The president-elect rides the cowboy spirit

'In one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to help him run the country, including the prestige institutions and the press, was melting down.' (Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

Democratic PartyDonald Trump JrKamala HarrisPoliticsRepublican PartyUSUs election

David Samuels

November 8, 2024 11 mins

It was long past midnight in Livingston, Montana, when Donald Trump finally stood up to address the nation as President-elect of the United States, having won the landslide victory that had eluded him in his successful run in 2016 and again in his re-election bid in 2020. This time, the American people had overwhelmingly voted for change. They had voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

“Trump has also lost a step or two himself.”

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48329642)

Running the Obama playbook and relying on his coalition won’t work again

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48329838)

Southwest and South

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48334219)

next nominee will be pivotal for the Demons, whether good or bad

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48329870)

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Obama Isn’t Going Anywhere

The former president lost big on Nov. 5. But he doesn’t seem interested in leaving D.C., or American politics.

BY

LEE SMITH

NOVEMBER 11, 2024

Donald Trump’s decisive victory last week was the only logical plot point in the most remarkable story in American political history. After the protagonist is humiliated, exiled and silenced, runs the gantlet of a justice system that means to imprison him for life, gets shot in the face, and escapes another murder attempt, he humbles himself, prays, cloaks himself, and walks among everyday Americans, as a fast-food worker then as a sanitation man, which shows him there are winners everywhere you look in America. And then he wins, too. It’s not an American story if he doesn’t win.

But the story of Trump’s rise and fall and redemption isn’t over yet. If he doesn’t drive Barack Obama out of Washington, D.C., and dismantle his private- and public-sector network, Trump can still ultimately lose. His first term was undermined by Obama allies in U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and there’s evidence that the heart of the resistance is now ensconced inside the Pentagon and already poised to fight him. This threatens not only the Trump presidency but also the stability of the country. After fulfilling campaign promises to close the borders, embark on a massive deportation program sending millions of illegal aliens home, and appoint an attorney general capable of restoring the rule of law, the president-elect’s top priority must be to bring an end to the Obama era.

Presidents leave the capital city after their term in office to demonstrate their respect for one of the fundamental principles of our republic: the transfer of executive authority from one president to another. Obama stayed to underscore the opposite.

Woodrow Wilson, the only other ex-president who stayed put, had been incapacitated by a stroke midway through his second term and couldn’t leave. Obama announced at the start of his second term he wasn’t going away, and spent the first four years of his post-White House tenure to lead the resistance, and the next four as shadow president.

No other former president has distributed his opinions to the public in the immediate aftermath of a presidential election, because no previous holder of that office intended to give the impression that he was still involved in deciding the fate of the nation.

Obama never hid his role as the real center of power during Joe Biden’s term. When he retired the old man to make way for the candidate he’s preferred since at least 2019, Obama simply grabbed the mic and took center stage. The “Kamala Harris” campaign—whose “New Way Forward” slogan he premiered—was, in reality, just another Barack Obama campaign. Harris, who had never won a primary vote and withdrew from the 2020 race polling at 3%, had already been vetted and her record showed that she was unlikable, and more exposure made her even more unlikable. Pushing Harris on Democratic voters in the middle of a medical emergency—Biden’s cognitive meltdown during the June debate—and giving them no other choice was the only way to get her on track for the White House.

On election night, Obama stepped up to steady Harris voters—and demoralize Trump supporters—by promising a late-hour comeback similar to Biden’s four-years ago. “It took several days to count every ballot in 2020, and it’s very likely we won’t know the outcome tonight either,” he tweeted. “Let the process run its course. It takes time to count every ballot.”

Social media MAGA saw a repeat of the 2020 “red-mirage blue-shift” blackout when ballot-counting mysteriously shut down with Trump ahead, restarted hours later, typically without poll observers, and ended with Biden tallying 81 million votes—more than 15 million more votes than Clinton received in 2016. The reason it didn’t take days to announce a winner this time is because Trump lawyers won enough battles against Marc Elias and other Obama-allied lawyers to defend election integrity against procedures designed to facilitate fraud. And thus, in the end, Obama lost twice on election night: His puppet lost at the ballot box, and his legal team lost in court.

To obscure his culpability for the party’s loss, media accounts claim that what Obama wanted all along was an open primary—in reality a catastrophic scenario that would have entailed the party’s leading lights eviscerating each other three months before the election. And now, instead of installing another figurehead to occupy what in his estimation is the ceremonial position of president while he and his faction held real power, Obama must fight to stay relevant.

Following the election, he issued a statement shortly after Harris gave her concession speech. This marked another Obama first—no other former president has distributed his opinions to the public in the immediate aftermath of a presidential election, because no previous holder of that office intended to give the impression that he was still involved in deciding the fate of the nation.

“America,” Obama wrote, “has been through a lot over the last few years—from a historic pandemic and price hikes resulting from the pandemic, to rapid change and the feeling a lot of folks have that, no matter how hard they work, treading water is the best they can do. Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune.”

The “folks,” in Obama’s condescending account, were not rejecting the transformative program he championed. Rather, they were reacting, likely irrationally, to phenomena that lacked cause or agency. There have been “price hikes resulting from the pandemic”—not historic levels of inflation caused by the Biden administration’s climate change agenda that has transferred trillions in middle-class wealth to Democratic Party donors and clients as well as the People’s Republic of China. There has been “rapid change”—which is to say the tens of millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration has ushered across the border in less than four years, spiking crime rates, suppressing the wages of U.S. workers, burdening taxpayers with the cost of education, housing, and other services for noncitizens. In any case, it’s not that this “change” wasn’t progress. It’s just that it may have happened too fast. And these “conditions,” which in Obama’s construction materialized out of the blue, “created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world.”

No doubt this document was read, drafted, and revised dozens of times by a team of Obama loyalists to ensure that every word served a purpose. “Around the world” is intended to underscore the small “d” in democratic—Obama is not talking about an American political party but rather a political system. Trump didn’t beat Democrats, he thwarted democracy by defeating its defenders. In contrast to Harris, Trump is more like a right-wing fascist, or an authoritarian strongman, like Vladimir Putin, for instance. Thus, in the context of democracy, Trump’s presidency is not legitimate. And that calls for resistance.

Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, Obama set in motion the multi-pronged operation to undermine his successor. Obama told his FBI Director James Comey to continue the investigation, and surveillance, of the president-elect that was initiated while Trump was the GOP candidate. Further, the outgoing president directed CIA chief John Brennan to produce an official assessment asserting that Trump owed the presidency to Putin. By using the U.S. government’s official imprimatur to validate the conspiracy theory that Trump had been compromised by a foreign power, Obama delegitimized Trump’s presidency at its birth and divided the country. Now Obama is looking for another play, and it appears that it involves splitting the armed forces.

Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed Pentagon personnel to carry out a smooth transition and reminded them “to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command.”

It’s not the first time an outgoing Pentagon chief counseled his subordinates to abide by their oaths to the Constitution—what’s of potential concern is that the phrase “lawful orders” appears to contain a warning that some military officials’ decisions regarding lawful orders may be shaped by anti-Trump animus. What orders is Austin referring to? First, Trump has indicated he might use the military to assist in carrying out his incoming administration’s operation to deport illegal immigrants. Further, the Trump White House is planning to shrink the size of the bureaucracy, which also includes Pentagon officials. The resistance has already picked up on the cues left in Austin’s message.

For instance, in a report on Pentagon officials discussing how to respond in the event Trump issued unlawful orders, CNN correspondent Natasha Bertrand emphasized the threat implicit in Austin’s wording and wrote that “the US military will obey only lawful orders.” Bertrand famously drove the Trump-Russia narrative with leaks from intelligence officials, and in October 2020, she was first to report on the letter authored by 51 former spies falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That is, the CNN reporter is a delivery mechanism for anti-Trump information operations, and this particular op has been in the works for nearly a year.

In January, NBC News reported that former Obama officials and Democratic Party operatives were already plotting to derail Trump’s agenda under the pretext that he was aiming to use U.S. military to implement his political agenda. “We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to,” said Mary McCord, a former DOJ lawyer who oversaw its unlawful Trump-Russia probe. Another partner in the Pentagon op, according to the NBC story, is Democracy Forward, chaired by Marc Elias, who paid for the Trump-Russia dossier when he was a lawyer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

In May and June, former Obama Pentagon official Rosa Brooks convened past Democratic and Republican officials to war-game scenarios for the postelection period. She’d done the same for the 2020 election with the Transition Integrity Project, a messaging campaign that prepared Democrats for the ballot count to drag on long past election day making Biden the winner and leaving Trump to contest the election. For this election, she joined with reporter Barton Gellman and the Democracy Futures Project to “forecast” the aftermath of election 2024.

The scenarios were made public on July 30 in an obvious media rollout, with stories in The Bulwark, where Brooks herself sketched the scenarios; The Washington Post, in a piece authored by Gellman; as well as The New Republic and The Guardian, the last of which gave the most detail on the various war games. One scenario posits the possibility “that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests.” In other words, riots designed to block Trump policies would be as bad or worse than the spring and summer 2020 George Floyd riots when Trump reportedly entertained the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act. Those social justice demonstrations left 19 dead and caused billions of dollars worth of damage in dozens of cities across the country.

“In the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise,” according to the Guardian report, “the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement.” The account relayed that as the scenario unfolded, Trump fired the officers who disobeyed his orders and replaced them with officers who implemented them.

Last week’s CNN article picked up on the same themes and keywords: “The president’s powers are especially broad if he chooses to invoke the Insurrection Act, which states that under certain limited circumstances involved in the defense of constitutional rights, a president can deploy troops domestically unilaterally,” wrote Bertrand. “A separate law—the Posse Comitatus Act—seeks to curb the use of the military to enforce laws unless authorized by Congress. But the law has exceptions for rebellion and terrorism, which ultimately gives the president broad leeway in deciding if and when to invoke [the] Insurrection Act.”

With this, the tabletop exercises and the communications component for the anti-Trump Pentagon op are in order. Does the resistance really intend to move pieces in place to split the military or are they just bluffing to get Trump to back off on campaign promises that will topple two of its pillars? It might seem strange to threaten to destabilize the country on behalf of defense bureaucrats and illegal aliens, but the former constitute a crucial part of Obama’s network, and giving the latter the vote, as Trump’s landslide victory shows, may be the Democrats’ best chance to win national elections in the near future. It’s tempting to read the Brooks scenarios and the CNN report as resistance porn—a performance of the rituals and motions that this class has accustomed itself to over the course of the past eight years, as it now braces for the return of the president it did its best and failed to destroy.

Would Obama fracture the military to once again cripple Trump’s term in office? The former president is in a decidedly weaker position and facing a battle-hardened Trump. Still, it would be reckless to assume the best from the man who already proved his willingness to weaponize the national security apparatus against his political opponent. The president-elect shouldn’t take any chances.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48330894)

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https://archive.ph/VwzRZ

Lind on why non-profits and foundations keep pushing the boundaries:

So what I think of after two decades in the nonprofit sector, at various times, is Lind’s law of nonprofit advocacy: You go as far as the voters support your position, and then you go beyond the border into further territory where the next position is unpopular. And this is a deliberate strategic move, because if you just are advocating for what everybody believes anyway, then you’ve won. Nobody’s going to write you a check.

But if you go 10 or 20 or 30 percent further, into the controversial realm, then you will be attacked. And in the case of progressive nonprofits, you’re being attacked by the right, which is what you want. And you can say, “We’re being attacked for this.” And then you can link it to your previous gains by saying, “They don’t only oppose this bridgehead in enemy territory, but they want to roll back everything we’ve done in the last hundred years.” So I do think that kind of edginess, that’s baked into NGO annual fund-raising newsletter culture. That’s how you get people to open their wallets.

And I think that explains a lot of 2020, whether it was the trans issue, whether it was the “Defund the Police” — things that make perfect sense if you’re a nonprofit trying to pry open the wallets of a small number of billionaire megadonors. And big foundations are just electoral poison.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48330984)

"And big foundations are just electoral poison."

so many of the foundations are based on the fortunes accumulated by men who bought into classic liberalism and the virtues rewarded by relatively free markets. but now their fortunes are controlled by resentful [people] who loath what created that wealth.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48334625)

A Newsom/Whitmer ticket would do pretty well in 2028 IMO.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5632128&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#48334921)