January 6th - Another Day That Will Live In Infamy, Trump The Felon, Incoherent GOP Economic Plans Already Falling Apart

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Simon Rosenberg

Jan 06, 2025

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Morning all. We’ve talked about how the road ahead is going to be full of hard days. This is one of them. Stay strong.

On Friday Trump posted this on Truth Social:

Biden gave Liz Cheney a Medal yesterday, even though she has proven to be totally corrupt. She, “Bennie” Thompson, and the rest of the Unselect Committee, destroyed and deleted all evidence from their crooked investigation of January 6th. Cheney has the distinction of losing her Congressional seat by the largest margin in History! The people of Wyoming understood how bad for our Country she was, but Biden rewarded her only because she hated “TRUMP.” She’s a Warmonger of low intelligence. All she wants to do is kill people in “Endless Wars,” with no gain other than to defense companies. Liz Cheney, Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, Bennie Thompson, and the rest of these dishonest Thugs have gotten away with horrible things under the pretense of January 6th. Nancy Pelosi refused to accept the help which was offered for security. She is responsible, and admitted as much, for all to see, on her daughter’s tape. They have destroyed the lives of many people, and are rewarded by getting Biden Fake Medals. This is not America. January 20th cannot come fast enough. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Here is how she responded:

Here’s what I wrote to you in my very first post after the 2024 election:

While I am going to go slow, listen, and take my time I do have a few initial thoughts this morning about where we are now and where we are going, together……
Over the past few years we, our country, our leaders, Merrick Garland, the Harris SuperPAC and many, many others failed to adequately indict Trump and explain what an unprecedented threat he was. A rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon was just elected President. The relentless normalization of his extremism, madness and ugliness, the legacy media’s complicity in reporting on the race not the stakes, was a collective failure of enormous consequence.
Related to point one, I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.
It’s why whatever happens next, it is time for the Democratic Party’s generational wheel to turn and for new leaders who are not steeped in and hobbled by old ways to take the helm. We are facing a new battlefield, and more contemporary strategies, tactics, alliances and leaders are required in this next stage of the fight. Now is a time for re-invention, re-imagination, and risk-taking. We need to build a new politics for the American center-left, a more modern one, one more suited to the opportunities and challenges in front of us, a more “networked” one as my friend Joe Trippi would say.

An early test of our ability to fight and win in the new, emerging battlefield is how many of Trump’s unacceptable and dangerous 4 - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy and Patel - we can derail. Today would be a good day for everyone in this community to call their Senators and House Members, offer them good luck in this new Congress, and insist they do everything they can to block these 4 outrageous nominees. Gaetz went down. They need to follow. Thanks to all of you who have self-reported your actions to help defeat these terrible 4. Many members of our community have been working it!

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that Trump is likely to scale back his reckless, inflationary tariff plans:

President-elect Donald Trump’s aides are exploring tariff plans that would be applied to every country but only cover critical imports, three people familiar with the matter said — a key shift from his plans during the 2024 presidential campaign.
If implemented, the emerging plans would pare back the most sweeping elements of Trump’s campaign plans but still would be likely to upend global trade and carry major consequences for the U.S. economy and consumers….
…...
The potential change reflects a recognition that Trump’s initial plans — which would have been immediately noticeable in the price of food imports and cheap consumer electronics — could prove politically unpopular and disruptive.

This is a significant development for Republicans have been counting on the revenue of broad, across the board tariffs to make up revenue lost from their plutocratic tax cutting plans. Less revenue means higher deficits and much more trouble inside his already deeply unstable governing coalition. Trump’s team is working furiously to try to prevent Trump’s incoherent and reckless economic agenda from being implemented as he promised, for it’s inherent dangers are already starting to unravel the strong economy he’s inheriting; which in turn is putting the entire early Trump 2.0 project at risk.

Trump will be appearing in court this Friday to be sentenced for his 34 felony convictions:

A judge has ordered that Donald Trump will be sentenced on 10 January in his hush-money case in New York - less than two weeks before he is set to be sworn in as president.
New York Justice Juan Merchan signaled he would not sentence Trump to jail time, probation or a fine, but instead give him an "unconditional discharge", and wrote in his order that the president-elect could appear in person or virtually for the hearing.
Trump had attempted to use his presidential election victory to have the case against him dismissed.

In a new Substack post Timothy Snyder makes the case for Dems forming a “Shadow Cabinet:”

Like so much else in British public life, the institution of the shadow cabinet was unfamiliar to me, but I soon grew to appreciate and admire it. The "cabinet," of course, was the assembly of government ministers, led in Britain by the prime minister. The party in opposition (the Labour Party when I arrived in Britain in 1991) appointed its own leading members to "shadow" each government minister, including the prime minister.
Shadow meant follow. The shadow ministers "shadowed" the actual ministers, in the sense of following their every move, criticizing policy and offering alternatives. Importantly, the shadow minister was always available to offer commentary to the press on his or her area of expertise. This greatly enriched public life. At any point a journalist, and thus the public, had access to an alternative point of view, one which was both pertinently expert and politically relevant. Shadow ministers did not always become real ministers after the next elections, but often they did.
Four years ago today, Donald Trump led an attempt to overthrow a democratic election and thereby undo our constitutional system. In two weeks, the same man will be inaugurated president of the United States, this time with a centibillionaire as the unelected de facto head of government and with anti-qualified anti-patriots as his cabinet nominees. What to do? People talk about resistance, and about opposition. What forms should these take? I have written elsewhere about what citizens can do. Leading politicians of the opposition party, the Democratic Party in the United States, have a special responsibility, and also special opportunities. One of these is to form a shadow cabinet. I want to join the voices of those advocating for this. (Here I am speaking for the idea on television a few weeks ago.)

In the UK today Prime Minister Keir Starmer hit back at Elon Musk’s unhinged attacks on his government. In Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be announcing that he’ll not be running for re-election in what is now becoming a very consequential Canadian election later this year, one where Musk is also working to elect a far-right extremist (as he has here, and is now working actively to do so in the UK and Germany).

I just came across this smart Politico article on what happened in California in 2024. Victories, yes, but ongoing concerns about Democratic drop-off. It is worth a read.

On Friday, in his opening speech to kick off the 119th Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson recited a prayer he claimed was written by Thomas Jefferson. This was a lie. It is a prayer long popular in far right Christian nationalist circles, falsely and grotesquely attributed to Jefferson. The very first day in his very first speech Speaker Johnson lied and advanced a profound insult to American democracy (here’s a link to the Bluesky thread cited below):

Here’s something Thomas Jefferson actually wrote that speaks powerfully to our current moment:

Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg

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