And there’s a song already.

And in case any of you missed it, here is the NY Times analysis of the Minnesota shooting that uncledad linked to in comments yesterday. It’s very helpful.

I wonder if Kristi Gnome and Trump were even aware that this video was all over cable news and social media already when they released their statements about what happened. The Gnome’s description of what happened bore no resemblance whatsoever to the video, and millions of people likely had already seen the video. And of course Trump’s claim that an ICE agent had been “run over” was downright hallucinatory.

Yesterday seemed like an inflection point to me, but we’ll see.

Trump chose yesterday to ask  Congress to add another half trillion dollars to the defense budget, to bring it to $1.5 trillion.

The president provided few details in his post on Truth Social, other than to say the money would pay for his “Dream Military.” Trump did suggest that tariff revenues could cover the increase, but even if he managed to circumvent Congress’ constitutionally mandated power over spending, existing tariff collections would still be several hundred billion short of what the president plans to ask for.

While finding half-a-trillion dollars in new spending would prove difficult, Trump and some congressional Republicans appeared confident they could do so. The budget reached $1 trillion this year thanks to $150 billion in new money Congress voted to pour into Pentagon coffers via a reconciliation bill, although much of that will be spread out over the next five years on various long-term projects.

This is just ridiculous. But it ties into Paul Krugman’s column today, titled The Looting of U.S. Foreign Policy.  He starts out talking about Trump’s oil grabbing plans in Venezuela, which seem mostly about enriching Trump and his clique, and then writes this:

I use the word “clique” advisedly. That’s the term used by the political scientists Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman in a recent paper titled “Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System.”

Goddard and Newman have received well-deserved attention for their analysis, which states that Americans should stop believing that U.S. foreign policy serves U.S. national interests. Instead, they argue, we must recognize that in many ways we’ve been transported back to the 16^th century – a time before nation-states existed, when international affairs were a game played by dynasties serving their interests.

Thus, the Italian Wars of the 16^th century weren’t a fight between France and Spain, they were a contest for dominance between the House of Valois and the Habsburgs. Similarly, Goddard and Newman argue that Trumpist foreign policy has nothing to do with, well, making America great again, and everything to do with raising the wealth and status of the Trump family and its hangers-on — what they call our ruling clique.

As Goddard and Newman point out, U.S. foreign policy over the past year makes no sense if interpreted through the lens of national interest. How can it serve U.S. interests to insult and demean Canada, which has been an utterly reliable ally? Why would a U.S. president talk about seizing Greenland, which belongs to another ally, Denmark, and is a place where America already has a military base and can do whatever it considers necessary to protect our national security?

But the Trump clique doesn’t care whether nations have been staunch allies of the United States. They want subservient clients paying tribute, not to America, but to them personally. And that’s something democracies like Canada and Denmark won’t do.

Of course. Now that Krugman points it out, it seems to obvious. Krugman goes on to say that this is why Trump has no interest in restoring democratic government to Venezuela. A corrupt autocracy can be bullied into paying protection money to him. A democracy won’t do that.

According to a December report in The National Interest (an ironic name given Trump’s policies) moving a carrier group to the Caribbean cost around $600 million. In addition, the ongoing operational costs are $6.5 million per day, which have been accumulating since late October/early November. Add in the cost of munitions expended during the Maduro abduction, and the whole adventure has surely cost more than a billion dollars. Moreover, the meter keeps ticking: since Chavistas are still in power, Trump has to keep forces nearby in order to intimidate them to honor agreements. But Trump doesn’t care: The military expenses are the little people’s problem.

The bottom line is that to understand what Trump is doing around the world you must disabuse yourself of the notion that any of it is about serving America. It’s all about glorifying himself and enriching his clique.

He’s not just looting Venezuela. He’s looting American taxpayers and using taxpayer-funded resources like the U.S. military to carry out looting to benefit himself and his cronies. The military expenses are the little people’s problem.

Likewise, ICE is obviously not about making America safer. It’s about making America intimidated. We’ll be more compliant if we’re all afraid.

And I see that Trump’s talk about taking over Greenland is being taken very seriously now.

Yesterday Trump floated the idea of canceling the midterms and then said he wouldn’t do it. Of course not. If he can stir up enough violence and unrest in the U.S. maybe he can use that as an excuse. Constitutionally he has no authority to cancel elections, nor does Congress. Elections are run by the states. But if he could set up a scenario in which some red states did cancel elections he might go to court and say the election results are invalid because some states didn’t participate. I think we need to get ahead of this. But I’m not sure how.

An ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minnesota today. Immediately Kristi Gnome claimed the woman was a domestic terrorist who was trying to ram ICE agents with her car. Already Gov. Walz and Minneapolis Mayor have both seen a video of the incident and say the video doesn’t show the agent being threatened.  We also have an eyewitness account:

Emily Heller lives near 33rd and Portland and said she woke up to a commotion outside her home. She said she saw a car blocking traffic on Portland Avenue that appeared to be part of a protest against federal law enforcement operations.

Heller said she heard ICE agents telling the driver, a woman, to “get out of here.”

“She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” Heller said.

Heller said it appeared the woman then accelerated and traveled about 100 feet before striking a utility pole and some other vehicles. She could be seen slumped over inside her car.

It may be a while before all the details are public. But we already know that from now on all the MAGAts will defend the ICE shooter and say he was acting in self defense, Just like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse. And the dead woman was terrorist libtard scum. Same old same old.

I just watched a video of the incident taken on a bystander’s phone. I don’t know if this is the same video Walz and Frey saw or not. It seems obvious the woman was trying to turn away from the ICE agents and get away from them. I didn’t see any ICE agent in danger, unless there was one crouching in front of her car so he couldn’t be seen. You can see it here, starting at about 1:50.

The Gnome says that the shooting victim was a domestic terrorist. I say the Gnome has led a sheltered life.

Trump appears to be very pleased with himself over his Venezuela adventure, meaning he hasn’t yet grasped what a mess he gotten himself (and us) into. I found this at Axios this morning:

President Trump said Monday the U.S. may subsidize oil companies’ efforts to rebuild Venezuela’s energy infrastructure in a project he estimated could take less than 18 months. …

…The president argued that having access to Venezuela’s oil would allow supply to flow more freely, bringing prices down in the U.S.

Trump has claimed Venezuelan officials stole U.S. oil assets when the country nationalized the industry, though experts say the situation is complex.

He has said the U.S. would restore Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and compensate American companies that lost out in the seizures.

Trump always underestimates how complicated the world is and how difficult fixing a problem will be. Everything I’m reading says that getting Venezuela’s infrastructure up to speed will take “years,” or “several years,” or possibly “a decade.” And the cost will be massive. (See Rebuilding Venezuelan oilfields won’t be easy or cheap, analysts say, by Ben German at Axios.) Trump’s story about how the oil companies might be reimbursed keeps changing. Oil companies lost billions of dollars when Venezuela nationalized its oil industry and sent the oil companies packing. Trump sometimes makes noises about the U.S. reimbursing them for that loss, which makes no sense to me. Or sometimes he talks about compensating them for rebuilding the infrastructure now. There’s every reason to fear this project could take a big hit on U.S. taxpayers.

But there’s currently something of an oil glut that’s expected to continue for a while. Even if the Venezuelan oil industry could be optimized in a few, or several, years, will there be a market for the oil then? At a price that would make the investment worthwhile? And will Venezuela benefit from any of this? See Trump says he’ll unleash Venezuela’s oil. But who wants it? at Grist.

Paul Waldman writes that Trump’s Venezuela adventure is already a propaganda disaster. Nobody speaking for the Trump Administration seems to be on the same message regarding Venezuela. For that matter, Trump himself seems to change the story by the hour. Beyond his general notion that U.S. oil companies will get Venezuela’s oil production up to speed, there are countless details up in the air about how that’s going to happen. And who is really running Venezuela? One minute Trump says he is; another minute the existing government is still in charge but will be coerced into meeting U.S. expectations, somehow. Waldman writes,

Nevertheless, the incoherence of the Trump administration’s communication suggests that what happens next in Venezuela will be an unfolding series of screwups. If these clowns can’t even get the American public to support a war, do we really think they’ll be able to manage an infinitely more difficult task of nation-building?

Assuming they are planning any nation-building, of course. I’m not sure they are.

See also Greg Sargent, Trump Blurts Out Dark Truth About Venezuela Plan—and About MAGA Voters.

… note that most analysis of Trump’s plans for Venezuela has proceeded on two tracks. One of them, as Seva Gunitsky explains, posits that Trump envisions a “tripartite” division of the world, in which the U.S., Russia, and China all bless one another’s domination of their respective regions in a “hegemonic carve-up.” The other sees Trump’s action through the prism of domestic corruption: He’s turning Venezuela over to American oil companies and executives, some of whom bankrolled his reelection.

We need to put those two pieces together. Trump appears to envision something like a “hegemonic carve-up” that also gives regional MAGA-friendly oligarchies a major stake in our “share” of that tripartite division’s spoils. This is already the Putin model: authoritarian rule that enables smash-and-grab oligarchy by those in the regime’s good favor. Trump is making it unusually explicit that in this sphere of influence, Trump-approved oligarchs will be enriched by our regional spoils.

“Baked into Trump’s views on these so-called spheres-of-influence are opportunities to enrich himself, his inner circle, his donors, and his fellow oligarchs,” Casey Michel, a New Republic contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, tells me. “Putin envisions a world in which a small group of imperialists loot their portions of the globe as they see fit. Trump has been envious of this model for a long time. He’s implementing it himself in the Western hemisphere.”

Trump is boasting about taking on Cuba or Colombia or Mexico or Greenland next. Congress absolutely must re-assert itself to shut him down. But will they?

Nobody knows Trump’s post-Maduro plan for Venezuela. There doesn’t seem to be one, beyond a vague notion that U.S. oil companies will take over oil production and the government of Venezuela had better cooperate. Paul Krugman:

Two days after the abduction, it’s clear that Trump wasn’t seeking regime change, at least not in any fundamental way. He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take.

Maduro may be in custody in New York, but his allies are still in power in Caracas. Trump would rather work with them than with the Maduro opposition in Venezuela.

“It’d be very tough for her to be the leader,” Trump said when asked about Machado on Saturday, adding that she“doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.” …

…Two people close to the White House said the president’s lack of interest in boosting Machado, despite her recent efforts to flatter Trump, stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award the president has openly coveted.

Although Machado ultimately said she was dedicating the award to Trump, her acceptance of the prize was an “ultimate sin,” said one of the people.

“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” this person said.

Do note skepticism of this story. It’s more likely Trump is not likely to cede control of anything once he gets his little hands on it. Trump sees himself as the new capo di tutti capi of Venezuela and expects the lieutenants of the former capo to answer to him. That really does seem to be the plan. Trump lieutenant Marco Rubio is saying he’s not going to go into Caracas and try to actually run things, but instead will “coerce” the government to take direction from Trump.

The secretary of state suggested the U.S. would continue to maintain a blockade on sanctioned oil shipments from Venezuela and use that as leverage to seek concessions from the government. Rubio said this is “sort of control the president is pointing to” and the oil “quarantine” gives the U.S. a “tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes.”

I’m grateful, at least, there are no U.S. troops in Venezuela putting their lives at risk for this stunt. Let’s hope that continues.

Yesterday I wrote about the oil issue and why U.S. oil companies are possibly not as eager to go into Venezuela as Trump assumes. I see that Reuters and some other news outlets are reporting that U.S. oil execs are saying Trump did not consult with them before nabbing Maduro. All of these outlets are behind a paywall so I can’t see the details.  Yesterday I cited a Politico story saying that the oil execs had been tipped off something in Venezuela was about to happen. In Trump’s mind, maybe that was “consulting.”

On the other hand, Judd Legum at Popular Information writes that ousting Maduro was a big help to one of Trump’s biggest donors, Paul Singer.

In November 2025, Singer acquired Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Singer, through his private investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, bought Citgo for $5.9 billion. The sale to Amber Energy, a subsidiary of Elliott Investment Management, was forced by creditors of Venezuela after the country defaulted on its bond payments.

Citgo owns three major refineries on the Gulf Coast, 43 oil terminals, and a network of over 4,000 independently owned gas stations. By all accounts, Singer acquired these assets at a major discount. Advisors to the court that oversaw the sale valued Citgo at $13 billion, while Venezuelan officials said the assets were worth as much as $18 billion.

Singer acquired Citgo at a bargain price in large part due to the embargo, with limited exceptions, on Venezuela oil imports to the United States. Citgo’s refiners are purpose-built to process heavy-grade Venezuelan “sour” crude. As a result, Citgo was forced to source oil from more expensive sources in Canada and Colombia. (Oil produced in the United States is generally light-grade.) This made Citgo’s operations far less profitable.

Elliott Investment Management is known as a “vulture” fund because it specializes in buying distressed assets at rock bottom prices.

Muduro’s government was also seeking to appeal court approval of Singer’s bid for Citgo. Now that Maduro has been ousted, however, it seems unlikely that the appeal will continue.

Singer no doubt has Trump’s ear; they may even have done some “consulting.” As for the rest of the U.S. oil industry, this is Paul Krugman —

But you know who doesn’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in Venezuela? Oil companies. They see a dilapidated infrastructure that would cost billions to repair. They don’t see a stable political environment above ground. And while Venezuela has large oil reserves, much of its oil is “extra heavy, making it polluting and expensive to process.”

Trump is supposed to meet with oil execs soon at some not-yet-specified time. That may not go well.

In the meantime, I am not going to predict what may happen in Venezuela over the next few months.

A big part of Trump’s Plan for Venezuela involves U.S. oil companies investing a lot of money into getting Venezuela’s oil industry back on its feet. But the oil companies don’t seem to be leaping at the opportunity. This is from Politico:

Administration officials have told oil executives in recent weeks that if they want compensation for their rigs, pipelines and other seized property, then they must be prepared to go back into Venezuela now and invest heavily in reviving its shattered petroleum industry, two people familiar with the administration’s outreach told POLITICO on Saturday. The outlook for Venezuela’s shattered oil infrastructure is one of the major questions following the U.S. military action that captured leader Nicolás Maduro.

But people in the industry said the administration’s message has left them still leery about the difficulty of rebuilding decayed oil fields in a country where it’s not even clear who will lead the country for the foreseeable future.

“They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed,’” said one industry official familiar with the conversations.

The offer has been on the table for the last 10 days, the person said. “But the infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable.”

So the oil execs must have known that Trump planned to invade Venezuela and seize assets for several weeks. But this article is saying none of them seem all that eager to go along with the plan.

A central concern for U.S. industry executives is whether the administration can guarantee the safety of the employees and equipment that companies would need to send to Venezuela, how the companies would be paid, whether oil prices will rise enough to make Venezuelan crude profitable and the status of Venezuela’s membership in the OPEC oil exporters cartel. U.S. benchmark oil prices were at $57 a barrel, the lowest since the end of the pandemic, as of the market’s close on Friday.

Trump has already announced that the oil companies will be rebuilding the infrastructure. He said something about them being “reimbursed,” but gave no details about what that would mean. Probably Trump doesn’t know what it means, either. He’s not a policy details guy.

But this is reminding me of  the Bush Administration’s half-assed planning for “regime change” in Iraq, which is to say they had no plan other than ousting Saddam Hussein. There’s an excellent retrospective of What Went Wrong in Iraq at the Brookings Institute, The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction. It’s very much worth reading, especially since most of the “sins” are already present in Trump’s Venezuela gambit.  And I doubt very much that the oil execs are eager to march into Venezuela anytime soon. If within a few months the country is reasonably peaceful they might send people into the old oil fields to do an assessment. And even then they might say no.

There’s a good backgrounder on Venezuela’s oil industry and its relationship with the U.S. at Wikipedia. That relationship is old and messy. Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest known oil reserve. But much of it is “heavy crude,” which is more expensive to extract and refine than most other oil. Plus the existing oil infrastructure in Venezuela is old and decayed, and oil production in Venezuela has slowed to a trickle for the past few years. I don’t see the oil execs agreeing to anything until all the details are worked out. And that’s going to take a while.

There are more complications. Trump has rejected Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado as Maduro’s puppet replacement. Instead, he has decided that Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez should take over. Trump has told reporters that Rodriguez already has been sworn in as president, although there’s no indication from Venezuela that has happened. And Rodriguez seems to not want to be a puppet.

The 56-year-old former labour lawyer struck a defiant tone in her televised speech on Saturday night. She condemned the abduction of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and demanded their return.

“What is being done to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law. History and justice will make the extremists who promoted this armed aggression pay,” she said. “There is only one president in Venezuela and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”

So the regime change thing may take some more work.

Josh Marshall also says that no one person in the Trump administration is really in charge.

Let me reiterate a general point I’ve made in other posts. I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezueala for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with Maduro. That combination of factors created a lot of forward momentum within the U.S. government with nothing pushing back in the opposite direction. That gets you to today. My point is that it’s a mistake to think there’s a “real” reason mixed in with other subterfuges and rationales, or that it’s important to find out which one the “real” reason is. It’s not that linear or logical.

And I think it’s safe to say the whole bleeping Trump Administration has gotten itself into something that’s way over its head. Not the first time, of course. But they’re about to learn that the military operation that seized Maduro was the easy part. They’re at great risk of finding themselves in an unpopular quagmire that will drag on for many months and possibly years.

I’m still trying to digest what’s up with Trump and Venezuela. Here’s the latest from the New York Times:

Hours after a U.S. military operation that captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, President Trump said the United States would “run the country until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” Mr. Maduro and his wife are being taken to New York to stand trial on drug and weapons charges, he said.

Mr. Trump offered few details about how the United States would oversee Venezuela, saying only that “a group” would do so. He added that he was not afraid of “boots on the ground.”

Mr. Trump said Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, had spoken to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and told him she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary.” But hours earlier, Ms. Rodríguez denounced the U.S. operation on state television.

Trump can’t run this country properly, much less another one. I take it Marco Rubio and Pentagon Pete will be in charge of Venezuela. Maybe Pete will line up all the men and order them to shave.

Putting Maduro on trial in New York is an interesting move. Can the DoJ even prove it has jurisdiction? Trump would probably have to prove that Maduro is directly in charge of gangs operating within the U.S., and he may not be able to do that.

In his press conference today, Trump tried to make Maduro sound like a threat to the United States:

Trump addressed reporters shortly after returning to Florida, framing the developments in Venezuela as an urgent national security matter and casting the Maduro government as a direct threat to the United States. The president said the now-deposed Venezuelan leader had deepened ties with foreign adversaries while pursuing advanced weaponry capable of harming Americans.

“Furthermore, under the now deposed dictator Maduro, Venezuela was increasingly hosting foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing, offensive weapons that could threaten U.S. interests and lives,” Trump said. “And they use those weapons. Last night. They used those weapons last night, potentially in league with the cartels operating along our border.”

Bring on the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake. I don’t doubt Venezuelans used some weapons last night, as they were being attacked. Duh. Then Trump mentioned the Monroe Doctrine without giving a hint that he knows what that is. It’s being superseded by the “Donroe Doctrine.” I’m serious; he said that.

Congress wasn’t even notified of this move, of course. It was not only illegal under the Constitution it also violated the UN charter (see Just Security). 

Needless to say, this will not turn out well. And maybe it was about the oil after all. CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Saturday said U.S. oil companies will invest billions of dollars in Venezuela’s energy sector after the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro. 

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said in a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Let’s start making money for the country,” Trump said.

Trump can’t order our very large oil companies to do squat in Venezuela. I’m sure they’d do it if there’s a guaranteed profit for them, but that’s not making money “for the country.” That’s making money “for the oil companies.”

I’m sure there will be more details over the next few hours. I just want to note this one reaction from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

the ultimate democratic party response: i LOVE the crazy illegal thing you just did, but could you perhaps come to my office to sign form 317b for it?

[image or embed]

— Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 9:38 AM

Yeah, Dems need to work on the resistance thing. Some of them aren’t very good at it.

The Mamdani era of New York City politics begins. Over the past couple of days social media have been jammed by “New York City RIP” messages from righties. They can’t wait for Mamdani to fail.

Of course, there was general hysteria when it was learned he took the New York mayoral oath of office on a Quran. Two Qurans, actually. The oath must be invalid! I spent part of yesterday writing a backgrounder on why the Constitution does not require swearing on the Bible to take oaths of office. There were also rumors that Mamdani had refused to take any oath to uphold the Constitution. This was all nonsense, of course. Much suspicion was cast on the midnight ceremony in which he first took the oath. It was a “private” ceremony in that attendance was by invitation only. Obviously, he was trying to hide something. But it was televised. There are videos all over the web.

The term of the previous mayor ends at midnight, so new mayors are sworn in immediately after midnight. Then at the public inauguration yesterday afternoon, I understand he took the oath again. This is normal. But everything he says or does or didn’t say or didn’t do is being picked apart and held up as an example of the danger he poses to America.

Mayor Mamdani’s inaugural speech is quite good, IMO, and worth reading. Much of what he wants to do is going to be a heavy lift, but I think he is capable of success. Let’s hope.

Here’s another video for you — Jack Smith’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. I have only seen bits of it, but this is supposed to be the whole thing. It may take a while to watch.

The Trump Administration continues to shoot itself in the foot. As I understand it, some rightie influencer made a video accusing daycare centers run by Somalis in Minnesota of fraud. We’ve been having dump on Somalis in Minnesota month, I take it. Whether this guy found actual fraud, or whether his claims are the fraud, is still up in the air. But HHS has frozen all federal subsidies to day care in all 50 states. It will be up to day care centers to prove to HHS that they are legitimate, or something. This will take a while.

So along with losing their health insurance a lot of people are going to start the new year by losing their day care. Yeah, that’s a great way to endear oneself to the voters.

Happy new year.

I’m not in the mood to celebrate, but if you are, enjoy and stay safe.

The coming year is likely to be an epic mess. But let’s hope that by this time next year we’ll be in a better place. In the meantime, I hope you all keep commenting here. It helps me and I hope it helps you.

Update:

A wave of business bankruptcies is slamming the U.S. economy, Business Insider reports.  “From billion-dollar giants to mom-and-pop shops to everyday individuals, bankruptcies are piling up  across the US this year, with large corporate bankruptcies already hitting their highest level in 15 years.” Do tell.

Paul Krugman writes that small businesses are getting the worst of it. Although the tariffs are hurting everybody, big companies are better able to absorb sudden extra cost. Big companies can also game the system to their advantage; small businesses cannot. Finally, the end of the Obamacare tax credits means small business employees, and many employers, are losing their health insurance.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are evaporating. Trump really didn’t do much for manufacturing jobs in his first term. For a couple of years he coasted on the momentum of President Obama’s economy, but by 2019 the U.S. was in a manufacturing recession. (See U.S. manufacturing dives to 10-year low as trade tensions weigh by Reuters, October 2019.) And then came Covid.

But that was then. A month ago Fortune reported that Despite Trump’s best efforts to reshore manufacturing, blue-collar employment is plunging for the first time since the pandemic with 59,000 lost jobs. Sorry I can’t report past the headline; there’s a paywall. For how many manufacturing jobs Trump has actually lost, see the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The numbers are preliminary, but could be as many as 208,000. And that’s just manufacturing. See also ‘An Abject Failure’: Economists Trash Trump’s Disastrous Job Creation Record in Year-End Reviews at Common Dreams.

Whether the U.S. economy is in danger or is showing resilience and should do fine depends on whom you ask. But from what I’m reading all the juice is going into tech, especially AI and related industries, while everything else is struggling. And of course Trump and the clowns he’s chosen for his cabinet are not capable of making any of this any better.

But I’m not sure the state of the economy is getting as much attention as it normally would. There’s so much drama going on, all the time, to focus on any one thing. Today Trump is busy making a mess of the Ukraine-Russia crisis and engaging in an undeclared and unauthorized war in Venezuela. Plus he’s bombing more boats in the Pacific now. Trump appears to be in denial that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the economy, and his flickering attention span is elsewhere. Except that he’s still talking about giving Americans a “tariff dividend” of $2000, which would really be a payoff to dispose taxpayers toward voting Republican in the midterms. We’ll see.

Gallup says the public is in a gloomy mood. Gloomy enough to punish Republicans in 2026?  I guess we’ll find out.

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday. And now, back to work.

The Trump Administration certainly had a busy holiday. First we had a big Christmas Eve Epstein files document announcement. More than one million files they previously didn’t know about have somehow turned up! Somebody must have stacked them in a back hall under the old pizza boxes. My goodness, what a surprise. And after Trump’s girl Pam kept saying the DoJ had done an “exhaustive review” of everything Epstein and there was nothing in the files worth releasing. It’s going to take them a while to review all that, of course.

And then on Christmas Day Trump bombed Nigeria. Why did Trump bomb Nigeria? To please his White evangelical supporters, basically. White evangelicals in the U.S. have been yammering that Nigerian Christians were being “targeted” for death. There was talk of a Nigerian Christian genocide. So Trump dropped a bunch of bombs on Nigeria, I take it. And the evangelicals were pleased.

I’ve been watching this for a while. There has been a lot of terrorist violence in Nigeria. Some of the people killed by terrorists are Christians. Some of them are not. According to Pew, Nigeria is 56 percent Muslim and 43 percent Christian. Maybe. I’ve seen different figures elsewhere. Terrorist groups in Nigeria include West African ISIS, Boko Haram, and Ansaru, These are all Muslim organizations. But there are also a whole lot of criminal gangs in operation, and I take it the authorities aren’t always sure if particular incidents of violence are terrorist-related or gang-related. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-most populous country.  It has more than 250 ethnic groups, with varying languages and customs. Who knows who is targeting whom?

Juan Cole:

Ironically, the strike was fully supported by the Muslim president of Nigeria, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and coordinated with the federal military. Nigeria’s Daily Post is more positive about the operation than most US newspapers. It says that US naval vessels in the Gulf of Guinea launched 16 guided MQ-9 Reaper missiles at “two major Islamic State ISIS terrorist enclaves located within the Bauni Forest axis of Tangaza Local Government Area, Sokoto State.”

So Trump’s attempt to configure the action as a Christian strike in defense of Christians (for his Evangelical base) is a stretch. He seems actually to have worked hand in glove with Tinibu and the Nigerian Muslim elite to hit a mutual problem. Although parts of Nigeria, especially the northeast, are poor and conflict-ridden, there is no evidence that Christians suffer worse from this violence than Muslims — people from both communities have been kidnapped, brutalized, and killed by forces such as Boko Haram.

That’s what I’m seeing from other sources. Whatever is going on in Nigeria is not a simple Muslims-versus-Christians dichotomy. It’s more complicated. Never mind that Trump had no authorization whatsoever to bomb Nigeria. Nothing happening there threatens the United States. He just did this to score points with the White evangelicals. Who are less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, btw.  See also Breaking down U.S. strikes on ISIS in Nigeria and the complicated conflict there at PBS.

Also, Trump has decided that since “affordability” is a fake word, or something, the midterms will be about “pricing.” I don’t think that’s going to help him much.

You’ve probably also heard that the MAGA movement is fracturing. There was a particularly good analysis of the current state of MAGA at the New York Times — The Strange Death of Make America Great Again by Matthew Walther. It’s good enough that I’m burning my last gift link for the month. Walther proposes that “Coalitions organized around symbolic enmities and ideological absolutes rather than shared material interests are prone to sudden collapse.”

… MAGA’s internal contradictions can no longer be ignored. The movement that had promised an end to foreign adventurism has found itself torn between an alliance of ideological noninterventionists and realists and a hawkish national security establishment. Trumpism promised a revival of domestic manufacturing, yet neither the president nor his advisers have decided whether this means tariffs, industrial policy, reviving organized labor, environmental deregulation or mere nostalgia. MAGA also promised immigration reform but has oscillated between showboating deportations and a deference to pro-visa allies in Big Tech and corporate agriculture. At the same time,  American support for Israel has become a contested issue on the right for the first time in decades. Some opponents have been accused of antisemitism; others simply announce it. …

… This problem extends to Mr. Trump himself. No postwar political movement has been more closely bound up in the fortunes of its founder than MAGA is. Yet during the recent controversies, Mr. Trump’s own views have been neither heeded nor even earnestly solicited. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he has begun to recede from the movement he created.

Is MAGA sustainable without Trump? MAGA was never a serious political movement. It is more of social/cultural phenomenon, a movement of people estranged from multiculturalism, liberal values, and the 21st century in general. .

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune.

Without a strong personality to rally around, to tell them who to hate this week, they have no direction. And Trump is fading. Had he lived, maybe Charlie Kirk could have been the new MAGA Daddy for at least part of the movement. But I don’t see J.D. Vance or Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro or Nick Fuentes or any other semi-leaders of MAGA turning into The One. More likely MAGA, whatever it is, will just fracture. Even Jim Geraghty, a long-time Trump apologist who writes for the Washington Post, called the recent Turning Point conference A conference of clowns; “Wrestlemania with podcasters.”

See also Cracks have emerged in the Maga coalition by Moira Donegan at The Guardian.