February 21, 2025 95C

The Risks, Part I

The greatest risk we face is the possible slide into martial law.  That was my greatest fear after the election.  This is looking less and less likely; our institutions, including the military, and our popular will are looking too strong for that to happen.  The administration is already, after a short time, helping to unite the country against them.

Nevertheless we absolutely cannot let down our guard.  We crossed a deep red line (there have been so many red lines I have lost track — and yet for now we survive) with the approval of Kash Patel for FBI director.  The Republican senators are a craven bunch, entirely unworthy of their offices, who have abandoned their oaths to the Constitution and need to be reviled throughout history.  They can each have a pay toilet named after them.  Anyway, this was a very bad sign.  There will be attempts to intimidate (there already have been) and possibly to arrest any opposition.  Those must be resisted.  By “resisted” I mean five million people showing up in DC to say that this is completely unacceptable and must be reversed.

At the other end of the spectrum is the (nearly) completely inept shit show.  That keeps coming up as a possibility as we see over and over how stupid and unqualified Trump’s appointees are for the jobs they were given.  For example, Pam Bondi is an evil influence atop the Department of Justice, but she is such an idiot that I doubt many DOJ lawyers are seriously afraid of her.  Similarly, Patel is not going to be able to get the entire FBI under his sway, even if they allow him to think so.  

There was some good news today from the polls:  Trump’s approval ratings are dropping, very rapidly as these things typically go.  His initiatives are widely unpopular and economic bad news is going to sink him like a stone.  That will not give him a strong platform for intimidating anyone.  And a large majority of Americans detest Elon Musk.

There seems to be a lot of confidence that midterm elections will actually happen.  There’s no doubt that Trump would like to stop them, but they are run by the states and he has no official control over them.  Of course, he will try to find leverage to give himself control over the states, enough to cancel the elections, and we have to be on guard against that.