Thursday, January 23, 2025. Annette’s News Roundup.
Every day, remember.
January 20, 2025. A beast entered the White House.
January 20, 2025. The brutal takeover of America began.
January 20, 2025. We continued to fight.
Meet a MAGA with morals.
Convicted US Capital rioter turns down Trump pardon.
Meet some Disenchanted MAGA.
So it begins. Expect an avalanche as people who supported Trump discover who he is and what he does.
The New York Times quoted Aquilino A. Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant, who was assaulted during the [J6] attack and retired because of the injuries he suffered. Mr. Gonnell said of the nearly 1600 pardons and 14 commutations “It’s a miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy.”
We need to be sure to keep reminding voters that Trump’s pardons for the violent rioters of January 6 betrayed us all, and his party either supported his action or were silent, though there were a few mealy mouthed exceptions like Susan Collins who split their criticisms about pardons between those issued by President Biden to protect his family members and the J6 Select Committee, and those issued by Trump which undermine the rule of law.
A powerful overview of Day One and Musk.
Snapshot: Fascism Day One.
This photograph of Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute while standing behind the seal of the President of the United States summarizes the reprehensible first day of the second Trump regime. This gesture was no accident. The richest man in the world gave Hitler’s sieg heil not once, but twice in rapid succession.
“Some elections are important, some are not. But this one, this one really mattered and I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” Musk said. Then he clapped his hand on his chest and aggressively, enthusiastically raised the Nazi salute. “It is thanks to you,” he told the Trump supporters at the post-inaugural event at Washington’s Capitol One Arena, “that the future of civilization is assured.”
While some legacy media minimized this act as a Roman salute or an “uncertain” gesture, let’s remember that this despicable man recently expressed his backing of Germany’s far-right, neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party. Let’s not forget that his salute makes a mockery of the deaths of over 400,000 Americans who fought and died to defend democracy against these fascists in WWII, in addition to over 6 million Jews who were exterminated by Hitler and his monstrous regime.
Musk’s Nazi salute put an exclamation point on a number of related activities by his freshly inaugurated buddy Donald Trump. It was awful to watch him mouth the words of the oath of office— “to protect and defend the Constitution”—a charade meant to indicate that he gives a damn about that once-sacred document. He did that mouthing, by the way, without putting his hand on any Bible. And his backdrop in the warm and cozy Capitol rotunda where his insurrectionists gleefully paraded four years earlier was now comprised of tech-bro billionaires who’ve demonstrated their fealty to him since the election with their dollars and their kowtowing visits to Mar-a-Lago.
There was no inaugural parade outside in the cold, but there were Proud Boy militia men marching in the street like conquering heroes. Trump took little time to extract America from both the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. As a subdued press corps looked on in the Oval Office, he also signed an executive order intended to end birthright citizenship which is enshrined in the 14th amendment of the Constitution (and which likely will eventually be assessed by the Supreme Court).
And the first day’s coup de grâce: Trump pardoned over 1,500 felons convicted for their participation in the Jan. 6 attacks at our Capitol. That includes several hundred convicted criminals who beat up police officers with deadly or dangerous weapons, who will now be among the violent felons released from prison and available to serve as paramilitary shock troops for the lawless Trump regime.
These insurrectionists, who all were at the Capitol to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, will surely now be held up as heroes. We can only imagine how many still-traumatized and physically wounded police officers and good Americans who turned in to the authorities some of these angry, violent thugs must now worry for their personal safety.
There’s no sense in sugarcoating the nature of this vengeful, hateful, aggressive first day, intended to stoke fear and let Trump’s enemies know that he will ignore the rule of law and the Constitution to get what he wants.
In his inaugural address soon after noon—with Presidents Biden, Obama and Clinton looking on—Trump claimed that he wanted to be a peacemaker while also proudly threatening to invade Panama to reclaim the Panama Canal. He insisted America is “seemingly in complete disrepair,” then pledged that “all of this will change starting today” and “America's decline is over.”
This follows his pattern of claiming things are broken and in crisis—which, if true, is likely of his own making—and then presenting himself as the only one who can fix it. But this time he went further with the messianic claim that he was “saved by God” from an assassin’s bullet “to make America great again.”
Our response cannot be to simply express outrage over every transgression. We will have to pick our battles and decide where we will focus and expend our energies for maximum impact. I know, for example, that the deportation efforts will be high on my list. I hope you will let me know both where your priorities are and what you’d like me to spotlight in the weeks and months ahead.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to calibrate our actions and our emotions to be in this battle for the long haul. There are already lawyers armed with lawsuits and other advocacy groups gearing up to oppose the hateful onslaught intended to intimidate and silence the opposition. We can count on this regime’s overreach and incompetence to minimize at least some of the damage.
But let’s not doubt that we are facing, as Martin Luther King, Jr. described it, “the fierce urgency of now.” As he put it from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial over six decades ago, “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” Our renewed defense of democracy starts now. (America, America by Steven Beschloss, Substack).
Some called Musk’s salute what it was, the Nazis salute, recognized as such by anti-Nazis and Nazis the world over.
Some didn’t.
@ Jon Cooper wrote - If you want further proof that American journalism is dead, the Hollywood Reporter showed more moral clarity in their coverage of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute than the Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, WSJ, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS or NBC. Cowards all.
Here is one who named what he saw, but unfortunately he limited his interpretation of what it meant.👇
Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York.
@RepJerryNadler
I never imagined we would see the day when what appears to be a Heil Hitler salute would be made behind the Presidential seal. This abhorrent gesture has no place in our society and belongs in the darkest chapters of human history. I urge all of my colleagues to unite in condemning this hateful gesture for what it is: antisemitism.
My commentary - Sorry, Jerry, antisemitism is only the rotten tip of what Musk’s Nazi salute meant. It also signals a salute, an embrace to authoritarianism and the end of Democracy.
But the biggest disappointment in its reaction to Musk’s outrageous display of unity with Nazis all over the world was the ACLU.
Did they not see the action, or hear the context (Musk, who has gone out of his way to embrace the white supremacist AfD party in Germany declaring his gratitude, that “the future of civilization is assured.”)
Did they not notice the response from Nazis worldwide (sample- WE ARE FUCKING BACK,” the administrator of a Nazi meme channel on Telegram wrote under a clip of Musk giving the salute, or Evan Kilgore, a right-wing political commentator, who wrote on X: “Holy crap … did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC … This is incredible.” Kilgore later wrote: “We are so back.”)
If you donate to the ACLU, or if you don’t, you might want to contact them over this. Yes, the ACLU has filed a suit against Trump’s attempt to end Birthright Citizenship, so congratulate them on that and criticize them on this.
THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004
(212) 549-2500
Contact your elected officials about this other matter too - aid for play. Don’t let a day go by without fighting back.
HANNITY: Are you saying that California, if they continue to aid and abet lawbreaking and harbor illegal immigrants, money from DC gets cut off? MIKE JOHNSON: Yeah. We're talking about conditions to this disaster aid.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-01-22T02:27:57.857Z
Also, remember this. 👇
Beware, Trump: the American spirit is indefatigable
‘They cannot do everything they aim to do. Because politics is not over; because our institutions are not all collapsed.’ Photograph: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images.
At noon ET on Monday, the US presidency changed hands, and one of the largest governments in the world rearranged itself in service to the petulance and vulgarity of the nation’s new president.
At the Pentagon, a portrait of a general who Donald Trump had found insufficiently deferential to him in his first term was removed from a wall; photographs of the empty spot circulated on social media. Trump was set to sign a bevvy of executive orders, pledging to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, to revoke policies promoting wind energy and electric cars, and to exert executive powers to speed up the construction of oil pipelines.
He was scheduled to revoke federal acknowledgement of transgender identity for the purposes of civil rights law, declaring in his inaugural address that “there are only two genders”. And Reproductiverights.gov, a federal web site aimed at helping women navigate abortion access, immediately went offline.
CBPOne, an app used by migrants to the US to manage their interactions with immigration officials, went dark when Trump was sworn in. An announcement posted on the programs website said that all existing appointments had been cancelled, leaving tens of thousands of people in the lurch. The press has reported that the new administration plans a series of high-profile raids in major cities this week, in search of immigrants to deport.
Latino businessowners in Chicago reported lost revenue as their clientele stayed home out of fear; a friend from college, a New York City public high school teacher, shared the instructions from her school administrators on how to protect her students in the event of an Ice raid. Meanwhile, Trump’s aides said he would issue an order ending birthright citizenship for the US-born children of immigrants, a move that would create a class of hundreds of thousands of un-Americans and move the concept of US citizenship from a legally protected status to something more akin to an inherited one.
It is not clear what authority, exactly, Trump has to do this; birthright citizenship, after all, is enshrined in the United States constitution. Like much of the inauguration’s declarations, the statements may be for show – grand pronouncements that will be muddled and eroded by the reality of policymaking, the grind of bureaucracy, the whittling-down of lawsuits.
Stephen Miller, the longtime Trump adviser and anti-immigrant crusader, has planned, according to the New York Times, a sort of shock-and-awe approach, hoping to issue as many executive orders and pursue as many maximalist policy changes as possible within the first days of the administration, hoping to terrify and exhaust the opposition. As is always the case with Trump, his statements are much grander than his actions. That doesn’t mean that his actions will not hurt people.
Trump returns to power with more loyal followers and more skittish, deferential and frightened enemies. The Republican party has been reshaped in his image, and so have the courts: just last summer, the US supreme court, including all three of Trump’s first-term nominees, voted to make him virtually immune from criminal prosecution for acts taken in office.
He has pledged to pardon all the convicted January 6 insurrectionists, and to halt prosecutions of those not yet convicted. And he is likely to use his authority over federal law enforcement to pursue civil and criminal proceedings against his enemies. On his way out the door, Joe Biden made a point of pre-emptively pardoning lawmakers who had investigated the January 6 attack, to protect them from Trump’s reprisals. The Democrats are weak, fractured, embittered and scared; the same consultants whose advice lost them the 2024 election are now telling them to defer to Trump, abandon resistance, and shift to the right. So far, many of them appear to be listening. The others are pointing fingers at one another.
Right now the money is on Trump, and the money is substantial. The three richest men in the world – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – all sat in the front row at Trump’s inauguration. (His cabinet members were in the second.) The men are there to court lucrative government contracts and discourage regulation of their businesses, but they also appear willing to commit themselves to Trump’s ideological project, especially with regards to gender, and to wield the massive communications platforms that they control to further his culture war agenda.
Bezos has intervened at the Washington Post to tilt the editorial slant in Trump’s favor; Zuckerberg has removed many sex, sexuality and gender protections from the content moderation policies of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. Musk, meanwhile, is reportedly slated to be given an office in the West Wing, though he has no official government job. Speaking at a rally of Trump supporters held at an arena after the official inauguration ceremony, the billionaire effusively thanked the crowd in his mealy South African accent. Musk then jerked a flat hand from his chest into the air, in a gesture that resembled a Nazi salute.
There is something broken in the soul when such spectacles can no longer shock you. But I confess that they no longer shock me. America is ruled, now, by men who are extremely psychologically transparent: their resentment and greed, their desperate, seeking needfulness, their insecurity and rage at those who provoke it; these things seep off these men, like a stench. They are evil men, and pathetic ones: mentally small, morally ugly. They are relentlessly predictable.
Here is another prediction: these men will not succeed in all their schemes. They will not deport as many people as they say they will; he will not change the law as much as they pledge to; they will not, cannot, capture the institutions as completely, or bury dissent as successfully. They cannot do everything they aim to do. Because politics is not over; because our institutions are not all collapsed; and because the existing institutions are not the only methods of resistance and refusal.
The Trumpist movement that ascended to power on Monday is relying on a tired, defeated America, one too diminished to do anything but submit to their demands and schemes. But the American spirit is indefatigable: it loves freedom and equality, abhors tyranny, values minding your own business and hates, above all, to be told what to do. When Trump was last in office, Americans found, at the end, that they did not like it. They will not like it now, either, and that dislike, however tardy, will have political consequences.”
(Moira Donegan, Guardian columnist)
Moira Donegan
Writer in Residence
Moira Donegan is writer in residence for the Stanford Clayman Institute, where she participates in the intellectual life of the Institute, hosts its artist salon series, teaches a class in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and mentors students, while continuing her own projects and writing.
Her criticism, essays, and commentary, which cover the intersection of gender, politics, and the law, have appeared in places such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and Bookforum. Donegan has been an editor at the New Republic and n+1, and currently she writes a column on gender in America for The Guardian. Her first book, Gone Too Far: MeToo, Backlash, and the Future of Feminist Politics, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Last of all, this. 👇
Gotta love the British press.
— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) 2025-01-22T03:48:47.857Z
I do love it. Wish that it was only that easy.
See you tomorrow.