Kamala Harris
The End of Days Inn
What Trump’s team wants to do to America, and how to fight it.
By Sarah Kendzior | Nov 2024
I am in northern Ohio, looking down at the End of Days Inn.
The parking lot cracks like an outstretched palm no fortune teller needs to read because its future is too obvious. The cracks spread to the dead mall next door, a vacant behemoth with CLOSED and THANK YOU written on an old marquee. I wonder about the person who placed those letters there one by one. That final demarcation, the words you write when you cannot say goodbye.
At the condemned Days Inn, the “D” was removed from all signs. As if folks needed a clue that the old days are gone, as if weeds winding to empty windows weren’t enough.
“AY’S INN”, my children read, laughing.
“This is what America looked like when you were one year old, after the economy collapsed,” I said to my daughter, born in 2007.
“And this is what America looked like when you were one year old, when they said we’d recovered,” I said to my son, born in 2011. “But they were lying.”
Russia: “We have won.”
Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
Nov 12, 2024
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.
In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.
Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.
The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.
Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.
Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.
Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.
All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.
While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.
The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?
Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.
In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”
Trump’s “efficiency commission” plan cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
Nov 7, 2024
Today the Trump family posed for a post-election photo. Missing from the group was former first lady Melania Trump. Joining the family was billionaire Elon Musk, who supported Trump’s campaign both through his ownership of X, formerly Twitter, and then with $132 million in cash and with apparent giveaways to get voters to give the campaign personal information.
As an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is barred from the presidency himself by the U.S. Constitution, which requires that a president be born in the U.S. (out of the Framers’ concern that a foreign country could put a puppet in the presidency). But he is now very close to Trump and stands to gain significantly from a Trump presidency, both through deregulation and government contracts, and through Trump’s planned tariffs on Chinese imports that will enable Musk to monopolize the electric vehicle market in the U.S. Musk also would like a victory in the culture wars; he is strongly opposed to transgender rights.
After the election results came out, Musk posted on X, “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” Latin for “New World Order.”
At Trump’s election party, Trump said: “We have a new star: Elon. He is an amazing guy. We were sitting together tonight—you know he spent two weeks in Philadelphia and different parts of Pennsylvania campaigning? He’s a character, he’s a special guy. He’s a super-genius, and we have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them. We have to protect our super-geniuses.”
Trump’s new closeness with Musk presents an issue for the Republican Party. The president-elect is 78 and has shown signs of mental and physical deterioration, making it possible that someone will need to take his place at some point in the next four years.
The vice president–elect, current Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, is constitutionally the next in line for the presidency, but neither Musk nor Vance has Trump’s popular support, making it unclear who will take over the leadership of the party if such a takeover is necessary. Whether either can command Trump’s supporters is also unclear.
What is clear is that neither of them has much experience in elected office. Vance was elected senator just two years ago, and Musk comes from the business world.
There is another, major problem for the party, as well: Trump won the election in part by promising everything to everyone, but the actual policies of the MAGA party are unpopular, even with many Republican voters.
Notably, Trump has said he will appoint Musk to head a new government efficiency commission, and Musk has vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. Such cuts would decimate government services, including food programs and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Supplemental nutrition programs disproportionately benefit rural areas, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are used much more heavily in counties that support Trump than those that don’t.
That will be a hard circle to square.
So will Trump’s promise to lower consumer costs while also putting tariffs of 10% to 20% on all foreign imports and of 60% on imports from China. Tariffs are borne by consumers, so by definition they will drive prices up. These two promises cannot be reconciled.
Trump has promised mass deportations, and much of his base is fervently behind them. The Republican National Committee even had signs saying “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” made up for attendees to wave at the party’s convention.
Priscilla Alvarez and Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump’s allies have been preparing for mass detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants, and the stock prices of private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic have soared since Trump’s election. Steven T. Dennis of Bloomberg reported that on an earnings call today, GEO chief executive officer Brian Evans told investors that filling currently empty beds could bring in $400 million a year and that the company can scale up its current surveillance, monitoring, and transportation programs to handle millions of immigrants. “This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he said.
But deporting up to 20 million people will be a logistical nightmare and is projected to cost from $88 billion to $315 billion a year. At the same time, much of the U.S. economy depends on undocumented immigrants, and Republican businessmen will certainly object to losing their workers.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump in his first term, backed away from some of the extremes of Trump’s immigration policy when he told CBS last month: “It’s not gonna be—a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous…. They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous, you know, investigative processes.”
Meanwhile, Democratic state lawmakers have been preparing for a potential Trump administration for more than a year, and some are putting down public markers that they will not cooperate with the extreme policies of the Trump administration.
Trump vowed to begin his mass deportation plan in Aurora, Colorado, where he maintained—contrary to the statements of local Republican officials—that Venezuelan gangs had taken over the city. Aurora is a suburb of Denver, and yesterday the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, told a reporter he would not cooperate with requests that are “immoral or unethical or unfair.”
California governor Gavin Newsom called an emergency session of the California state legislature to convene on December 2, “to help bolster our legal resources and protect our state against any unlawful actions by the incoming Trump Administration.” It will focus on funding lawsuits against any actions that impact civil liberties, reproductive rights, protection for immigrants, and climate initiatives. Newsom said the California lawmakers “will seek to work with the incoming president—but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.”
California has the fifth largest economy in the world, and its population of 39 million people is more than four times the 9.59 million people in Hungary, the country from which MAGA Republicans are taking much of their ideological vision.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, who has been called a “happy warrior,” held a press conference today, telling reporters that he will continue working to keep Illinois “a place of stability and competent governance” and vowing to protect the people of his state no matter what the new administration does. “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” he said. “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Trump has made it clear he intends to have a say in the decisions of the Federal Reserve, which manages interest rates, and during his first term he frequently attacked Fed chair Jerome Powell, whom he appointed, for not lowering rates to boost the economy. Trump’s advisors have suggested the president can gain power over the nation’s finances by removing members of the Fed in his next term.
Today, when reporters asked Powell if he would resign before Trump takes office, he said no. When asked if Trump could fire or demote him or the other Fed governors, Powell was firm: “Not permitted under the law.”