Originally published at: Trump and Vance Hit Unexpected Snag in Indiana
Former Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels penned an op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday evening encouraging Republicans in his home state’s Senate who are currently opposed to mid-cycle redistricting to stand firm and not cave to pressure from the White House. In the piece, Daniels, who has rarely made political statements since leaving office,…
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All this gerrymandering is going to bite them (republicans) in the butt.
And checking out the list of companies that donated to the stupid ballroom (which won’t have any dancing), I am very disappointed. While they are donating to try to save themselves from ruin over the orange clown, I wish they had a better outlook on this. I guess they don’t realize that he is not done asking them for money. Give him the hand and he will demand the entire arm. This decision to donate will bite them back as well.
Will the orange clown want to take that ballroom with him when he has to leave the white house?
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Yes, it will. Ideally, they’d manage to both overstretch their margins in as many districts as possible, and primary a lot of their own more squishy types to replace them with toxic unqualified hardliners.
No, he’ll generously lease it back to the United States for a “reasonable” fee.
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“Conceivably some computer could carve out a winnable GOP district."
Oh! That’s how it works! The politician picks the district he’ll represent.
That explains why Republicans have no interest in helping their districts. No connectivity to the people who live there. Heck, they can even skip town halls, while insisting we conform to “America’s true values.”
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You know what I would like to see? In every news report about Trump, instead of his sagging made-up puss, the image shown would be the torn down East Wing.
How quickly it has vanished from the news stream.
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disagree, it should always be a picture of a younger, fitter trump - next to Epstein
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I always held Indiana as a Mid-West South Carolina, never boycotted them like I did to SC because after all they fought for the Union.
But recently I have been surprised by the decency of Pence, Quayle, and these state representatives. Which means that you can be a reactionary without having to be and outright fascist and cheat.
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IF, and it is a big IF, an elected Republican can stand up to Trump and keep their job, then at least some progress will have been made.
The current Republican Party, and especially the rank and file, have one policy and one goal, White grievance and POWER respectively. They are entirely unified in this single policy and goal which is why so long as Trump speaks in grievance he has no challengers from within the GOP.
If someone within the GOP challenges this single goal of POWER, it might crack the White grievance unity.
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While the public face of the Republicans is to destroy the Democrat brand fully, this leap to redrawing the districts has been an absolute tell to me. They see the future and they themselves are not in it. They cannot win unless they stack the deck and cheat. And it is going to take some heavy lifting.
Meanwhile their King, who they fear, is going quite mad. Right along with his hand picked cabinet and advisors. The bottle cap is off and the Republicans were part of it. And they didn’t do the job and they will suffer for it.
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Trump says he’s ending trade talks with Canada over TV ads
Response to this
https://x.com/i/status/1978779503213052337
TORONTO — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday challenged President Trump to make a friendly wager on the outcome of the World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers.
But Mr. Carney said Mr. Trump hasn’t returned his call yet on the potential bet.
“I think he’s afraid, I think he’s afraid to make a bet,” Mr. Carney joked to The Associated Press while taking in batting practice at Toronto’s Rogers Centre a day before Game 1 of the World Series in Toronto
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Trump’s Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic
Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?
Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. So why do I want to talk about Trump’s appalling design sense?
But these aren’t separate issues, because tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.
I’ve read uncountably many articles about Trump and his motivations, and I continue to think that one of the most insightful is a piece by Peter York, published early in Trump’s first term, titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic.” York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles.
York was shown photos of a New York apartment, at first not knowing who owned it. His reaction:
I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold …
The apartment was, of course, Donald Trump’s. The purpose of all this excess wasn’t personal pleasure: dictators’ palaces generally look very uncomfortable. Instead, it was to project
a kind of power that bypasses all the boring checks and balances of collaboration and mutual responsibility and first-among-equals. It is about a single dominant personality.
So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?
This is all deeply alien to American tradition. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings. Yet the style of these monuments and public buildings is generally one of restrained neoclassicism meant to evoke the Roman Republic – an ideal of a republic of equals reflected in law and norms as well as architecture. Anything approximating the Louis XIV style of Trump would have been considered monarchical and autocratic by the Founding Fathers.
So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.
One final thought: According to social media, many men are obsessed with the Roman Empire. I’m not one of them, partly because I’ve read Patricia Crone’s classic Pre-industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World , so I know that even at the height of its glory the Roman Empire would have looked incredibly poor and shabby by 21st-century standards.
But I now find myself frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship. For, in essence, Roman emperors were dictators, regardless of the fancy trimmings.
What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.
The modern parallels are obvious. Here’s a photo of Jeff Bezos’s yacht:
But back to Trump’s demolition of the White House — because that’s what it is. This isn’t a remodeling or building an addition, it’s a teardown. It may seem like a trivial story, but it’s a highly visual metaphor for the way MAGA is tearing down almost everything good about our country. And that ballroom’s hideousness is an equally good metaphor for all the political ugliness that lies in our future.
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Trump is calling the Ontario ad fake because the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation complained about how it used “selective audio and video.” In other words, an edited version but not exactly fake, just condensed. Reagan did say the words. Here’s the ad:
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I’d be interested to see a photo of the crew quarters.