The Fifth Risk Meets Project 2025

Those who voted for Donald Trump clearly wanted Mr. Trump to disrupt, to ignore precedent, which to their way of thinking is to reject "woke," and now they may (or may not) get that.

As Michael Lewis documented in his 2018 book, "The Fifth Risk," Trump was never able to do much more than lower taxes on billionaires and build a part of a wall on the Southern Border, which often fell over or was scaled or tunneled under, so it did not much stem the tide of cross border crossings.

His impotence in "draining the swamp" derived mostly from an ignorance of what the swamp is, does and what keeps it full.

To chose just one of dozens of examples, he sent a man named Thomas Pyle to disembowel the Department of Energy, as a part of a "Landing Team" to assault the department, but the man never actually attended all the briefings about the Department's operations, so the landing wound up being a bunch of commandos seeking out woke civil servants, who had attended meetings about the Social Cost of Carbon, but the many jobs of the Department of Energy remained untouched--as it turns out if you are trying to negotiate with Iran to prevent it from making nuclear weapons, you have to know which parts of their nuclear program they must stop to prevent them from making a nuclear weapon. And for that you needed the physicists at the Department of Energy.

Obadiah Youngblood

Trump's shock troops simply never discovered what places like the DOE actually do. The names of the various Departments are misleading. The Department of Commerce actually has little to do with business, directly. It is really the Department of Statistics. 

National labs like Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia simulate nuclear explosions so we don't have to do actual explosive tests to test our nuclear arsenal--all that is not in the Defense Department but in the Department of Energy.

It's confusing and Trump never got un-confused.

Rick Perry, who Trump sent to head DOE, who said the DOE didn't do anything worth doing, never bothered to get briefed on a single program run by the DOE. 

But the DOE did provide low interest loans to Tesla so it could build a factory to make electronic (environmentally friendly) cars.  But now, of course, Mr. Musk may find that inefficient. He doesn't want to talk about that.

A lot of the DOE budget went to maintaining the nuclear arsenals in their siloes scattered about the country, and another big share to cleaning up the mess generated in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The DOE still spends billions to clean up the radioactive mess it unleashed in Hanford, Washington between 1943 and 1987 making nuclear weapons. Trump wants to shut down that down, part of cleaning up the swamp, or more accurately, allowing the swamp to just sit there and glow. Hanford's county voted by 25 points for Trump.  

One might say, well then, if that's what they want, let 'em glow.

The DOE is not really a department of energy--it's a department of science, figuring out what to do with nuclear waste from nuclear plants. Also tracking down and finding people who have sarin gas canisters they plan to release in football stadiums or subways.

Fracking was a DOE invention. Now, of course it's all "drill baby drill" for the MAGA crowd, but it was conceived of and launched by the government, specifically, the DOE.

Another thing we were lucky the Trump men did not manage to understand is the role of the DOE in defending and developing the electric grid. In the red West, locals shot up electrical transformers and cut wires to Apple and Google centers. The government had to protect these icons of free enterprise from crazies.

As time allows, Mad Dog may work through other goals of 2025: turning the USA into a Christian nation, abolishing the Federal Reserve, replacing the income tax with sales taxes, abolishing the Consumer Protection Board, taxing things made in the European Union and China into oblivion, so we no longer have to worry about competition from cheaper foreign goods, which is to say, abolishing the global economy in the USA.

The project is over 400 pages and, to say the least ambitious in its transformative goals.

It will take some time to visit all of it.

Until then, Mad Dog may just wait and see.

They Just Don't Like Us

There will lots of post mortem exams for Democrats to explain the thumping they took in 2024--lost both House and Senate and the Presidency.

Toxic 

But, for Mad Dog, the simple truth is: They just don't like us. Voters may or may not like Trump, but they will vote for him so they can vote against Democrats.

Listening to Hispanic voters interviewed on NPR, who said they don't like boys playing in girls sports, don't like people who don't work, or who sneak into the country or those who defend them, Mad Dog thought: So the vitriol from FOX and the Right really did get absorbed.

Americans really do not like Democrats. We are not likeable because we throw our arms around people other Americans do not like. Drug addicts who litter the streets of Manchester with their syringes and needles. We don't feel sorry for them. We don't like them.

Republicans don't like a lot of people, and they don't care if people do not like them. And, in the end, the folks who care too much about not offending, wind up offending more people than those who don't care who they offend.

 The photo/video of the frozen Joe Biden standing next to a laughing Kamala, who was flanked by her husband and next to him a man with shoulder length hair, wearing a dress, a transvestite or something, was enough to send a chill to Mad Dog's marrow--beyond cringe worthy. What was that man doing in a photo opportunity during election season? What message was the Democratic party sending America?

What does that do to the Honduran immigrant, naturalized U.S. citizen, church going man, when he sees Joe Biden embrace all that? As the man said: the Democrats are the party of freaks and weaklings, the party of people who talk about being afraid, or who talk about many genders--they want his little girls playing soccer against girls who used to be boys.  This immigrant wants to assimilate into a culture with clear cultural and gender identities, not the Weimar Republic.

The people who are seen to be creepy weirdos are not the guys who talk about immigrants eating pets, who bed porn stars, or say their daughters are so hot they would date them if they weren't their fathers. 

The creepy weirdos are now the Democrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTiZisXrkw&t=17s

I don't know how widely this clip was viewed, but who among the Blue Campaign could have seen this without cringing and seeing the doom of the Democrats?

Everyone Has An Answer

 

But Mad Dog has no answer.

Why did 20 million fewer voters turn out to vote for Kamala Harris than they had for Biden? Actually, that may not even be true, but whatever the number, she got fewer votes than Biden and that difference may or may not have beaten Trump who got about the same 72 million.

The numbers matter.

The breakdown and analysis of the numbers matter: More Hispanic males and Black males voting for Trump likely means something. More white suburban females voting for Trump likely means something. 

Clearly, however you slice and dice it, there were more Americans who voted for Trump in what appeared to be a free and fair election.

Bernie Sanders says this is because Democrats have abandoned the working class.

Seth Moulton says this is because the Democrats have tried to please every special interest group--transgenders for example--which alienates the great majority of working class White voters who see Democrats kissing up to Indians (Native Americans), transgenders, gays, People of Color, what have you but nothing addressed to whitebread, "ordinary" Americans, who are actually still in the majority. 

It's not Just This Guy

Arab Americans in Michigan say she lost because of Gazza and losing Michigan, but even if she had won Michigan she lost Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, so Michigan didn't matter.  In fact those last three no Democrat had any business winning in the first place, they are all Confederate states or Confederate diaspora states.

Re-elected by their adoring constituents 

And it's true, the Deep Blue states of New England and the West Coast stayed blue as did Colorado and New Mexico. 

So, if everyone has a reason for the demise of the Democratic Party, why should Mad Dog be left out?

For Mad Dog, the reason for the apocalypse is that Democrats do not have an entertainment/political propaganda juggernaut like the Republican FOX/Rogan/Breitbart/Storm Front/erstwhile Rush Limbaugh.

No matter where you go in America, you can hear workman, roofers, carpenters, garage mechanics, working men listening to radio right wing and loving it, laughing along and getting indoctrinated.

Of course, people choose to tune into FOX, for the most part. They know what they are going to hear.

And liberals tried putting Al Franken on the radio once to offer a liberal alternative, but, truth be told he wasn't very funny and he didn't last long.

There was a reason Joseph Goebbels was so important to Hitler and the Third Reich: he was the minister of propaganda and without a marketing wing, the National Socialist Workers party would have been just another crackpot cabal on the fringes.

Bad Optics: Not What We Should Be Selling

Mad Dog once tried to launch a rendition of "Spitting Image" the British puppet show which lampooned various politicos, but, despite lots of puppets and an effort to launch on youtube, he got all of about 15 clicks.

So, clearly, Mad Dog does not have the Rush Limbaugh karma. Or maybe it's the message. Or maybe just not funny enough, or not enough Koch brothers money behind it, or something.

But, from all Mad Dog can tell, door knocking and telephone banks cannot penetrate the minds of Americans. Something else has already done that and continues to do that, so you hear FOX phrases coming at you from a wide variety of citizens. 

Mad Dog may be wrong, but he thinks it's entirely possible it's not that the message conveyed is wrong or unattractive--it's the delivery of that message, the media which has destroyed Democrats. "It's the media, not the message," or perhaps, "The media IS the message."

Mad Dog suspects  until Democrats master the airwaves, the podcasts, the social media X sites, they will watch Trump and his progeny dominate political power.

We sure won't be beating him with blogs and the New York Times.

Delicious Defeat

 

How perverse is it that even seeing Donald Trump get 51% of the popular vote, and facing 4 more years of All Donald All the Time, there are a couple of things Mad Dog secretly relishes?

Every once in a while, at one of the monthly Democrats Club meetings a guest speaker would introduce herself and add, "My pronouns are she/her," and it took every fiber of his restraint to throw nothing at her.

Reading a New Yorker article about a gender fluid person whose pronouns were "they" and the New Yorker dutifully described "them" going to town to get a haircut and how "they" ate an ice cream cone and he would tear that issue into tiny pieces.

As Dave Chappelle said, "I completely support everyone being whoever they want to be but my question is to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?"

And he agrees with the Massachusetts Congressman, Seth Moulton, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that."

And he can now reiterate that when Ray Buckley opened the New Hampshire State Democratic convention with 15 minutes of Native Americans playing traditional tom toms to show how inclusive Democrats are, but there was no Lee Greenwood singing, "Proud to be An American,"  and he thought, "Oh, this ought to win over a lot of plaid shirt and suspender HVAC guys in Claremont and Salem," he was dismissed as intolerant.

The fact is, he forgave all that because the alternative--Trump--was worse. 

But 51% of his fellow Americans were offended enough to vote Republican.

Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality

 

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

--T.S. Eliot

One thing you can say for T.S. Eliot: He did make one very true observation about humankind's inability to deal with reality.

Actual Hard Times: Reality

But, of course, Eliot was writing in the wake of a horrific world war, when men with half their faces blown away were wandering the streets, when reality was hunger, outdoor plumbing, rampaging infectious diseases and truly hard times.

The really astonishing accomplishment of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan and Rush Limbaugh and all the Rupert Murdoch cabal is they have been able to turn a reasonably prosperous reality into a nightmarish landscape of pet eating Black immigrants, a mostly invisible invasion from the "shithole countries" (i.e. dark skinned countries) of rapists, thieves and murderers.

Despite the best economy since the 1960's, the millions who voted for Trump cannot abide the price of eggs. 

Here in New Hampshire, when you ask people about the big issues in the election you hear, "The Border," followed by "the economy."

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What border and what economy are they talking about you may ask. Most of the people I heard from had not seen an immigrant in Hampton, N.H. And about half of them were living in modest apartments, possibly in strained financial circumstances, but many were, by any measure, wealthy.

Out of 10,365 votes cast in our town, Trump lost by only 659 votes.  And he had no ground game. Not a single door knocker. Nobody driving voters to the polls. You could see Democrat canvassers in the streets every weekend and toward the end every day and nary a Trump door knocker. The only visible presence were Trumpies holding signs at Lafayette and Exeter, the main intersection, and not that often, and of course lawn signs all along the roads with simple one word messages: Trump: Safety/Kamala: Crime. 

The Trump campaign folks must have been laughing at the Harris campaign from the 20th century. By some invisible means, the Trump message got through to all those folks we spoke with who stood behind their screen doors and told us the Border was their main concern. 

And they all hate the government. The government steals their hard earned money (i.e. assesses taxes) and gives it to undeserving pet eaters.  The government is visible. 

When they have to pay $800 a month for some life preserving medication, that is not the government. The only face on that outrage is a sympathetic pharmacist who offers you a coupon for a month's free supply.

The fact is, Trump, Inc. sold over 51% of the nation on the idea that we have turned into a "shithole" country and it's all the government's fault and you can keep your government hands off my Social Security and Medicare.

The idea that democracy is just one long argument and nothing can get done and we are better off handing over everything to smart, rich guys like Elon Musk, Trump and other men who have fought their way to the top against all odds--never mind the fact they were born on third base--and they can do our thinking for us and we can lead our lives. 

It's pretty much the old scene from "Gone With the Wind," where Ashley and Scarlett look out over the fields worked by hundreds of slaves, and the world is in harmony and there are no arguments.

Keep It Simple

The slickest trick of all is Trump and his little band of conspirators regard their supporters with contempt, but they have convinced the contemptables it's Kamala and the Democrats who who hold them in contempt and it's the Republicans who have their backs. 

This America, Man

 

The opening scene of the five seasons of the TV show, "The Wire"  is a Baltimore street, a teenager lying in a pool of blood, a bullet in his head, and Detective Jimmy McNulty sitting on a stone stoop with a local Black teenager, contemplating the body--and there are exchanges about all the injustices in the world, but, the scene ends with the teenager telling McNulty, to explain the way things have played out: "This America, man."

And this is what happened November 5, 2024. After all the talking heads, the experts, the pundits with their predictions and polls, it was always going to come down to whether there are more of them, the Trump voters, or more of us, the anti-Trump voters.

Clearly, right now at least, there are more of them. 

This America, man.

The Daily Show, in one of its segments without Jon Stewart, did a wonderful montage of pundits explaining why Harris lost: One pundit says she was done in by her failure to win over the Palestinian sympathizing voters in Michigan, while another says she was done in by alienating Jewish voters by sympathizing too much with Palestinians, and it continues on with each analyst bringing up his or her pet cause which, if only Kamala had embraced would have spelled victory, and then another pundit saying just the opposite in the next clip.

As the vast sea of readers of this blog knows, Mad Dog's premonition was a Trump victory, and not a close one, based on his looking around and seeing so many Trump fans over the course of his own week, and as he did canvassing for Harris on the weekends.  Each of us is always looking through a key hole, so Mad Dog was careful not to claim he knew enough from what he could see locally. The soldier on the front line knows only what is happening in front of him, not across the whole front.

But Mad Dog was not surprised on November 5th.

Mad Dog makes no claim to be able to explain it, apart from saying that White people feel aggrieved, and think too much has been given to anyone who is not White;  and Hispanic males love a macho man; and Black men--well, who knows what's going on in the heads of Black men? But clearly they feel aggrieved and maybe there's a certain Stockholm Syndrome operating--if I just embrace this guy who holds power over me, maybe he'll not hurt me and make me one of his boys. 

One of the most common reactions of white patients when they find they are charged $600 for their insulin is to remark that their neighbor, who is Hispanic, not working and on Mass Health gets his insulin for free. (And none of these white voters thanked Biden for eventually getting insulin down to $35.) They had no idea Biden had anything to do with that. They were just angry about their neighbor's free ride. Mad Dog asked once, "Did you ever think to ask why you don't get your insulin for free? I mean, why be angry at the guy who gets it for free, rather than the company that makes it so expensive for you?" 

That was met with uncomprehending stares.

On Trial in Mississippi for Murder of a Black Man

Heather Cox Richardson is correct in making the obvious point Trump has managed to sell a false bill of goods--the economy we have by every measure we have of economy (unemployment rates, effective wages, inflation) hasn't been this good since the 1960's and yet Trump sold the idea it has crashed and burned, not been rescued by Joe Biden with his government sponsored bail outs during the pandemic so business did not collapse and workers got paid.

But even in a good economy, apparently, there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck who are uneasy, angry and want a strongman to help them out.

Mad Dog met a man a few days before the election who worked for an HVAC supply company which laid him off, along with all the other 20 employees, early in the COVID pandemic as their revenues tanked, but the company paid him his full salary and his health insurance for 2020-2021. And he told his wife, "Hey, I'm going to take the year off! This is great!"

So Mad Dog said, "Well, then, you really did benefit from a government program!" 

And he looked back at Mad Dog, uncomprehendingly: "No, that was the company that did that."

And Mad Dog said, "And who do you think gave that company the money to do that when the company had no income?"

This citizen Trump voter had no idea what the answer to that question might be.

This America, man.