When Trump blasts Fox News for failing to "work for us," what's key is the *open and unabashed* assertion that he is entitled to a 24/7 propaganda outlet working on his behalf.
The open flaunting of Trump's corruption is a key feature of it.
We should view Trump's demand that Fox News function as his personal propaganda network, along with his nonstop lying and attacks on legitimate news organizations, as its own form of insidious corruption:
"All politicians shade the truth. But most hew to an underlying belief that gaslighting voters too shamelessly treats them with deep contempt; that at some point, factual reality has to matter; and that this is necessary for democracy to function."
Good piece by @AdamSerwer identifying a key through line of Trumpism: Creating subordinate, inferior classes that are more easily subjected to persecution and abuse 1/ theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Adding to @AdamSerwer, another one of Trump's executive orders also does this: It effectively declares that by pronouncing us under "invasion," Trump is now unbound by Congress or statute in determining what to do w/the "invaders," as I reported. 2/
@AdamSerwer Relatedly, this is also an important nugget from @AdamSerwer: Some factions in the conservative legal movement are using the "invasion" rationale to invent a new way to undermine the guarantee of birthright citizenship. 3/
Scoop --> Republicans didn't intend this, but it turns out the Laken Riley Act gives Steve Bannon a big weapon against Elon Musk. Bannon tells me he'll use it to get MAGA AGs to sue to block H1B visas. Rs created a big mess for themselves here.
This also creates more MAGA splits. Bannon will demand bans of H1B visas from, say, India. But will Secretary of State Marco Rubio want that? If not, Bannon can get AGs to try to force him to.
Also: Tech industry lobbyists are worried, source tells me.
Ominous: GOPers are now saying Trump is picking Kash Patel to "clean out" FBI and restore its "integrity." This will be their cover to go along w/Trump's scheme to unleash FBI on enemies. Media already credulously echoing this claim. Awful.
Nobody is required to pretend GOPers actually believe it when they say Trump is picking Kash Patel to "reform" the FBI in any meaningful sense. It's a lie. Rs know Trump is only picking him to target enemies and they should be hounded on this point.
There's also this media narrative that the GOP is now "suspicious" of law enforcement as part of a principled ideological repositioning. Nonsense. This should *itself* be treated as spin, as cover to justify abuses that Trump already intended to unleash.
First note that Elon Musk spent $20 million on the RBG PAC, which sought to deceive people into thinking Trump's abortion stance is similar to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's.
This and X becoming a right wing disinfo machine show the depths of the problem. 2/
I asked three DNC chair hopefuls how they'd fix the party's info problem. @benwikler tells me that millions of voters are getting *all* their info about Dems from GOP and right wing sources. He would train an army of surrogates to "disrupt" this. 3/
Striking: In numerous cases, Republicans or GOP-aligned industries are now admitting that mass deportations and rolling back Biden's climate agenda could prove disastrous in their parts of the country.
*In California, agriculture interests and GOP lawmakers fear mass deportations will cripple their industry
*In Texas, construction industry fears same
*In Georgia, at least one town that went for Trump worries economy will be upended
This is a good discussion but on immigration in particular this is not an intellectually adequate frame for understanding what happened. The groups did not dictate the Biden/Harris immigration agenda. If anything they were sidelined/ignored more aggressively than under Obama 1/
At this point someone will note that Harris took left wing positions on immigration in 2019. True, but the vast bulk of GOP attacks concerned the Biden/Harris handling of immigration *while in office,* and there Biden was mostly at odds with the groups all throughout 2/
It's true that Biden undid *some* of Trump's immigration policies. But these were mainly ones that produced particularly terrible humanitarian outcomes. Aside from that Biden took many actions that the groups disliked. See this @David_J_Bier rundown 3/ cato.org/blog/list-120-…