On The Cusp Of Trump II, A Way To Make Sense Of The Coming Madness

INSIDE: Merrick Garland ... Pam Bondi ... Kash Patel

Jan 17, 2025

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Happy Last ‘Normal’ Day

On the last full workday before Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, I wanted to return to our earlier discussion of the three horsemen of the Trump II apocalypse: retribution, corruption, and destruction.

As the pace of the Trump II chaos has quickened in recent days, it’s been harder to keep track of of it all, let alone make sense of it. We can wave our hands at the general chaos, but if our understanding starts to slip, we can’t triage and prioritize the various threats and transgressions. It helps to remember that the chaos isn’t the point in and of itself but is in service of the three driving motives that animate the MAGA id.

Trump’s lizard brain seeks retribution for slights real and imagined, with near perfect overlap between wounds to his ego and threats to his power. He perceives them in virtually the same way, and therein lies so much of the danger of the Trump cult. The melding of the personal and the public, of personality and power, and of loyalty to an individual and duty to the common good.

The corruption comes hand in hand with the elevation of personal loyalty over any other obligation or imperative. And it is enhanced by the destruction of institutions, power centers, enforcement mechanisms, and norms that would otherwise impose restraints.

All three impulses combine to project dominance, giving him and his backers a frisson of power as they bully, hurt, and demean for the sake of doing so.

The three motives overlap and reinforce each other, but they remain distinct from each other and help to clarify why a particular threat, scandal, conspiracy theory, elaborate charade, or transgression operates to enhance Trump’s position.

But I don’t want this framework to exist only at the level of an abstraction. This isn’t a passing parade for us to gawk at from the sidewalk. Real people – government employees; prosecutors, investigators, and judges; regulators, auditors, and watchdogs; and of course marginalized people of all stripes – are going to bear the very real and tangible burdens of being targeted, vilified, and abused under Trump II. That starts at noon ET Monday.

We owe it to them and to each other to keep clear heads about what is happening and why. Onward.

Quote Of The Day

“It is the obligation of each of us to follow our norms, not only when it is easy, but also when it is hard, especially when it is hard. It is the obligation of each of us to adhere to our norms, even when and especially when the circumstances we face are not normal.” –Attorney General Merrick Garland, in his farewell speech to the Justice Department

Trump II Clown Show

Pam Bondi‘s financial disclosure form shows she and her husband have a net worth of $12.1 million – $3.9 million of which is stock in Trump’s Truth Social platform, Business Insider reports, based on documents it obtained.
Kash Patel has vowed retribution. As FBI director, he could do it.–WaPo
Stephen Miller, Channeling Trump, Has Built More Power Than Ever–NYT

Rudy G Settles With Georgia Election Workers

After a flurry of news reports yesterday that suggested Rudy Giuliani was a no-show for scheduled court proceedings, it became clear that he and Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss have settled their disputes over executing the $148 defamation judgment they have against him.

2024 Ephemera

TPM’s Hunter Walker: One Of Ruben Gallego’s Top Strategists Explains How They Won A Senate Seat In A State That Swung Hard For Trump
NYT: How Chuck Schumer Pushed Joe Biden to Drop Out
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) picks state Attorney General Ashley Moody to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate seat.

Didn’t See This Coming

SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein has been indicted on federal tax evasion charges in Maryland … but that’s only the surface-level news. Goldstein, until 2023 a prominent Supreme Court advocate, was allegedly also a high-stakes poker player. Very high stakes. Millions of dollars in gamblings debts and winnings, allegedly. Adding to the sordid soup: allegations relating to keeping women he was involved with on his law firm payroll in fake jobs.

Welcome To The Pyrocene

One of Morning Memo’s jobs is to introduce you to expert voices you may not have heard yet. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist with a bent toward communicating the risks of climate change to a lay audience. He posted a long thread overnight on wildfire risk in a warming world. In giving a broad overview of what’s changed, why wildfire impacts are worsening, and what policy changes and mitigation efforts need to be prioritized, Swain explicitly embraces complexity and doesn’t offer silver bullet solutions or over-simplistic “fixes.” Worth a read, especially if you don’t live in the arid West.

Pulling Back The Curtain On Disaster Response

Earlier this week, I was exchanging emails with TPM Reader JP, who has local-level disaster management experience. He’d written in primarily to highlight why Trump’s political attacks on California were so godawful, but he also touched on one of my perennial preoccupations: The way news coverage creates and reinforces profound misapprehensions about how disaster response works.

I’m not sure if your readers, or even your staff in general, understand that when a disaster occurs the federal and state governments don’t come swooping in. They’ll contribute money and press junkets, eventually. All the responders, which covers so much more than fire/police personnel/resources, are all local. As the disaster response expands beyond strictly local (county) capacity, the state may facilitate the transfer of other local resources, but that’s it. No President or Governor is in a secret bunker directing the response and no national base is waiting with disaster equipment and staff to dispatch overnight, like some sort of military air-drop.
As resources start pouring into the disaster response, for whatever disaster wherever it occurred, it’s all localities from across that state and across other states contributing to our shared welfare. I had municipal coworkers at my elbow who had just lost their houses and all their possessions, but knew they could still contribute to our community’s welfare by continuing to work in the response. These really are the most ‘by the people, for the people’ experiences our country has, not war, not voting, not traveling, and certainly not social media. For those involved in the response and/or affected by the disaster it becomes one of the most elevated community/emotional experiences you can have.
That a President, any President, would try to pillory a state in a time of crisis shows their true lack of character and moral ugliness. Even TX Governor Abbott, despite his political chicanery and CA scapegoating, knows that Texas and California are brethren in this cause and need to stand together. My heart goes out to those in Southern California fighting this raging storm of fire, we all stand with you in this time.

What’s Next In Los Angeles?

Susan Crawford: Why pushing to rebuild quickly in LA is both understandable and unthinkable

‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’

The aerospace industrial complex has always launched as many euphemisms as it has rockets. When Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch vehicle Starship exploded yesterday over the Turks and Caicos islands while on a test flight, we got this oldie but goodie:

The disintegration of the unmanned spacecraft was spectacular:

Kilauea Puts On A Show

The series of summit eruptions on Kilauea that began Dec. 23 resumed Wednesday morning and has evolved into vigorous lava fountaining from two vents at the base of the 700-foot-tall caldera wall. This is the fourth eruptive episode of the past month: