Month: November 2024
Trump Set to Ban Transgender Military Servicemembers
“Donald Trump is planning an executive order that would lead to the removal of all transgender members of the U.S. military. … The order could come on his first day back in the White House, January 20. There are believed to be about 15,000 active service personnel who are transgender. They would be medically discharged, which would determine that they were unfit to serve.”
— The Times of London
Trump’s Secretaries of Sexual Abuse
“If everyone is a sexual predator, then no one’s history of misdeeds matters (or, at least, no one needs to be held accountable). … MAGA Republicans seem to be having their own #MeToo moment, except here, a growing cohort of men is essentially saying: Oh, another man accused of sexual predation? #MeToo—and so what? Being accused of sexual harassment, abuse, or assault is no longer disqualifying; on the right, it has been normalized. It may even be an asset.”
— Jill Filipovic
Musk’s Wealth Hits Record $348 Billion
$348 billion
“Elon Musk’s net worth hit an all-time high of $347.8 billion on Friday, driven by Tesla Inc.’s ongoing stock rally and a new funding round valuing his artificial intelligence startup xAI at $50 billion,” Bloomberg reports. “Musk’s numerous businesses have been surging in value since Donald Trump’s election victory propelled Musk, the so-called ‘first buddy,’ into the political spotlight.”
Trump’s Tariffs Target Top Three Sources of U.S. Imports
This is not incompetence. It’s an attack. Creating economic chaos is fundamental to the authoritarian playbook.
After Running against High Prices, Trump Warns Americans That He’ll Raise Prices Across the Board The chaos is the point
In Shock Doctrine, her seminal work on the rise of authoritarnism in the contemporary world, Naomi Klein shows how fascists undermine democracies in order to replace them with authoritarian states by creating and exploiting economic chaos. In the disruptions that ensue, they seize power.
In advance of his inauguration next month, Trump is saying plainly that he is very intentionally bringing economic chaos on day one. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do.”
Salon.com: Donald Trump, who won in part due to inflation that peaked two years ago, campaigned on a policy of making everything from vegetables to televisions more expensive, suggesting a plurality of voters either did not understand tariffs — and the rippling economic impact of raising taxes on imported goods — or simply did not believe the Republican candidate would follow through.
In a Monday evening post on Truth Social, the president-elect reaffirmed that yeah, he’s serious.
