hudebnik

My brother did a tour of duty with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and reported (among other things) on the politics: there were apparently free and fair elections, among candidates from multiple political parties, none of which had any distinct policy positions to run on. The only reason to work for, or vote for, one party over another was which one had promised you a government job. Which offered a steady, if small, paycheck -- and something more.

In modern Russia, and the old Soviet Union, and sometimes Mexico, and many other "developing" countries noted for endemic corruption, it's been taken for granted that government officials can be, and indeed must be, bribed -- not only to overlook the law, but even to apply the law or to do their jobs as the law demands. If you have any kind of complex interaction with the government, you need to show up with lots of cash in order to grease the palm of each successive official along the way. Indeed, in such countries a government job pays you not primarily in wages, but in the authority over ordinary people that enables you to extort bribes and kickbacks from them.

Such a regime, of course, impoverishes ordinary people, except those already too poor to afford bribes, who can expect no help at all from government or the law. The system drives home, every day, the lesson that government serves the rich; indeed, why would anyone expect government to serve all the people? That's not what it's for.

It could reasonably be argued that most nations throughout history have been like that: almost everyone was desperately poor, including government officials, and the most obvious way for the latter to make money was to use their government authority to extort bribes and kickbacks. And of course government serves the interests of the rich; that's the way it's always been and always will be.

In such nations, it's also taken for granted that elections are rigged, predetermined to favor the incumbent. If you have governmental power, and one of government's functions is to hold elections, of course you're going to use your power to make sure your side wins; why would anybody expect otherwise?

The United States prided itself on being different. From the start, the authors of the Declaration and Constitution expected at least its elected officials to be public servants, accountable to all the people (a category which gradually expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), and removable peacefully from their posts when they failed to serve the people. The Constitution mentions two specific crimes for which a high judicial or executive official can be impeached, and one of them is bribery: a public official taking bribes, or otherwise using his official powers to enrich himself, was not doing his job and shouldn't continue to hold it. And for many years the fairness and honesty of elections was the closest thing we had to a national religion: the most un-American, un-patriotic things you can do are cheat on an election, or refuse to leave peacefully when you lose.

As this NY Times piece explains, the 1881 assassination of President Garfield by a disgruntled campaign worker who hadn't gotten the government job he expected triggered a backlash against the then-accepted "spoils system" by which elected officials routinely gave lots of government jobs to their supporters, regardless of qualifications, competence, or interest in the specific job. Congress passed laws requiring some, and eventually most, Federal civil servants to be hired on the basis of competence, and forbidding them to be fired or demoted for political reasons. The new expectation was that Federal employees at all levels were there to do their jobs for the benefit of the American people regardless of their personal political leanings, and would continue to serve, and develop role-relevant expertise, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That expectation has lasted us for well over a century, but Donald Trump is intent on ending it.

In the 20th century, the United States developed a new self-appointed role in the world: the shining city on the hill, the exemplar of how a nation should work, with free speech and association for all its people, free and fair elections, law and justice impartially applied to all, and a government that honestly tried to serve the needs of all its people. The US cast itself as the honest, upstanding hero in a morality play in which Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, and other "un-democratic" nations were the enemy. Naturally, the US didn't always live up to those ideals, and it frequently compromised with one un-democratic nation in order to fight another or to gain access to natural resources... but even so, it often acted in the interest of "spreading democracy", and not only Americans but downtrodden people around the world saw the US as on the right side of history. Pro-democracy activists around the world fought and died for the right to have what Americans had.

After World War II, General MacArthur occupied Japan for seven years, with half a million US and allied troops. The Japanese people prepared to be treated as vanquished enemies -- abused, crushed, humiliated. But for the most part, that didn't happen: high-ranking Japanese military officers were tried for war crimes and forbidden to enter politics, but the occupying forces were strictly forbidden to abuse the locals, and punished when they did. Instead, they concentrated on distributing food to the starving Japanese people and rebuilding a functioning economy and government. They legalized trade unions, redistributed land ownership from a few quasi-feudal lords to their multitude of tenants, guaranteed labor standards, and wrote a new Constitution in which women could vote and the Emperor continued as the ceremonial head of a parliamentary democracy with self-defense forces but no offensive military. All of this was forced on Japan, but it produced, peacefully, a sustainable system that over the next fifty years thrived and grew into a major world economy.

In 1977, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, forbidding US-based companies from bribing government officials even in foreign countries where such bribery was a common, accepted practice. The affected companies chafed under this constraint, but since American companies were so awesome they figured they could still compete for foreign business while upholding Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

This sort of self-consciously-virtuous government requires a massive act of faith: the people have to believe that their government is accountable and will generally act in the public interest, that elections are free and fair and honest, and that government officials are there to do their jobs well rather than to extort bribes. These ideals, once instilled, form a positive feedback loop: if most people honestly believe in them, officials who violate them are likely to actually be punished, which reinforces public belief in the ideals, and so on.

Conversely, in a country without public belief in these ideals, it's difficult to instill them: if people expect most government officials to be corrupt, they won't expect corrupt officials to be punished, so officials will see no reason not to be corrupt, and the people's expectation will be fulfilled. Nations can be divided into those with a widespread belief in accountable, honest government, and those with widespread cynicism about government corruption and self-interest, and it's difficult to cross from one category to the other.

Starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the US Republican Party began a decades-long program to dismantle people's faith in government. It was necessary to convince the American people that government could not, and should not, make ordinary people's lives better, and could never be accountable enough to be trusted with power. Whenever government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, Republicans were obligated to sabotage it, lest people come to expect government to make their lives better. Once Donald Trump came on the scene, he concentrated his efforts on dividing Americans against one another and telling them that elections were not free and fair, but rigged against him (and therefore against his supporters, the "real" Americans). Today, in 2025, this program is bearing fruit: recent generations pride themselves on being cynical about government and democracy, and have seldom experienced a public-interest government program that worked smoothly, so (the theory goes) they won't lift a finger to stop government and democracy from being dismantled.

Which brings us to the substantial minority of Americans who are passionate, dedicated Trump-supporters. As Timothy Burke pointed out in 2020, Trump's die-hard supporters aren't blind to his autocratic, un-democratic tendencies; they're in favor of them. "Fundamentally they think power is a zero-sum game. You hold it or you are held by it. You are the boot on someone’s neck or there will be a boot on yours. They agree that what they have was taken from others; they think that’s the way of all things. You take or are taken from.... That what can be taken must be taken.... Authority is cruel and without mercy because it must be. They simply expect authority to be far more cruel to others than it is to them. And they expect to be cruel with the authority they possess." I made a similar point about Trump himself here.

Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to reinstate the 19th-century "spoils system" in which government workers are hired and fired for their political allegiance, not their qualifications or competence. If you seek a job in the Trump administration, you'll be asked "Was the 2020 Presidential election stolen from Donald Trump?", and if you can't answer "yes" with a straight face, you don't get the job.

On the issue of bribery and other financial crimes, he explained nine years ago on the campaign trail how he routinely donated lots of money to political candidates so they would do him favors once in office, with the implication that that was entirely right and proper. He's recently "halted enforcement" of the aforementioned FCPA, ordered IRS agents repurposed from catching tax evaders to catching illegal aliens, ordered Justice Department prosecutors reallocated from financial crimes and election interference to international drug cartels, pardoned numerous politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) convicted of bribery or tax evasion, and ordered the dropping of bribery charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, explicitly so that Adams could help him catch illegal aliens. In short, he's trying to legalize and normalize bribery and corruption, to turn the US into something more like Russia. After all, everybody in the President's circles commits financial crimes routinely, so it seems unfair to prosecute them as though they were "real" crimes.

Now add Elon Musk to the mix. He appears (based on the past few weeks) to be engaged in a holy war of wanton destruction. His strategy seems to be to destroy government agencies, their knowledgeable staff, and their data so quickly that he can irreversibly change the facts on the ground before the law and the courts can catch up to him. Because of this need for speed, he can't waste time analyzing individual programs to see whether they're actually wasteful or serve a useful purpose (Congressional staff typically spend months doing that); it's much easier and more fun to burn everything to the ground and rebuild from scratch (or leave the latter job for somebody who cares).

So the President is trying to turn the United States into a Russian-style kleptocracy in which bribery, nepotism, political patronage, election-rigging, and silencing of dissenters are taken for granted as normal and acceptable. Meanwhile, the co-President-without-portfolio is playing a videogame whose side effect is turning the United States into a nation without a civil service: there's an all-powerful President, his extremely manly military, a purely advisory Congress, an irrelevant and toothless hierarchy of courts, and nothing else.

The word "nothing" there is important. A more recent Timothy Burke post makes the interesting point that Elon Musk, and a handful of others in his bracket (Trump isn't rich enough for this club), are so mind-bogglingly wealthy that they couldn't lose or spend it if they tried. The annual interest on Musk's wealth is what 10,000 average Americans will earn in their combined lifetimes.

Such people have transcended the usual entrepreneur "take risks with other people's money" success story and reached "take risks because even if I lose every bet, I'm still unimaginably rich". Musk theoretically lost $30 billion buying and mismanaging Twitter, and it doesn't matter: he got control of a major social-media network, and if it no longer produces revenue, who cares? He can afford to "move fast and break things" because it doesn't matter to him if he breaks everything. He isn't acting irrationally or irresponsibly; he's a rational nihilist. He needs to find bigger and bigger risks to take, bigger and bigger things to break, just to stave off boredom and keep the adrenaline flowing. The US government is a big enough target that destroying it is actually a bit of a challenge, and therefore worth doing.

The reader may have noticed that the cynic and the nihilist aren't entirely on the same wavelength. If the nihilist succeeds, there will be almost no US government authority left that the cynic can milk for bribes and kickbacks. In the most charitable, optimistic reading, the latter is the culmination of Reagan's dream: reduce the US government to the point that it's not worth capturing, so "regulatory capture" disappears. As yet another Timothy Burke post points out, Musk is rapidly dismantling exactly the infrastructure and expertise that Trump (or any other would-be dictator) needs to enforce his will. But that comes at a cost: with the rule of law gone, your security depends on what you personally can enforce, and you'll have to spend a good deal of your time enforcing it rather than building anything new. If you're not a strongman, your best hope is to find one and throw yourself on his mercy.

One is steering the ship towards dictatorship, the other towards anarchy. Where will we actually end up?

There's been a lot of talk about Donald Trump turning the US into a dictatorship. He probably wants to move in that direction, but there are legal and Constitutional guardrails still standing that might slow him down. So to get around limits on what the President or the Executive Branch can do, he appears to be out-sourcing a lot of it to Elon Musk, who has no government job, no security clearance, no Senate-confirmed Executive Branch post... if he doesn't have it, nobody can take it away.

Summarizing from Heather Cox Richardson's latest vlog, although I had heard about some of this stuff myself too...

• A week or two ago, Musk went to the US Federal Payments System and demanded that he and a bunch of his assistants be given userid's and passwords with full access to the system. "The system" in question controls payments from the US government to individuals, companies, and organizations -- tax refunds, Social Security checks, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, Federal employee paychecks, research grants to academics, operating grants to humanitarian organizations, Pell grants to students, purchases of paper clips for government offices, purchases of bombers and missiles for the military, you name it. With read access to the system, they could see the details of all these payments for the last several decades: as Heather puts it, this would be the largest privacy data breach in human history. With controlling access to the system, they could decide which of the government's bills will get paid in the future and which won't, and perhaps even write themselves large checks with no oversight or authorization.


• Naturally, the head of the Federal Payments System, one David Lebryk, told Musk "absolutely not, not in a million years". Musk went screaming to Trump and/or Bessent (the newly-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury), Lebryk was placed on "administrative leave" and then forced into early retirement last Friday, while an unknown number of Musk's assistants were quickly declared to be Treasury Department employees and given an unknown level of access to the system. NY Times article here.


• So Elon Musk, who has never received a single vote, nor ever been confirmed or hired to any government post, has been given at least read access to this huge database of sensitive financial information about approximately everybody in the US.


• It's not clear whether he also has controlling access, the ability to write checks as he wishes and prevent other checks from being written. This Politico article says Treasury officials say the access is read-only. OTOH, Musk claims on X to have already stopped government payments to at least one humanitarian organization. Remember, these are expenditures that were passed into law as part of last year's Federal budget: once Congress has said "this money shall be spent in such-and-such ways," it legally has to be spent in those ways. Musk has no Congressional authorization to cut off spending (which would be difficult to grant because he isn't even a government employee), and it's not clear whether he's gotten authorization from anybody else either, or whether he's making these decisions entirely on his own.


• On Sunday, Musk similarly sent people to the USAID offices and demanded to enter a secure area to view classified documents. USAID doesn't have as much private information about US citizens, but lots of information about US foreign aid projects; more relevantly, since USAID is part of the State Department, it has lots of information from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, an intelligence agency comparable to the CIA or DIA, and much of that stuff is classified top secret.


• Naturally, the security people told Musk's people "Absolutely not, not in a million years". Musk went screaming to Trump and/or Rubio, the security people who told Musk to pound sand were "escorted off-site" and put on "administrative leave", and half a dozen of Musk's assistants (between the ages of 19 and 24; Wired article here) were given an unknown level of access. As far as I know, none of them was already a government employee, and I very much doubt that any of them had a top-secret security clearance. The chief of staff, appointed by Trump only a week or two ago, has resigned. (NY Times article here.)


• So Elon Musk, who has never received a single vote, nor ever been confirmed or hired to any government post, has been given access to a large cache of top-secret intelligence documents. All the intelligence sources used by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research should now be considered compromised.


• Musk has also told USAID employees to not come into the office on Monday, as he's in the process of shutting the agency down.


• Elon Musk's assistants, former employees, and friends, including at least one who graduated high school in 2024, have been installed in high-level positions in the Office of Personnel Management, the HR department for the Federal Government (Wired article here).


• Elon Musk's assistants, former employees, and friends have also been installed in high-level positions in the General Services Administration, which oversees government-owned real estate, government-owned laptops, and a bunch of stuff like that. They claim to have already put several government buildings up for sale (which may be a good idea, for all I know, but they don't have Congressional approval to do it), and may be installing spyware on employee laptops.

This isn't about partisanship any more; it's about your privacy and national security.

Q: What's worse than thousands of government bureaucrats each having partial access to your private information and making decisions about your life based on government regulations?
A: One person with no accountability to the public at all having complete access to your private information and making decisions about your life based on no regulations at all but his own whims.

Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have sensitive financial data about most of the companies and individuals in the US, just because he's the President's buddy?

Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have that many top-secret intelligence documents at his fingertips, just because he's the President's buddy?

Do you want one un-elected, un-cleared, un-confirmed person to have the unilateral power to sell government buildings, choose which government bills to pay and which to deny, and spy on government employees, just because he's the President's buddy?

Do you want somebody to become the President's buddy, and get all that power, by contributing $280 million to his Presidential campaign?

First, a little news squib: one of our cis-het-white-able-US-born acquaintances reports that he is now considered a "DEI hire" because he got a few points' bonus on a civil-service exam once for being a military veteran. So now are they going to fire all the veterans currently working for the Federal government?

A somewhat more-widely-known news squib: the Trump Justice Department a few days ago effectively-fired about a dozen high-level, experienced prosecutors because they had been involved in Jack Smith's investigations and prosecutions of Trump. Yesterday it became clear that it's not just high-level, experienced prosecutors; the same goes for dozens or hundreds of lower-level employees who probably had no say in which cases they were assigned to. But because they were assigned to investigate and prosecute an alleged criminal, they did their jobs as assigned, and that alleged criminal subsequently became President, they're all losing their jobs. This looks like nothing more than pure, personal revenge. Although it also serves the purpose of removing a lot of qualified, non-partisan employees from the Justice Department, so they can be replaced with Trump loyalists. (In today's news, the number of Justice Department firings is now estimated in the thousands, most of whom probably weren't involved in investigating or prosecuting Donald Trump but rather Jan. 6 rioters. This makes the latter explanation look even more likely. We already knew there would be a need for lots of lawyers to challenge Trump administration law-breaking, and now there will be lots of them on the market.)

And today's the day DJT's long-promised import tariffs are supposed to kick in: 25% on everything coming from Canada or Mexico, and 10% on everything coming from China. DJT has sold these tariffs as serving three purposes: support for domestic jobs (in the industries that compete with these imports), revenge (those countries have been taking advantage of the US's generosity by selling us more goods and services than they bought from us) and fund-raising (those countries will now pay gazillions of dollars straight into the US treasury, which will enable us to cut taxes on hard-working American billionaires). I'm not sure whether he honestly believes either of these, but then I'm not sure the words "honestly believes" are particularly important in Trump's psychology: he says what he thinks will benefit him, regardless of whether it's true or whether he even thinks it's true.

Selling us more goods and services than they buy from us means that they're accumulating US dollars, which are either piling up uselessly in bank accounts abroad or being used to buy something in the US that doesn't cross borders, like stocks and real estate; it's not clear that either of those outcomes hurts the US. And import tariffs are paid by importers, which means either US consumers pay more for the goods (and thus buy less of them) or foreign producers cut their prices in order to preserve their US market share; most economists believe the former is more likely.

If DJT has thought through this at all, he probably thinks the US market is so overwhelmingly valuable, and he's such a dominant alpha-male, that the latter will happen rather than the former. There is perhaps an argument that he can squeeze price cuts out of Canadian producers: much of what the US buys from Canada are heavy, bulky commodities (steel, aluminum, lumber, crude oil) that are cheaper to ship to the US than to any other country. On the other hand, that's been true for many years, so one would expect it to already be factored into the prices US companies are paying their Canadian counterparts. Mexico has other land borders, but not with nations nearly as large, developed, or wealthy as the US, so you could argue that they have to sell most of their exports (including oil) to the US; OTOH, that's again all been true for many years, so we've probably already gotten the price concessions Trump hopes to get. And the mere fact that he's doing this so loudly and conspicuously, with such an obviously bullying attitude, means that other countries' own nationalism will kick in and they'll be even less likely to give him what he demands.

Some economists in Trump's circle claim that the tariffs won't actually raise domestic prices much, because as soon as they start to, domestic demand for imports will drop and the dollar will rise relative to other currencies enough to cancel out the tariffs. Which has several problems: first, it's very unlikely that the dollar would rise enough to completely cancel out the tariffs' inflationary effects. And if somehow it did, the rising dollar would also decrease US exports (measured in tons, not measured in dollars), which costs jobs domestically, which defeats one of Trump's alleged reasons for the tariffs. And even those economists say that such tariffs should be applied gradually, to give exchange rates time to adjust; DJT didn't listen to them except in the sense that he's threatening to raise tariffs even higher in the future if other countries don't do whatever he says.

More likely, he'll get insignificant price cuts, US companies will have to pay a lot more for their raw materials, and they'll raise consumer prices and/or cut jobs in the US. And that's before foreign countries slap retaliatory tariffs on the US, probably mostly farm products (as happened the last time, when Trump reimbursed American farmers with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars per year, with minimal oversight, for their lost sales to China; see this article). It's not clear whether Trump would agree to the same sort of bailout this time, since he officially isn't running for re-election this time; if he does, it will again eat up most of the tariff proceeds, and if he doesn't, lots of Trump-voting American farmers will go bankrupt.

Donald Trump has always been fond of “Hail Mary” passes: he arranges things so that he has nothing to lose, then tries something with a minuscule chance of success, but if it works, he’s gained something at little or no cost. The past week is sort of a “massively parallel Hail Mary” strategy: throw a hundred Hail Mary passes at once, with a hundred different footballs, and if one of them gets through, he’s ahead of the game.

Of his executive actions since taking office again, some are meaningless (e.g. directing all government departments to find ways to reduce food and energy prices), some are malicious and sadistic but within his legal powers, and some are malicious and sadistic and NOT within his legal powers. Let’s concentrate on the third category.

In the past few days he’s fired people “effective immediately” who can’t legally be fired without thirty days’ notice, or before the end of their Senate-confirmed terms, and can’t be fired except for a specific performance-related cause. He’s frozen billions of dollars per day of Congressionally-authorized spending, in violation of the Impoundment Act. And of course he’s ordered government officials to violate the 14th amendment by denying birthright citizenship — not only to the children of “illegal aliens”, as he said on the campaign trail, but to the children of LEGAL temporary residents (e.g. on student or tourist visas). I’m sure there are other blatantly illegal actions in the last few days; those are just the first few that occurred to me immediately.

All of these things will be challenged in court, of course, but if one in ten cases draws a sympathetic Trump-appointed judge who gives him a full or partial win, that case sets a precedent granting him one more power that previous Presidents (including himself) didn’t have. And in the mean time, all these court cases are clogging the legal system and reducing Americans’ faith in it, which is also a win.

It’s a distributed denial of service (and brute-force phishing) attack on democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

So how do you fight a distributed attack? It has to be in parallel, of course, to have any hope of keeping up with the traffic. Each processor/citizen can only deal with one or a few attacks at a time without crashing itself. But there are many millions of us already, and the farther he reaches with his attacks, the more people will realize that he’s not on their side.

I don't have much to add to the tributes and histories in the news media, except that Jimmy Carter's inauguration was the only one I've witnessed in person. We were living in Fairfax County, Virginia, and my mother decided it would be a good opportunity for my brother and me to witness history. So we stood in the cold in a crowd along the Mall, and for a few seconds saw the President-Elect and his family walking (with the limo close behind) towards the Capitol to become President.

shalmestere and I were in the Washington, DC area the weekend of Obama's inauguration, and we were actually on the mall the day before (I think I have a photo somewhere of thousands of Porta-Potties lining the nearly-empty streets), but didn't brave the traffic and crowds to attend in person. I sorta wish we had.

So we've spent the last four years debunking Republican claims that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen through "massive election fraud" on Biden's behalf, pointing out that

• the alleged "suspicious" behavior by poll workers, when you ask actual election officials about it, is not only perfectly normal but in some cases mandated by law;


• election fraud through voter impersonation would require an implausibly large number of participants, and be impossible to keep secret;


• essentially all of the proven cases of voter impersonation were committed by pro-Trump Republicans;


• any competent Democratic conspiracy to steal the election would have also stolen solid margins in both houses of Congress at the same time, while Biden over-performing his party is consistent with the story that Trump was uniquely unpopular;


• recounts and audits consistently showed discrepancies thousands of times too small to affect results, and correcting those discrepancies often actually increased Biden's margin of victory;


• any effort to hack voting machines would have to be done separately in different states, which generally have different software, different machines, different security procedures, etc.;


• and so on.

(Did I say four years? IIRC, Trump claimed even earlier that he had actually won the popular vote in 2016, but it was distorted by millions of illegal aliens bussed in to vote in California. Why any Democratic conspiracy to steal an election would do it in a state that's already a Democratic lock, or why so many illegal aliens would be willing to risk confrontations with law enforcement by voting, was never explained.)

So now we have viral allegations of "massive election fraud" on Trump's behalf in 2024. The main pieces of the theory seem to be

• The number of "bullet ballots", with a choice for President but no down-ballot votes, was several orders of magnitude higher this year than usual, but only in "swing states" (if true, this would easily explain Trump over-performing his party);


• In several states, Trump's margin of victory is just barely over the threshold which would require manual recounts, and the number of "bullet ballots" in those states is sufficient to produce that result;


• Elon Musk collected a lot of names and addresses, but not phone numbers, for his "lottery" in the last month before the election;


• Although ballot-counting machines aren't supposed to be networked while polls are open, poll logs showing who has voted (by mail or in-person) are often networked while polls are open (so that, you know, if you were eligible to vote at either of two polling places and tried to vote at both, or sent a mail ballot and also tried to vote in-person, you would be caught in real-time);


• Knowing who has actually voted in a given state, combined with pre-existing demographic and survey data, would give you a decent estimate of which candidate is ahead by how much, at any time late on Election Day;


• Matching the lottery list against the list of people who have voted would enable generating a list of registered voters who haven't voted, at any time late on Election Day;


• Much of the software running ballot-counting machines was copied by pro-Trump investigators after the 2020 election, and posted publicly e.g. on GitHub, so security hackers have had almost four years to find and exploit vulnerabilities in it, and build look-alike corrupted copies of it;


• If you had already broken into such software before Election Day, you might be able to open a network connection on those machines without detection (depending on whether local law requires them to be visibly physically disconnected);


• As demonstrated in the 2006 film "Hacking Democracy", if you can get physical access to replace the software in the ballot-counting machines, you can change the results to whatever you like, introducing 10,000 fictitious votes as easily as one.


• If you have a list of registered voters who haven't voted, and there are enough of them to cover the number of votes you need, and you control ballot-counting machines in real-time, you can create fictitious ballot records for exactly that number of ballots, while marking those voters as having voted, so the total numbers still match;


• Since this is a software-based approach, it doesn't require thousands of co-conspirators, only a skilled team of a dozen or so in the months leading up to Election Day.

So how seriously should we in the "reality-based community" take this?

I'm skeptical for a couple of reasons:

• Since the election, it's been widely reported that almost every region of the country, including deep-blue and deep-red states, shifted towards Trump relative to his performance in 2020. That would be much harder to fake than a shift in only a few swing states.


• How many names-and-addresses did Musk collect in the last few weeks before the election? Is it plausible that this set of names overlapped sufficiently with those registered-but-not-actually-voting that he could have changed the results in several swing states?


• How many separate physical security breaches would you have to do, undetected, in order to replace the software on enough voting machines? Could Trump's and/or Musk's people plausibly have done that in all seven swing states?


• How long has Musk been in Trump's camp? Long enough for him to supervise a software team to develop this stuff? (Or did he develop it on his own, as "wouldn't it be convenient to have something like this in my back pocket, no matter who's running for office?", and then approach Trump a few months ago saying "You know, I've got ways to help you win this..."?)


• In some ways the scheme sounds overly complex. If we hypothesize that Musk's people had software control of a sufficient number of voting machines on and around Election Day, why didn't they just subtract a certain number from the Harris vote count and add the same number to the Trump count? This wouldn't change the total number of votes, so they wouldn't need to cover their tracks by marking a bunch of non-voters as having voted, so they wouldn't need to hack into pollbooks in real-time and match them against lottery names.
  

On the other hand, if the wildly anomalous counts of "bullet ballots" are true, they would certainly justify some manual recounts to see whether there's any fire behind this smoke. The deadlines to request manual recounts are different in different swing states, but I think they're mostly in the next week or two.

Indeed, I've believed for many years that we should have manual recounts of randomly-selected precincts after every election, regardless of how close or surprising the official results are, in order to detect machine-hacking fraud. Closeness isn't a good indicator: as mentioned above, if you control the software, you can insert 10,000 fictitious votes as easily as one, as long as you can cover your tracks with total numbers of voters. If your exploit enables you to change votes rather than insert them, you don't even need to worry about total numbers of voters.

On the third hand, "if the wildly anomalous counts of bullet ballots are true" is a big "if". It's not clear where Spoonamore or anyone else got those numbers, and officially-reported numbers of "ballots with a vote for President" and "ballots with a vote for Governor and/or Senator" in various swing states suggest that there can't possibly be as many "bullet ballots" as Spoonamore claims, nor are the numbers unusually large by historical standards; see Snopes as reported in MSN.

Inspired by this NY Times story...

Donald Trump was scheduled for sentencing next week in the one criminal trial that managed to take place before the election, the one about disguising his company's hush-money payments before the 2016 election as legal fees. The judge and prosecutor are, naturally, uncertain how to proceed now that he's President-elect.

Option (a) would be to ignore the political reality and sentence him as though he had any other day job that he might regrettably be unable to perform while in prison. The principles of "American blind justice" and "no one above the law" would demand that, but it's realistically not going to happen.

Option (c), suggested by Trump's lawyers, is to dismiss the whole case: so what if he's been convicted by a jury of his peers, he's about to be President, and you can't treat the President of the United States like a criminal even if he is one. And besides, it was a bogus case using legal theories that wouldn't have been applied to anyone else (there's a grain of truth to this last).

Option (b), floated by the prosecutor, is to "freeze" the case for four years. Which sounds sort of appealing, if we can't have blind justice.

But. It gives Trump even more incentive than he already had to either

(d) not leave office in January 2029, or

(e) see to it that something bad happens to D.A. Bragg and/or Judge Merchan in the next four years, and the case is assigned to a different judge who will "see things Trump's way", particularly after seeing what happened to Merchan. Trump wouldn't have to have his fingerprints on it; a simple "will no one rid me of this meddlesome judge?" might suffice. Or, since he's now immune from criminal prosecution for acts using his official Presidential powers, he could openly order the military or the Justice Department to take care of the problem.

As for "not leaving office", I don't think it's feasible for Trump to get the 22nd Amendment repealed in the next four years: it would require not only passage in both houses of Congress, but passage in 3/4 of all states, and the latter isn't going to happen. But that's playing by the rules, which isn't Trump's style.

SCOTUS has already ruled that the 14th Amendment's section 3 (prohibiting people serving in office who have previously done so, sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then engaged in "insurrection") isn't self-executing, and needs an implementing act of Congress. SCOTUS could (especially with another one or two Trump nominees on the Court) decide the same of the 22nd Amendment, and obviously no such act of Congress is going to pass with Trump's signature on it.

There’s also an argument that he could serve a third term as President by running (and being elected) as Vice President in 2028, with a Presidential running mate who has promised to resign from office immediately after Inauguration, making Trump President again. See, the 22nd Amendment doesn’t say no person can serve more than two terms as President, only that no person can be elected more than twice as President. OTOH, the 12th Amendment says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President,” and since Trump would be ineligible to run for President a fourth time, that makes him ineligible for the Vice Presidency too, right? OTTH, as already pointed out, the 22nd Amendment doesn’t make him ineligible to be President, only to be elected President. All of this would probably end up in front of a Supreme Court with at least four members appointed by Trump.

Or he could skip the SCOTUS step altogether and simply say he's staying in office, or running for re-election in 2028, on the practical grounds of "who's going to stop me?".

From the "Truth is Stranger than Fiction" department,

The Onion has won the auction to buy InfoWars

In the absence of a miracle, 75 days from now Donald Trump will become President again, with a Republican-majority Senate, quite likely a Republican-majority House, and a 6-3 Republican-majority Supreme Court that has repeatedly proven itself to be in his corner. Most, though not all, of the brakes have come off the bus. What happens next? What will he realistically do?

First, even before Trump can take office, Vladimir Putin will be emboldened. It was already looking unrealistic that Ukraine would ever regain the territory Russia invaded almost two years ago, much less the territory it invaded ten years ago. But now the terms of Ukraine's surrender have shifted markedly in Putin's favor: he'll no longer be satisfied with those provinces and a promise never to join NATO, but will demand total disarmament, and push towards what he really wanted all along, a puppet government in Kyiv -- which would at least give the Ukrainian people a respite from the bombing that has leveled much of their civilian infrastructure. (Anything short of a puppet government, and Russia will invade again in a year or two.) Tiny Moldova will presumably be the next target, followed by any of the NATO members Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland; I have no idea which of these would be the softest target, but with the United States likely to renege on its treaty obligations to NATO, NATO membership is less of an obstacle to Putin's imperial ambitions.

Benjamin Netanyahu too will be emboldened. Where Biden has chided him ineffectually about civilian casualties and humanitarian aid, Trump will be his chief cheerleader. But in Gaza, there's no question of "negotiating terms of surrender", since Netanyahu won't stop bombing if there's any pseudo-governmental agency left in Gaza to negotiate with. As people more-informed than I have pointed out, Netanyahu has no good options for the day after "beating" Hamas, and will probably have to install a permanent occupying force in Gaza; that would be a lot simpler if there were few or no Palestinians there at all, whether by evicting them (two million more stateless, starving, poverty-stricken refugees for the world to absorb) or killing them, and Trump wouldn't object to either of those solutions as long as the refugees didn't come to the U.S.

Less clear, but quite possible, Xi Jinping may be emboldened to invade Taiwan. Since Trump considers him (unlike Putin or Netanyahu) an enemy, he might not want to invade while Trump is President, but if he invades during the chaos of the transitional period, by the time Trump takes office he might have a sufficiently dominant position to trigger Trump's "side with the winner" instincts. This would enable Trump to take office blaming the Biden administration for Taiwan's loss of de facto independence, and with one less foreign-policy dilemma to deal with himself. Indeed, with Taiwan removed as a point of friction, he might develop as cordial a relationship with Xi as he has with Putin. (The next target might be the Phillippines....)

The Democratic Party will do a post-mortem. Why did they lose (in 2016 and 2024, and almost in 2020) against such a monumentally corrupt and unqualified candidate? They lost the votes of white, non-college-educated, blue-collar workers, and their edge among women wasn't large enough, losing white suburban "soccer moms" worried about immigration, as well as boys on girls' sports teams, men in women's public restrooms, and similar vanishingly-rare threats to civilization. Refocusing the Democratic Party towards the needs of blue-collar workers is probably healthy, albeit too little too late. On social issues, the party will probably throw trans people under the bus and hope not to lose too much ground on the LGB parts of the quiltbag. Even before the election, the Democratic nominee championed an immigration bill containing almost everything the Republicans wanted; in defeat, they may follow the Republicans even farther in an anti-immigration direction.

If Trump had lost this election, after losing in 2020 and leading his party to disappointing results in 2018 and 2022, the Republican Party would have undergone such a post-mortem, perhaps emerging again as a party with recognizable principles, a variety of carefully-thought-out policy ideas, and a respect for objective reality. Now that post-mortem won't happen for at least four more years, and possibly long after Trump's death, since he won't be perceived as taking the party down with him. The Republican Party will continue to be a cult of one man who can do no wrong. Since what he says today must be right even if it contradicts what he said yesterday, the party cannot develop any positions or principles other than "support Donald Trump" until he's six feet underground.

Then, in January, Trump takes office. What are his top priorities? Obviously, shutting down the two Federal criminal cases against him, and making the argument that the Georgia case can't proceed while he's President; his pet Supreme Court would almost certainly support that argument. He'll have at least two years with party control of both houses of Congress, and I think he'll prioritize making sure he never loses that power. He's already promised to reclassify most of the mid-level career employees in the executive branch as political appointees, firing and replacing anybody he considers insufficiently loyal to him; the effects will last for years after he leaves office. He will of course continue appointing Trump-loyalist judges at every level, without regard to the traditional measures of judicial competence, ditto. If the Republican-nominated justices on the Supreme Court show more than a faint flicker of independence (e.g. Barrett's concurring opinion in the immunity case), I wouldn't be surprised to see a bill adding at least two more seats to the Court effective immediately. And, using the momentum of eight years' lies about Democratic election fraud, there might be a bill with a name like "Federal Election Integrity Act of 2025" to increase Federal oversight of state-run elections, so he has leverage to prevent a Democratic takeover of either house of Congress in 2026.

I suspect he would very much like to repeal the 22nd Amendment, preventing him from running for re-election in 2028, and he could probably get that through Congress, but he wouldn't get 3/4 of states to ratify it in a mere four years. So there's a bright spot, a remaining guard-rail. OTOH, he might persuade his Supreme Court that the 22nd Amendment, like the 14th, is not self-executing and doesn't work without a specific Congressional implementing act, so he can run for re-election in 2028. Or he might just run for re-election anyway and ask "Who's going to stop me?"

Trump will appoint a bunch of Cabinet secretaries with personal loyalty as the main consideration, and even less concern for their competence, honesty, or knowledge about the department in question than in 2017. Some of these nominees may be so bad that the narrowly-Republican Senate won't confirm them, in which case Trump may keep them in place indefinitely with an "acting" in front of their titles. As in 2017, many of them will be involved in high-profile financial scandals, but Trump will be less willing than before to remove them from office for such trivialities; only disloyalty to him will get you fired.

In 2016, his top campaign promises were about illegal immigration and building a wall, and he did in fact move on both of those in his first year. In 2024, his top campaign promises have been about illegal immigration and tariffs, so I think we should assume he'll actually move on both of those in his first year. As before, there will be lots of illegal (and a substantial number of legal) immigrants rounded up, detained in conditions that wouldn't be acceptable in a prison, intentionally separated from their families to maximize suffering, and deported. As before, the various forms of legal immigration will be sharply curtailed, unless you have white skin and/or money (preferably both). If the numbers are anything close to the millions he's promised, there will be an abrupt shortage of labor in agriculture and construction, raising the prices of food and housing.

If some trusted advisor convinces him that tariffs cause inflation, he might postpone the tariffs until shortly before the 2026 election, so he can run on a promise kept before the American people see the consequences. But if not, he'll probably enact high import tariffs in his first year, raising the prices of all imported goods (especially from China) and the domestically-produced goods that compete with them. There will be a brief uptick in domestic employment, until our major trading partners retaliate with import tariffs of their own. Never one to back down from a fight, Trump would instinctively raise tariffs even farther, causing a trade war that could tip the world into another Great Depression -- or simply cut off the United States from the trade that enriches the rest of the world.

His 2017 tax-cut bill includes many provisions scheduled to expire in 2025 (when he was expecting to be out of office, so the blame would fall on his successor). He'll probably extend those provisions for at least another four years, and perhaps add even more goodies for billionaires and large corporations. The Federal budget deficit will grow rapidly, as it did in his first term.

On abortion, Trump isn't a "true believer"; he supported anti-Roe judges only in exchange for right-wing Christians' votes. In recent months he's backpedalled, seeing abortion as an electoral vulnerability, and promising not to sign a nationwide ban. But then he and his party won the election, so it must not have been such a vulnerability after all. I have no idea which way he'll jump on this; four years from now we may still be a nation divided into states where abortion is possible and states where it isn't. Or, between enforcing the Comstock Act and signing a nationwide ban, we might be a nation where abortion is possible only if you're rich, and where it's illegal (but still possible, if you're rich) to leave the country to get an abortion in another country.

Oh, and of course he'll pull out of the Paris accords, and slow-walk any renewable-energy work authorized under IRA until he can repeal it altogether, and remove all mention of climate change from government websites.

Speaker Mike Johnson said something last week about getting rid of Obamacare, but Trump hasn't made that a central focus of his stump speeches this time around, so it may not be a high priority for him. Trump has promised not to cut Medicare or Social Security, notably omitting Medicaid from that list (or maybe he doesn't know it's different from Medicare).

Trump has repeatedly promised to "lock up" a long list of people: anybody named Biden, any nationally-prominent Democrat, pretty much anybody who's ever dissed him. I don't know how seriously to take that: he was President for four years before, triggered some IRS audits of political opponents but never successfully brought charges against any of them, much less got them locked up. He might have an easier time now, with a lot more Trump-appointed judges and district attorneys, but the court system moves slowly even under a despot.

That'll do for now; I need to eat breakfast and do some deep-breathing exercises. Lots of deep-breathing exercises over the next four years....

My shift two weeks ago was all about encouraging early voting. This one was "if you have a mail-in ballot, it's probably too late to put it in the mail, so you'll need to drop it off in person; do you know where?" or "if you're planning to vote in person on Tuesday, do you know where, when, with whom, and how you're getting there?"

I talked to two people who were definitely voting for Trump, but were friendly about it, and a few who were definitely voting for Trump, but were nasty about it, and five or six who were enthusiastically voting for Harris (one of whom wasn't certain about his registration, because he had recently moved, and wasn't certain where his new polling place was, so I was able to help with that).

And lots of Pennsylvanians who were sick and tired of getting political phone calls. One little old lady answered the phone "Hello! F*** you!" [click] before I even said a word. A number of people weren't sure whether they were the person I had asked for until I identified myself, at which point it became a wrong number. One woman answered the phone, I asked for David, and in an outrageous fake-male voice she said "This is David; how may I help you?"

Perhaps the oddest answer I got was "I actually don't vote; I'm religious." [click]