Data Dump

Posted by zompist

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/fash-watch-4/

http://zompist.wordpress.com/?p=14822

I haven’t written one of these since April, and people have asked for an update. This is by no means complete; in fact it’s just what stuck in my mind. With this administration there is always something outrageous, stupid, and/or illegal every week.

(BTW, on my machines, WordPress has been absolutely awful. It’s either horribly slow, or I can’t update at all. If this continues I’ll have to move the blog.)

Executive summary: Things are bad, especially the war on Hispanics. The GOP is still ruining the economy and trying to bully the world. But things are not going the Republicans’ way.

My feeling is that the Republicans have shown their hand: most administrations do most of what they can do within the first year. I think they will fall short of the Orbánist state they want: they’re getting significant pushback and the November elections showed that they’re hemorrhaging votes.

First let’s go over some positives. It’s important to avoid doomerism and to recognize that fighting back works. (That doesn’t mean that everything is or will be OK.)

The Democrats won big in the 2025 election.

• California: Proposition 50 won, countering Texas’s gerrymander. For foreigners: normally seats are reassigned every 10 years. The GOP had the bright idea of doing it this year to try to pick up new seats by drawing absurd districts (‘gerrymandering’). Theoretically Texas would pick up 5 House seats for the GOP; now the Dems can pick up 5 Dem seats in California.
• Democrats won the governorship and expanded their control of the legislature in Virginia, and kept the governorshi pin New Jersey.
• 3 Dem judges retained on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, keeping their 5-2 majority.
• First statewide offices go to Dems in Georgia since 2006.
• Mississipi: Democrats flipped two seats, ending a GOP supermajority.
• New York City: Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani elected mayor; this is mainly a defeat for the stodgy old party establishment, and for pundits who think the Democrats are “too progressive.” NYC is an outlier, but Mamdani is extremely savvy and pragmatic, and his campaign for affordability was a winner.
• Pennsylvania: Dems flipped Bucks County sheriff’s office and ousted all Reps from school boards. The county went for Trump last year.

Democrats have been taking school boards across the country; this is important because, decades ago, this was the strategy conservatives used to launch their 1980s resurgence.

Trump is wildly unpopular– his approval rating is 40%. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, authoritarians like Viktor Orbán were able to take power and attack democracy precisely because they were popular. It’s a lot harder when the majority is strongly against the would-be dictator.

Trump had a big public falling-out with Elon Musk, who sulked back to his companies and darkly threatened to start a new party. The good news is that this was pretty much it for Musk’s destroy-government project, DOGE; the bad news is that most of the damage is already done.

The Supreme Court has mostly allowed Trump to overthrow the rule of law, but at least they seem unimpressed with his declaring fake emergencies to levy tariffs. No final decision yet, though. (Two appeals courts have found his tariffs illegal.)

The Republicans got Jimmy Kimmel off the air for criticizing Trump, a chilling blow to free speech. But after widespread protests, he was back on the air after a little more than a week.

About 7 million people joined one of over 2000 No Kings protests in October— more than the previous event.

Trump has not been able to bully China. Xi Jinping holds the high cards here, largely due to China’s near-monopoly on rare earths… to say nothing of having the largest economy in the world (by purchasing parity). He’s also pissed off rather than intimidated India.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been losing control over the House. An increasingly successful strategy is bipartisan groups using discharge petitions to force votes on their bills.

The Republicans, for years, built up hope in their base that the Epstein files would be released, presumably damaging their enemies. Once in office they released nothing. Then, this fall, Trump and Johnson both exerted enormous efforts to keep Congress from forcing releases of the files. This is pretty baffling: it annoys their own base, and makes everyone wonder what they’re hiding. It’s likely enough that nothing big is there: if there were anything that could be used against Democrats it would have been used months ago. (And if there were anything big against GOP , Biden would have used it.) It’s a mystery, and not a good look, why the GOP leadership tried to keep the files hidden. But also unsuccessful, which is a big defeat for Trump: Congress was willing to vote against him. To save face, he turned around and supported the release of the files.

On Trump’s Asia trip, many noted that he seemed to have trouble moving around, kept losing focus, and was more incoherent than usual. He seems to be experiencing an increasing cognitive decline. In the short term this probably is welcomed by the cronies and cranks who are handling him, since they can do as they want. In the longer term it’s a big problem for the GOP, since Trump is the glue that holds the party together. Though outsiders don’t see him as charismatic, his base sure does, and no one else has been able to do what he does.

On to the negatives.

On ICE’s campaign of terror, I can’t explain it better than this page does. Some quotes:

Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. […]

On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Shore. Roughly three hundred agents deployed flashbangs, busted down doors, and took people indiscriminately. US citizens—some women and children—were grabbed from their beds, marched outside without even a chance to dress, zip-tied, and loaded into vans. Residents returned to find their windows and doors broken and their belongings stolen. Despite the violence of the raid, it appears no criminal charges were filed.

This is real fascism, and the only upside is that a lot of people who voted for the GOP are realizing that they don’t want this. The country needs immigtants, businesses need workers, Hispanics need to live in safety. Last year lots of Hispanics voted for the GOP; that shift was erased in this month’s election.

In previous posts I talked about the economic ruin caused by tariffs, hobbling education, impeding foreign tourism and study, alienating allies and China alike. The economy is propped up by AI boosterism, and that lools like it’s cracking.

But there’s a more insidious problem: the Republican goal is crony capitalism. There’s at least some amusement in letting the arch-libertarians at Cato explain it.

The administration has been bombing ships at sea. There have been threats to invade Venezuela, Colombia, and Nigeria (?!). Trump bombed Iran in June. Ironically such posturing annoys some of his base, which is not in favor of wars abroad.

Trump directed the Justice Department to indict his political opponents, notably former FBI director James Comey. As of this week this was falling apart, as the courts declared that his move of naming his personal lawyer as a federal prosecutor, bypassing the Senate, was illegal.

The Supreme Court has disallowed a few minor things (e.g. it ordered the return of Kilmar Garcia to the US— the administration is now apparently planning to deport him to Africa— and turning down a chance to undo its decision legalizing same-sex marriage), but it has done nothing to stop Trump’s power grabs, notably impoundment. (For the less politically obsessed: this means the executive ending programs at his whim that were authorized and funded by Congress. It’s illegal and unconstitutional: Congress decides what the laws are and how to spend federal money.)

The problems with having a demented toddler in charge are becoming evident. Trump held up a trade deal with Canada because a provincial governor ran TV ads he didn’t like. At the same time, thoes who know how to flatter and charm Trump become his favorites, even temporarily. Obviously the bad guys know how to do this most easily, but Mamdani got along with Trump surprisingly well. (Apparently he did this by being laser-focused on “affordability”, which Trump has belatedly realized is a big issue for Americans.)

Less than a week after the invigorating Democratic wins on November 5, eight Senate Democrats voted with the Republicans to end the government shutdown, widely seem as a pathetic betrayal. The Republican position on the government shutdown has been aptly described as “We’ll stop feeding poor kids until you let us take away millions of American voters’ health insurance.”

Climate change denialism continues. Of course it’d be pretty bad to ruin the ecosphere that keeps billions of us alive; but it’s truly idiotic to cede leadership on renewable energy to China. I don’t begrudge them their success— they’re making non-carbon-producing energy available all around the world. But it’s insane to cut back on our own promising renewables industry in favor of an all-in bet on climate-harming AI.

Oh, and just this week Trump has been pushing to end the Ukraine war by having Ukraine give into all of Putin’s demands. The details are readily available if you like stories where evil wins. However, the administration is now backpedalling furiously as Europeans, Ukrainians, and quite a few Republicans are objecting to Trump’s Putin-worship.

Krugman again:

The administration has been doing all it can to dismantle institutions, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that were created to help keep investors and markets safe after the 2008 financial crisis. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and other Trump officials and allies — including some officials at the Federal Reserve — have also been doing all they can to undermine bank supervision, which tries to limit the kind of risk-taking that brought on the 2008 crisis.

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/fash-watch-4/

http://zompist.wordpress.com/?p=14822