We are at war with Iran, we are not at war with Iran. Federal lands are for sale, the sale of federal lands is prohibited. The tariffs are back, the tariffs are over. Foreign students are banned, foreign students can stay. Trump rebuffs Israel, Trump will defend Israel to the death.
To the death, to our death: the threat of death is the constant. Nothing is real except awful things that don’t stop growing and don’t backtrack. Death is behind the drapes you draw down like a gunfight you already lost. The temperature hits 100 and makes you remember when the world had centuries instead of one endless day.
The heat will not relent. Why should it when nothing else will?
Politics is a jigsaw seesaw with a push and pull that cuts. Every policy is retracted and reinstated so that you can no longer remember relief. What were its ingredients — time, promises? She inhaled a sigh of relief, you think, but all you inhale is heat. You open the front door and stick out your head and breathe like Sylvia Plath.
Slam the door: you have a choice. Slam the door on that cannonball sun.
If you could have one hour, only one hour, in the cool natural air, just one hour when things were not wrong, you could make it through the week. You imagine a lemonade stand run by children selling RELIEF to adults, pouring it into paper cups, and a line of adults so long it bests the record-breaking No King’s Day rally that everyone forgot after the King announced we were at war.
The King has proclaimed we are not at war with Iran anymore because The King Won (shhhh keep telling him that.) But his backers proclaim we are at war with a nice 33-year-old man who wants to do good deeds and has assembled a massive following.
Things don’t tend to work out well for fellows like that, especially against the forces backing The King. You take some comfort that this fellow is not a carpenter.
* * *
The air feels like an oven, but New York produced a spark. New York, of all places, gave America hope with the platform of Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. We are so used to New Yorkers taking — The Trumps, The Cuomos, The Kushners, Carl Icahn, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Adams, Bernard Kerik (RIP!), Wall Street — that it is odd when they offer something good. Affordable housing, cheap childcare, relief.
Rich New Yorkers compared the prospect of these policies to Kristallnacht.
Rich New Yorkers whined about their personal safety while powerbrokers threatened Mamdani with deportation. When they were mocked as coddled losers, they changed the narrative, claiming Mamdani, a Muslim, threatened heartland states like mine, Missouri. But the lead article on the day Mamdani won was about how much rural Missourians are enjoying the new halal menu at the Stuckey’s in Doolittle.
Zohran Mamdani has a buddy named Brad Lander who ran as a sort of co-pilot in New York’s ranked mayoral race. Lander is from St. Louis, which means he has seen affordable housing and free institutions firsthand. He can testify to New Yorkers that they are real.
Lander left St. Louis long before Wesley Bell won the most expensive race in district history with money from hard-right Zionist PACs posing under fake names like “Progressives for Missouri.” AIPAC and other lobbyists did not care about Bell or about St. Louis. Their only goal was to oust Cori Bush, who had condemned Israel’s murderous policies. The “election” was a sad spectacle. I would complain to my representative, but I don’t have representation.
There are so many terrible New Yorkers to primary, but if Lander feels homesick, we’ve got one here too.
Mamdani’s victory was a primary upset win over former governor and unrepentant sex pest Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is part of a legal team representing Benjamin Netanyahu against ICC charges of war crimes. The team was assembled by Alan Dershowitz, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Rich people who liked Epstein also like Cuomo, a fellow predator and death merchant. They need Cuomo to hold office and keep secrets.
Mamdani, unlike Cuomo, would not perform subservience to Israel, no matter how many times punditstried. Mamdani has secrets too: like that a city can uplift its own people instead of functioning as a hub for a wealthy criminals tied to foreign states.
Rich New Yorkers are panicking because that was never a secret. It only felt like one because hardly anyone powerful said it out loud.
I’m worried Mamdani will be murdered. I’m worried he’s another faker. I’m worried he will spur a political cult, and that worry has already been vindicated: the shredding of the American monoculture has ensured every politician has a cult. Politics is the only shared pastime, which is why American life feels miserable, because the stakes are so high, and the quality of programming so low.
* * *
The heat wave hit New York. I wondered how it would affect the election. I wondered if Mamdani would win and billionaires would sue the sun. I wouldn’t rule it out.
When heat waves get this bad, the smallest effort drains you. You can feel the whole country wilting, wilting against its collective will. New Yorkers voted anyway.
I’ve said time and time again that you can’t vote out the mafia, and that’s true. But you can try not voting in the mafia. It won’t change everything. But it’s a start.
Today’s mafia is transnational but not ethnic. Its criminals have multiple passports and offshore accounts and no national allegiances. To them, countries are land masses to be stripped and sold for parts. Transnational organized crime knows no geographical bounds — but it has key hubs, and New York City is one of them.
It does not have to be. New York has been that way so long, people accept it, even take pride in it. Elite criminal impunity is New York’s currency. But what if it wasn’t? What if London and Moscow followed suit?
People fear a system crashing down because they don’t understand that it already happened and they’ve been living in wreckage sold to them as privilege. Or they understand just fine, and do not know what to do about it.
The earth is screaming. It has heat exhaustion. I do too, as I write this out, ride this out, waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the sun to set on plutocrat thieves, waiting for the sun to set me free. Waiting for the day I greet sunrise not with dread at uncertain hours, but relief at the dawn of possibility.
* * *
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Photo of a sunset I took on a nice day in 2022. What, you think I’m going out in this weather to get another?!
L-R: Unknown, Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk
By Ray Pagett
“I needed something to play for club owners, so I cut a tape at the Gaslight. Everybody said, ‘Go away.'”
Before Albert Grossman, Terri Thal was Bob Dylan’s first manager. Though, as she would be the first to admit, she was no Albert Grossman. Closer to a friend helping a newcomer get gigs, just as she was doing for her then-husband Dave Van Ronk. Dylan writes about her in Chronicles:
Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out. She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics — not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness. Intellectually it would be hard to keep up. If you tried, you’d find yourself in alien territory. Both were anti-imperialistic, antimaterialist. “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener,” Terri once said as we walked past the shop window of a hardware store on 8th Street. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
During her six months as his manager, she made one huge contribution to Dylan’s recorded history. Looking for something to bring to club owners outside of NYC to convince them to book him, in September 1961 she recorded what would be become known as The First Gaslight Tape, one of his first concert recordings (the very first of a “regular” concert, since both Indian Neck and Riverside were special events). A recording Dylan fans have treasured for decades—even if the bookers at the time didn’t care.
Even after the manager bit ended, she remained friends with Dylan for a few years, and with Suze Rotolo for decades longer. She also remained close to Van Ronk even after they separated, after, as one chapter in her memoir My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me titles it, “Eleven Years and One Month.”
I spoke to Thal about those early-’60s Village days and what managing a 20-year-old Bob Dylan entailed. Plus I wanted to get her take on A Complete Unknown as someone who was actually there. “I’m not looking dispassionately at history,” she explains. “I’m looking at portrayals of friends.”
Thal and Van Ronk, August 1963, photo by Ann Charters
I have a lot of very specific questions but I’m going to start with a super broad one: What did you think of the movie?
I thought the movie was pretty good, which surprised me, because I am a very literal person. When I look at movies, I really want to look at biography, and this is not biography. It’s biopic, where the producers create an arc and move to whatever conclusion they want.
Did the early scenes, especially the Greenwich Village scenes, feel true to your experience?
The feeling, the tone, yes. I think they captured a lot of it quite well. Coffeehouse scenes, Village streets. That’s not exactly what it looked like, but it doesn’t matter.
I was curious about the coffeehouses specifically. Did they actually look like Gaslight and Gerde’s?
It was close enough. It was the feel rather than, did the Gaslight have those kinds of light fixtures, or were the tables in that scene arranged in three rows front to back the way the Gaslight tables were arranged? I don’t even remember what the Gaslight tables looked like. It had the look of the inside of a club.
But, depending on what scenes you’re talking about, I have problems with a lot of it, because I’m not looking dispassionately at history and saying, “Oh, somebody changed the history.” I am looking at portrayals of friends—and, in a way, portrayals of me, even though I’m not in it. It almost isn’t even a question of accuracies or inaccuracies, but of changes or distortions of people.
Dave is in the movie briefly a couple times. Did you know going in that there would be a Dave Van Ronk character?
I did. I saw the movie twice. The first time I didn’t even realize that that guy was David. It just went right by me. I think he was there once later in a party. I saw somebody with hair hanging down like David, so I guess that was Dave.
He’s in there very early on, telling Bob where Woody Guthrie’s hospital is. Plus that one line later at a party.
My feeling about that is, and this is a little difficult to explain, but Bob is on his way into New York to meet his hero. His hero is somebody who is part of a world that he’s going to leave. He’s coming into the folk music world, which he is going to leave for a different musical world. Dave is there to greet him before he even gets there. Dave is never seen again. The way David was set up, to me, it was like saying, “This guy is part of the world that Dylan is going to leave, which is a failing world.” I thought that the way it was done was insulting to Dave.
The only really political scene is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is portrayed I think quite well. They show the fear. People were really, really scared that night. They were terrified that they weren’t going to be alive the next morning. That the whole thing was going to just be gone. The movie shows Bob working in the Gaslight that night with a very small group of people riveted, listening to him. Then Joan Baez running to be with him because Suze is away.
Aside from the Joan piece, Dave was working in the Gaslight the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The audience was small; Dave usually packed the Gaslight. People didn’t go out that night. They didn’t go to hear musicians. It was a small crowd, but the small crowd were people who were riveted listening to David, as they are shown riveted listening to Bob in the movie.
I think that it was insulting for them to replace David. It was like Dave didn’t exist.
You’re saying that was Dave’s story, playing the Gaslight during the Cuban Missile Crisis, not Bob’s?
I was there. It was my story too. A piece of my life is erased in some way. I wasn’t a performer, but it was an important night in my life. It was an important night in the life of anybody else who happened to be in that room. They didn’t have to do that.
You mentioned there wasn’t too much politics in the movie. One scene I got more out of having read your book right beforehand is when the Suze character [named “Sylvie” in the film] encourages him to be more political, to get more into activism. There’s some line like, “You don’t need to be singing songs about the Dust Bowl. There’s issues happening right now you can write about.”
He did to a certain extent, in his own way. As a songwriter, Bob evolved brilliantly. He started by writing rapportage, whether it was about past events or present events. He moved into writing metaphor, which no one else was doing, or not doing well.
The movie, however, totally ignores the whole Civil Rights movement. It just ain’t there. That’s what I went back to see. I went back to see the movie because I said, “Am I really correct? Did this movie simply skip that whole thing?” This was years of really important political conflicts that were going on. It did show him singing at the March on Washington, which was an important event.
You were there right?
I was at the March. Dave was supposed to sing. He got sick, but he urged me to go. I was up on the platform, not because of who I was, but because of Dave.
Bob was not a political person in my terms. I was a committed, active Marxist. Our friends in the folk music world weren’t, for the most part. That was another really important part of my life and Dave’s life. But Bob was not uninvolved with what was going on. He did go South at one point. All of this was just totally ignored. It’s like it didn’t happen. In the movie, he comes to New York, he lives at a distance from this changing, growing Civil Rights movement. He goes to where a lot of people regard as its pinnacle, the ’63 March on Washington, and that’s it.
One line from your book I thought was interesting was that he would come to your apartment and you and Dave would tell him all this political theory, what you were passionate about. You felt the theory part he was uninterested in. It was more specific events that resonated for him. The story of Hattie Carroll, say, rather than concepts about Marxism, socialism, capitalism.
I didn’t know anybody from the folk music world who was really interested in the Marxist stuff that Dave and I spouted. That really wasn’t part of it. There were people who had been part of left-wing movement years ago; even they weren’t that interested in it anymore.
In Chronicles, when Dylan writes about you, he says a version of the same thing. He writes, “She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics. Not so much the political issues but rather the theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics.” It goes on for a little while.
Did he say Nietzschean or Marxist?
“Nietzschean politics.”
No. No way. I couldn’t tell you anything about Nietzsche.
The anecdote he shares after is about you two walking by a store. He’s saying how you’re anti-materialist and you say, “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener. Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
I read that.Did I say that? I have no idea. I could have.
Let’s rewind a little bit. In terms of your own story, talk about how you entered the Village folk scene and how you met Dave, before Bob even comes into the picture.
I backed into it through left-wing politics. I went to Brooklyn College, and when I was in college I actively sought out organizations that were left-liberal. I went to socialist meetings every Friday night, and all of the left-wing organizations met in the Village. I had been going to the Village with a high school friend even before that. I had heard some of the folk music in the Square on Sundays so I had a little bit of that background. I was very young.
Are we talking late ’50s now?
We’re talking mid-’50s. I graduated from high school in June ’55. I’m going to these socialist meetings in the Village in ’56, early ’57. I am accosted and interviewed and grilled by the FBI. I tell them to go away.
Just for going to the meetings, the FBI is on you?
All I was doing was going to meetings. I knew a lot less about the organizations they were asking me about than they did. This was the tail end, during the McCarthy period. I remember these guys walked up to me on the street. They said, “Terri,” and they showed me their FBI cards. Without even blinking an eye, I looked at them and I said, “I won’t name names.”
During the McCarthy period, people were summoned to Washington and asked to name people they knew who were involved in the Communist Party. I only knew people in socialist organizations, not the Communist Party.
Anyway, I was going to these meetings, and the world was very small back then. There were only a few hundred people in it. The socialists knew the folk singers, knew the science fiction people, knew the visual artists. Everybody hung out in the Village. That’s how I backed into folk music.
I met David at a science fiction party. We talked for a while. I didn’t see him again for several months, and then I ran into him in the Figaro, which was a coffeehouse that everybody I knew hung out in. We were together for another 11 years.
What precipitated you becoming his manager?
David hated business. David wouldn’t set foot in the bank. When we started to live together, I had to talk him into being on the checking account. He hated that. He just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
He would just be keeping all his money hidden somewhere?
He didn’t have any money! There was nothing to keep. Starting a checking account was wishful thinking.
He had this gig in a new club somewhere not too far from Philadelphia. [The club] was bombing; it wasn’t attracting an audience. It was pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to get paid, because they weren’t making any money. We called his manager. His manager said, “Work out the gig.” It was a perfectly reasonable thing to tell him. Work out the gig, and then we’ll…what? We’ll sue? I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the adage “you sue a beggar and you get lice.”
But he did it. He worked out the gig. He didn’t get paid. He fired his manager because he was pissed with him. Why did he hire me? I don’t know. I was there.
How do you learn the ropes? You’re not a manager, until suddenly you are.
You wing it. It was not such a big deal then. There weren’t an awful lot of commercial managers around. You had Albert Grossman, who was an up-and-coming commercial manager. You had Harold Leventhal, who was a very experienced, incredibly honest manager in New York. You had Manny Greenhill in Boston. Basically, in the beginning, I was a booking agent. I just called clubs and got gigs. It really was trial and error.
I was not the kind of manager who tried to change his music or the way my clients looked or acted or teach them stagecraft. I just took them as they were. Some people sent their clients to learn how to dress better or speak better. I didn’t do any of that.
When I managed, a good deal of what I did was PR. My clients had a ton, given the time, of publicity. I did an enormous amount of public relations for them. I had interviews, I had press coverage, everywhere they went.
What does public relations look like in the early ’60s? You’re writing press releases? You’re inviting reporters to shows?
At that point, it was both. I looked up who and what newspaper or what magazine would be interested in folk music. There were damn few people, of course. I had lists of names. I had phone numbers. I called them. If I went to another city, I met them. I did all that shit that a good PR person I thought was supposed to do, which was personal. I didn’t just send press releases. As a matter of fact, I barely even knew what a press release was.
I remember, I think it was 1964, there was a thing called the New York Folk Festival. David did the blues concert. He brought in Chuck Berry, who had gotten out of jail a while before and had not been around for very long. There was a guy who did PR. I saw the press releases and I said, “Oh, that’s what they do.” I had just always done letters and phone calls and personal shit.
Were journalists generally interested in a new folk artist?
No, they weren’t. By ’64, ’65, there was some interest. Before that, outside of New York, it was rough. It really was. I put a lot of time and work into that, and I was good. When I stopped managing, I did public relations for not-for-profit organizations for years.
Where you pitching Robert Shelton, or was he plugged in enough on his own?
He was around. He was very aware of what was going on in the folk music world. It wasn’t a question of nagging him very much. He knew who was there.
Was Bob your second client after Dave?
Yes, he was. That was ’61. I had just started to work with Dave.
There’s a scene in your book where Dave has seen this kid out in one of the clubs, and he comes back to the apartment and calls him a “fucking genius. Then you go out and see him and you agree. What about that early phase of Bob Dylan made you and Dave think he was a “fucking genius”?
People ask, and my answer is always, “I don’t know.” He stumbled a little bit and he looked cute and he doffed his cap and he walked and acted a bit like Charlie Chaplin. He was not a great guitarist. He was not a great singer, but something– I can’t put my finger on it, what there was about him.
It wasn’t only Dave and me who thought that. Within weeks, that guy started to become the most photographed folk singer in Greenwich Village. Other folk singers were more enthusiastic about him than they were about anybody else.
This is even before he’s writing his own songs too.
Yes, those first months. This wasn’t in the rest of the country or the rest of the East Coast, where he wasn’t yet known. This was in the Village.
How do you go from being a fan to being his manager?
He says to me one day, “Would you get me gigs?” We talk about it. I say, “Do you want me to manage you?” He says, “Yes.” We work out a verbal arrangement. Never occurred to me to ask him to sign a contract. I wasn’t that professional yet.
Initially, all I’m going to do is try and get him some work because he has to earn a living. I needed something to play for potential employers and club owners, so I cut a tape at the Gaslight. I took it to Philadelphia and I took it to Boston and I took it to Saratoga Springs. Everybody said, “Go away.”
When you say “took it,” are you making copies and mailing it out? Are you physically showing up to people’s offices?
I went to Boston. Richard Farina and Carolyn Hester were married at that time, and they were playing Springfield, Massachusetts, and then Boston. I went with them and I brought this little cassette and I played it for people. Philadelphia, I may have sent the cassette, or I may have gone down there when David was playing Philadelphia.
Everybody said, “Go away,” and so I went away. He did not come across well yet on tape. I was able to get him gigs in a couple of bars in New Jersey. I haven’t a clue how I did that.
Was it a proper show you recorded the Gaslight tape at?
It was a show; there was an audience. I think it was an evening that we set up as a booking, but I honestly wouldn’t swear to it.
There are six songs on the tape. Was that his typical repertoire around the time?
Yes, it was. Dave came on and did the chorus of “Car, Car.”
It’s funny that everyone’s passing on this tape because all these years later it’s so beloved and famous among Dylan fans.
Back then, no one was interested
It’s got “Song to Woody” on it, which I think a lot of people consider his first major composition. The movie treats it that way.
I think the tape is very good for what it is and the sounds on it. I have the original tape which will go up for auction one of these days. The sound is stunning. Because it’s such an old tape, I thought the sound would’ve dissolved, but it’s incredible. It’s just gorgeous
Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.
Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.
The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.
Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.
When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it’s a very small number of people we’re talking about, and it’s ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.
Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I’m going to look at it very closely. We’re looking at it right now. We’re gonna look at it. We’re gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We’re gonna look at everything.”
Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.
If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.
Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.
That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.
The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.
But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.
Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”
Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.
Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.
The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.
Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”
There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.
In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”
Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.
Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.
Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.
And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”
So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.
Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.
If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.
Ten days ago, on December 2, President Joe Biden arrived in Angola, the first U.S. president to visit central Africa since President Barack Obama traveled there in 2015. In the United States, the story got lost under the president’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, but it is the far more important one, since events in the 54 countries on the continent of Africa are key to the global future.
The Biden administration has made it a point to strengthen relations between the U.S. and Africa. It recognizes the importance of a continent whose 1.5 billion people are expected to climb to 2.5 billion in the next 25 years, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pointed out last Thursday. The median age of Africa’s inhabitants is 19, and by 2050 it is expected that one out of every four humans on Earth will be African.
The administration has worked to ease African distrust of the U.S. stemming from its history of enslavement, its tendency to back right-wing forces during the post–World War II and Cold War period when African nations threw off colonial rule, and the disdain with which Trump treated African countries during his administration.
The Biden administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders’ summit in December 2022, backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, and pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law.
During Biden’s term, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent. In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia.
In Angola last week, Biden said that the U.S. is “all-in on Africa.”
He was in Angola to highlight the Lobito Corridor, a development project centered around a rail line linking the port of Lobito, Angola, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, with the city of Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in Africa’s interior mining region. Biden traveled to Angola for a summit on the Lobito project as well as other infrastructure investment in the region, joining leaders from Angola, DRC, Tanzania, and Zambia on their own continent to demonstrate his conviction that the African people themselves must determine their own future.
The White House, other democratic countries, regional development banks, and international investors have put more than $6 billion behind the Lobito Corridor. They are hoping to ease the transport of critical minerals from interior countries like Zambia and DRC to Lobito. It currently takes a truck about 45 days to make the journey from the interior to Durban, South Africa; the railway would cut the trip out of the interior to about 45 hours.
The railway will strengthen global supply chains for those minerals while also benefiting local people, local governments, and the local region in Angola, Zambia, and DRC. The project includes investments in clean energy, agriculture, trade between countries, and clearing the mines from Angola’s decades-long civil war along the route, all of which will create good jobs for local workers.
“It’s a game-changer. Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper and most importantly, I think, it’s just plain common sense,” Biden said at the summit.
The Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of a new investment program from the Group of Seven (G7) called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The G7 is a forum of advanced economies that share values of liberal democracy, and the PGII is the answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has invested billions in infrastructure in developing African countries but brings with it the risk of debt traps for the governments that borrow from it. PGII is designed to connect democratic countries, the private sector, and development banks to create “sustainable and transparent investment in quality infrastructure.”
On December 5, Eugene Robinson noted in the Washington Post that Republicans are blasting Biden’s announcement last Tuesday of $1 billion in additional humanitarian aid to 31 African countries to address famine and displacement. Biden said that this help was “the right thing for the wealthiest nation in the world to do,” and Robinson noted that it is also smart. “Ultimately, it will be Nigerians, South Africans, Ethiopians, Angolans and the people of other African nations who decide the continent’s future,” he wrote. “They will remember who was there beside them all along. And who was not.”
Russia has also been working to gain influence in Africa with an eye to extracting the continent’s valuable minerals. It turned to the continent after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate Russia from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources. Russia has become the biggest supplier of arms to the continent.
The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatens Russia’s ability to continue to operate in Africa. As Mike Eckel of Radio Free Europe explained on Monday, Russia launches most of its African operations from the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Their loss would hamstring those operations. Russian officials are trying to negotiate with the insurgents who overturned Assad’s regime in order to secure those bases as well as Russia’s other footholds in the country. They have gone from calling the insurgents “terrorists” to referring to them as “armed opposition,” and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin has no plans for a public meeting with Assad.
The Syrian ambassador in Moscow told Russian media: “The escape of the head of this system in such a miserable and humiliating manner…confirms the correctness of change and brings hope for a new dawn.” Former Russian and Soviet diplomat Nikolai Sokov told Pjotr Sauer of The Guardian: “Moscow prefers to deal with those who have power and control, [and] discards those who lose them.” But, as the Institute for the Study of War noted, Russia’s inability to preserve Assad’s regime will make the African autocrats see it as an unreliable partner, an impression the Kremlin’s rapid about-face will do little to relieve.
On Monday, a senior administration official emphasized the same idea of self-determination that Biden’s administration applied to development in African countries. He told reporters that Assad’s collapse “is a day for Syrians, about Syrians. It’s not about the United States or anyone else. It’s about the people of Syria who now have a chance to build a new country, free of the oppression and corruption of the Assad family and decades of misrule. We owe them support as they do so, and we are prepared to provide it. But the future of Syria, like the fall of Assad today, will be written by Syrians for Syrians.”
That system, the official suggested, caused Assad’s fall. “[I]t is impossible not to place this week’s events in the context of the decisions the President has made to fully back Israel against Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, and Ukraine against Russia,” the official said. After bipartisan support for that position, the official added, “Hamas is on its back; its leaders are dead. Iran is on its back. Hezbollah is on its back. Russia is on its back. It’s just abandoned its only ally in the Middle East. Now, the Assad regime, Russia and Iran’s main ally in the Middle East, has just collapsed. None of this would have been possible absent the direct support for Ukraine and [Israel] in their own defense provided by the United States of America.”
The official recounted the importance of sanctions against the Assad regime and noted that the U.S. has maintained a military presence in Syria to counter the Islamic extremists of ISIS, targeting 75 ISIS targets immediately after Assad’s fall to ensure that ISIS does not regroup in the chaos of the moment.
The official noted that the administration still believes there is a path to a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza, especially in the wake of Assad’s fall and the “dramatically changed balance of power in the region”—“a path…to a Middle East that is far more stable, far more aligned with our interests, and far more aligned with the interests of the people of the Middle East who want to live in peace, without wars, and in prosperity in a region that is more integrated and prosperous and peaceful.”
Today, Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Jordan and Türkiye, where he met with King Abdullah II and President Recep Tayyip Erodğan to promote an “inclusive, Syrian-led” government transition in Syria.
Journalist Mike Eckel noted that “[t]he fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further.” Considering the ties of Russia to Syria, and the role Syrian bases have played in Russian influence in Africa, those reverberations will, in some form, echo across the African continent.
L-R: Unknown, Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk
