Opinion

"Trump World" is not a joke, if it ever really was. That's no longer the term exclusively applied to Donald Trump's orbit by media observers or political opponents. It's now how Trump World describes itself.

When longtime Trump loyalist Corey Lewandowski lost his job leading the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Action, after facing accusations of sexual misconduct, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich tweeted that Lewandowski "will no longer be associated with Trump World." (He was replaced by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is very much still associated with Trump World.)

Joe Biden's human infrastructure bill (aka Build Back Better) promises the largest expansion of the social safety net since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It is also one of the most pro-women and pro-child bills in US history. Among its progressive provisions are expanded child tax credits, paid leave and assistance with childcare expenses.

According to Axios, one reason the bill has stalled in Congress is due to US Senator Joe Manchin's demand that only one of these progressive provisions be included in the final version of the bill.

Virginia's governor's race is weird in that it falls between a presidential election and the following congressional election. Naturally, the press corps is looking to see whether it tells us anything about the midterms or Joe Biden's reelection prospects. I have no idea, but it might tell us something equally important: whether the backlash is working.

The backlash is about the coalition Joe Biden put together to defeat Donald Trump. The coalition was the merging and overlapping of two forces. On the one hand, anti-Trumpists (including respectable white people). On the other, anti-racists. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop was the culmination of these energies. It felt so complete, I dared say in 2020 that Floyd "ended the culture war."

Since Meghan McCain left her co-hosting duties at "The View" this past summer, we all knew this day was coming: the announcement of a tell-all audio book, with its first excerpt dropping Tuesday in Variety. In the excerpt, McCain's lack of self-awareness and self-victimization remain as intense and fresh as ever, as she opens by subjecting readers to her latest round of white tears.

McCain launches into petty rants about how rude and terrible everyone at "The View" was to her, at no point considering the angle that having horrible views necessarily invites people to not like you. It's really not complicated, although McCain tries to make it so by invoking her experiences with postpartum anxiety and mental health struggles.

The first person to represent Colorado's 3rd Congressional District, starting with the district's inception in the 1914 election, was a Democrat from Pueblo named Edward Keating.

He was the son of immigrants. He moved to Colorado from a Kansas farm with his widowed mother, and he left school at 14 to contribute to their livelihood. He became, at 23, the youngest person ever elected to the office of Denver city auditor. Keating later was known to Coloradans mainly as a journalist. He worked his way up from proofreader, and for five years before constituents sent him to Washington he was the editor of the Rocky Mountain News.

Excuse me but I have to vent.

Three House Democrats and one Democratic senator are now blocking a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Medicare is such a big purchaser of drugs that it has the bargaining leverage to cut drug prices for everyone — if allowed to do so. This would save at least $450 billion over the next 10 years and significantly lower prescription drug prices.

Colin Powell has died of COVID-19. One of the most unjustly lauded individuals in early twenty-first century America, an honest portrayal of Powell's legacy turns out starkly negative. From his cover-up of the My Lai Massacre to his lies about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, Powell holds a great deal of responsibility for many of America's worst crimes in the last 60 years.

Born in 1937 in Harlem, Powell's parents were immigrants from Jamaica. He started working as a young boy in Jewish-owned stores around his house and learned Yiddish well enough to speak it for the rest of his life, sometimes speaking to Israeli reporters in the language.

It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday's most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who are eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country.

Everybody treats it like it's a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: the psychopaths running the rightwing media ecosystem dominated by Fox "News" and social media, and echoed by 1500 radio stations across the country, have decided people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

The Proud Boys had another rally in California over the weekend, and a telling moment was clipped and shared by Ron Filipkowski, a lawyer turned chronicler of the far-right. One speaker, armed with a bullhorn, pointed to a group of Proud Boys and declared, they "got some single real men over here looking for some housewives." The men in the clip then joined together for a photo, flashing the "OK" symbol that has been appropriated as a way for white supremacists to signal each other while also — always — trolling the left.

In the space of a minute, it was a perfect illustration of the two-step process that the far-right has used for years now to recruit new followers: First, bait insecure men with fantasies of female submission. Once they're in, recruit them to white supremacy.

As anyone could have predicted, much of the media is once again obsessed with the "Democrats are in disarray" storyline, a perennial favorite that makes it easy to preserve the preferred conventional wisdom that says the right may be authoritarian bigots but at least they aren't the dizzy dingbats of the left. Republicans don't even have to make the trains run on time anymore.

Right now, the Democrats are doing the most tedious of all political tasks: trying to pass complicated legislation with a coalition that includes a handful of officials who look in the mirror every morning and see a superstar looking back at them. There is no politician on Earth who does not have a healthy ego, but these are people who live for headlines like this one: Manchin Lays Down Demands for Child Tax Credit.

In the weeks since the 20th anniversary of 9/11, sensory memories of that disastrous day -- things I haven't thought about in years – came flooding back.

In the hours and days immediately after the collapse of the twin towers, I remember the National Guardsmen posted at a nearby intersection checking ID, the police from all over the country rotating turns to guard our local precinct house, the post office a couple of blocks away closed "to all overseas mail."

Why is there even a question about prosecuting Stephen K. Bannon – and other advisors to Donald Trump — for snubbing a congressional subpoena? Since when is a formal summons optional?

For that matter, why are Republican members of Congress, including House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy, ducking responsibilities to testify to the Jan. 6 select committee about what they did or did not do on that insurrection day?

America's democracy crisis is rapidly getting worse. Collapse may be imminent, and coming far faster than many experts predicted. In a new conversation with Dean Obeidallah for Salon Talks, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of "How Democracies Die," says that when the book was published three years ago, he and co-author Daniel Ziblatt still believed "that the bulk of the Republican Party was minimally committed to small-D democracy":

We believed there was a faction in the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, that would be able and willing to draw a line that they wouldn't let Trump cross. And we were wrong about that. The speed and the extent to which the Republican Party has been Trumpified is way beyond anything that we expected.

We can only conclude that the country's democratic institutions were not as strong as many people believed them to be, and that the American people's faith in democracy was exaggerated. Furthermore, the Republican Party's move towards fascism was far deeper and more sincere than the country's political elites and mainstream media wanted to admit. Many other societal problems also helped bring America to this crisis.