F**king Mondays: The Gaslighter in Chief, Deep Shit Democrats, and Bolton's Warning
This is how dictatorships are born.
Welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! In the roundup today:
There is no strategy
Having worked for Donald Trump during his first term, former national security advisor John Bolton knows a thing or two about the current president’s so-called “deal making”. Speaking to Anderson Cooper on why the Trump administration suspended cyber operations against Russia while blocking Ukraine's military aid, Bolton had this to say:
“I think it's really despicable to stop providing the intelligence to Ukraine. This is all part of how Trump does business. It's all personal. I know this is hard to understand that people think there's some policy behind it, but it's not. This is -- Trump believes that U.S. relations with other countries are embodied in his personal relations with the foreign heads of state.
He thinks Vladimir Putin is his friend. He's never liked Zelenskyy, not since the famous “perfect” phone call in 2019. And this is what you're getting. But if I may come to this order suspending offensive cyber operations against Russia, this is a huge mistake for the United States. Forget Ukraine, this isn't going to make Russia more eager to come to the table. It's the rest of Trump's policies abandoning Ukraine and taking Russia's side that prevent Russia from coming to the table. Why should they negotiate when Trump gives them everything they want?”
I’ve written about this numerous times before, but one of the greatest myths about Trump is that there is any substance behind him. There isn’t. Trump is a master manipulator and showman who has spent a lifetime destroying businesses, ripping off vendors, and scamming people with a long list of criminal enterprises. While his sycophants believe he is the “only one” who could pull off a deal with Russia and Ukraine, the reality is that he couldn’t care less about Ukraine, or peace. Trump views this as an opportunity to extort Ukraine and cozy up to Putin for short-term benefit. There is no strategy, no plan for lasting peace, and no vision for the region. It’s just another grift.
Trump really does believe that U.S. relations are determined by his personal relations with the foreign heads of state. He can do deals with autocratic psychopaths, because that’s what he aspires to be. But brave leaders who are willing to die to protect democracy in their country? Not so much.
Democrats are in deep shit
Democratic strategist Rachel Bitecofer has a fascinating piece on her Substack about the myth of the “professional left”. Citing the work of former right-winger turned real journalist Tina Nguyen, Bitecofer lays bare the reality about the Democratic party’s infrastructure.
In her book ‘The MAGA Diaries” Nguyen describes working for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller where she was hired to cover tech, but discovered quickly it was really about pushing hit pieces for the enemies of a Republican communications firm. Nguyen fled the right wing propaganda machine and reinvented herself as a real journalist, landing a job at Vanity Fair in 2017. At her new gig Nguyen was pitched a story about a program Democrats launched in 2005 to build future political candidates, leaders, and operatives. When digging into the story, Nguyen realized the Democrats had almost nothing in the way of infrastructure compared to the GOP. As Bitecofer writes, the GOP has an extremely well funded and highly coordinated infrastructure to grow and support new talent:
The Heritage Leadership Institute’s Young Leaders program has graduates like Josh Hawley, who they basically grew in a lab.
Republicans also have Turning Point USA, which has a four building complex in Tempe, Arizona and about an $80 million dollar operating budget.
And ALEC
And The Federalist Society
And Judicial Watch
(I could go on and on).
Meanwhile, Democrats have 500 mostly unfunded grassroots groups with overlapping goals running on elbow grease with no dignitaries in sight.
This came as a shock to Nguyen, who had been conditioned into believing in a vast Democratic machine, but not Bitecofer who has been banging the drums for radical reform of the party’s infrastructure for years. She writes:
If you want to understand why Democrats seem inept right now its because we have no brain trust. We have no small room of very smart people with a shit ton of money and authority strategizing on to how fund, build, and run the infrastructure we need to compete with the propaganda machine Republicans have spent decades financing and perfecting.
Instead we have a series of barely connected party organizations, tons of 501c3s, and SuperPACs like Future Forward, who managed to waste nearly a billion dollars on positive ads on Harris that allowed 60% of swing voters to have positive memories of Trump’s first term.
One of the main reasons I believed Kamala Harris was going to win in 2024 was because of her enormous war chest. Harris raised over a billion dollars during her short campaign (and still managed to spend more than she brought in), leading myself and others — like Bitecofer — to believe that any shortcomings in party infrastructure could be overcome by ludicrous sums of cash. In 2024 however, it turned out that how you spend money counts for more than how much money you spend. As Bitecofer writes:
MAGA speaks with one unified, well funded, centralized voice bashing Democrats 24/7 using infrastructure capable of hitting millions of people a day: we do not because as of today, we can not.
If the Democrats want to compete with Republicans going forward, Bitecofer argues that they are going to have to rebuild their infrastructure from the ground up:
Until and unless we create that brain trust, fund it to the tune of billions of dollars, and use it to get the DNC, DCCC, DSCCC, DLCC, and DGA (AT LEAST) humming the same tune the Democratic Party will remain incapable of meeting this moment.
Given the right is already hysterical about “professional left”, Democrats have nothing to lose by actually building one.
The gaslighter in chief
I watched Trump address to Congress last week and posted this to Substack Notes right after:
To me the performance was more frightening that anything I’d seen from him in years. He laughed, joked and trolled everyone in the room with the swagger of a newly crowned boxing champion. Trump knew he had not only destroyed the opposition but also crushed any remaining dissent in his own party. Here’s how Andrew Sullivan described the sordid scene:
We have a sociopathic president in total command of a cult-like party; a Congress that, as long as the GOP controls it, is a rubber-stamp version of the Russian Duma under Putin; a court balanced precariously between a modest defense of the unitary executive and an Alito wing bent on empowering an American Caesar; and a Justice Department openly planning persecution of the president’s political opponents.
The speech itself, mind you, was masterful. He’s at the top of his game and clearly loving every second of it. If you knew nothing of history or reality apart from it, you’d have been inspired, entranced, even ebullient about the greatest comeback of any country in all of human history by far! And the poignant individual stories were pitch-perfect, with the Democrats’ cringey lameness the cherry on the cake.
Trump’s ability to invent and sustain a false narrative, however crazy and however incoherent, is preternatural. So are his profound skills in psychological abuse deployed to make it stick: gaslighting, intimidating, manipulating, and menacing you so that, in the end, you have no idea what the truth is or could be, and submit to the man if only to get out of his way.
As Russian dissident Garry Kasparov once said: “The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth”. Once truth has been annihilated, people coalesce around the strongman whose certainty provides relief — even if they know that everything he says is a lie.
This is of course exactly how dictatorships are born. What can we do to resist? Never give into the lies. Ever.
Have a great week!
If you would like to support The Banter and our mission, you can get 50% off a membership below:
All this tells me is how piss poor the United States has been since the the 1980s at pursuing white collar criminals and dodgy con artists. Now they've put one in the presidency, which is upending both the US and the world.
I used to respect the United States and its institutions. Now? Not so much. A country that can't even stop its biggest criminals was already in trouble before the Nazi muskrat and Putin's best buddy, aka the criminal-in-chief, were promoted as co-presidents. It's just that the trouble was hidden under the carpet, whereas now it's visible to everyone.
Every day there is some news to make my gut roil.