the impression of him as an old befuddled grandpa that Jon Stewart does on The Daily Show.
Compare that with AOC, who has been all over the place blasting Elon Musk and Trump and the new administration with a vigor and a fire that most everyone else seems to be missing. That’s something that the public really, really needs to see right now from Democrats. Otherwise, why bother voting for them when everything Trump does inevitably goes to shit?
The outrages are just too many to put up with. Foreign aid, that wingnut bogeyman that takes up less than 1 percent of the entire budget, has been frozen. The president is talking about ending the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and leaving disaster relief up to individual states, ignoring the fact that FEMA was founded precisely because individual states didn’t have the resources to get through natural disasters alone. That state of affairs has not changed.
Perhaps most frighteningly, Trump and his lickspittles have frozen pretty much all of the National Institute for Health, which means pauses on billions of dollars worth of research projects and even communications with the public to warn them about diseases and listeria outbreaks. Hey, no problem, grant money to study cures for cancer just falls out of the private sector tree all the time, and how bad could bird flu really be? Right, pretty bad.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn't even had his confirmation hearing yet!
Speaking of which, there is a rumor that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) might vote to confirm RFK Jr. because they are old buddies and law school classmates. This is the kind of stuff we’re talking about. This should not even be a question, and we don’t care how many of Kennedy’s weddings Whitehouse might have attended! The opposition should not be toying with voting for any of these galactically unqualified idiots. No exceptions!
Good god. We get that you can’t attack every outrage at every moment and you’re probably feeling pretty overwhelmed. We’re all pretty overwhelmed at the minute. But at the very least you need to be trying to rally the troops, even if it’s just with angry Instagram Reels. In a world of Chuck Schumers, be an AOC.
Or, to put it even more concisely: Sack up, you dipshits.
Wonkette is reader-supported and VERY, VERY PISSED OFF AT THE MOMENT.
Till the day I die, I will never, ever, ever understand this fetishisation of compromise. This idea that meeting in the middle, regardless of where that middle actually lies, is somehow inherently better- from a moral point of view- than refusing to compromise with something clearly terrible is just alien to me.
And I will just add this:
Andrea Junker
@strandjunker.com
“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”
Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943
https://bsky.app/profile/strandjunker.com/post/3lgj76pw5vk26