The Daily Parker

Voters across the US told the OAFPOTUS to pound sand in the clearest electoral rebuke to a major political party since 1984, and the hardest slap to an incumbent president probably since 1868. Democrats won crushing victories in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and even Mississippi. Almost every county in Virginia shifted toward Democrats, and no amount of money could unseat three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania. Plus, Zohran Mamdani beat the OAFPOTUS-endorsed candidates to win the New York City mayoral election, which doubles as a bitch-slap to the establishment pundits who can't wait for him to fail.

The Republicans, in short, got spanked hard.

I don't have time to summarize all the reactions, so I'll just list a few:

• Brian Beutler: 25 thoughts on the 2025 elections.
• David Graham: The anti-MAGA majority re-emerges.
• Adam Kinzinger: More Mikie Sherrills, please. (Sherrill won the New Jersey gubernatorial race.)
• Paul Krugman: Which party is in trouble, again?
• Josh Marshall: DC conventional wisdom goes down to defeat in state after state.
• Jeff Maurer's hot take is that we probably didn't learn very much.
• Lauren Pope: Here's how [the Democrats] can win.
• Jennifer Rubin: Democrats in array.
• Michael Tomasky: America has big-time buyer's remorse about the OAFPOTUS.
• Matthew Yglesias: 13 takeaways from last night and now here comes the interesting part.
• Even John Scalzi had some thoughts.

While voters were handing the OAFPOTUS and his droogs their political asses during the longest government shutdown in history (second only to the one in their first term), armed thugs from the Dept of Homeland Security burst into a fucking day-care just a couple kilometers from my house to arrest a woman that the day care says is legally authorized to work for them. But little kids screaming in terror while one of their caregivers gets thrown to the floor and handcuffed is the point for these assholes, and is just one of the many malfeasances of this administration that led to yesterday's decisive losses for their party.

Yesterday showed that Americans learned the correct lessons from Venezuela and Hungary, and the Republicans didn't. Know hope.

I come to bury Cheney, not to praise him:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who extolled the power of the presidency, died Monday at the age of 84, his family said in a statement.

The cause was complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, the statement said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney advocated an aggressive new foreign policy in which potential threats would be met with swift, pre-emptive action. No longer would the U.S. wait for an enemy to strike first. He helped sell the Iraq War by issuing dire warnings to the American people. At the same time, he famously predicted that the mission itself would be relatively easy.

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who then hosted the show, asked Cheney if the American people were ready for a long, bloody battle.

"I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Cheney said.

There were other controversies that dogged Cheney as the Bush administration's popularity plummeted in its second term. In 2007, his chief of staff and top adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney was not implicated in the case legally, but he was tainted by the scandal nonetheless.

Then, in what was one of the more bizarre incidents involving someone as high ranking in the government as Cheney, he accidentally shot and wounded a friend, attorney Harry Whittington, in the face and chest with birdshot pellets during a 2006 weekend quail-hunting trip at a Texas ranch.

Cheney advocated for a stronger executive, rejecting the framers' ordering of the branches of government.

The analysts will have a lot to say today about Cheney's "complicated" life story. But he made the OAFPOTUS's power grab possible, by supporting Federal candidates and judicial nominees who agreed that Congress should take a back seat to the President, regardless of the actual text of the Constitution. He even admitted that, in a way, when he supported Democratic candidates in 2022 and 2024 simply because they weren't insane.

One pundit, I forget who, said recently that Republicans and Democrats like me used to disagree on how to drive but we agreed on the destination, while people like the OAFPOTUS want to crash the car. Cheney may have been one of the former type of Republicans, and he may have agreed broadly on where we were going, but he yanked the wheel pretty hard to the right.

So many things passed through my inbox in the last day and a half:

• The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that an assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was observed over the weekend discussing plans over Signal with an aide to Reichsminister Stephen Miller to send the 82nd Airborne to Portland.
• Paul Krugman breaks from his usual economics beat to lambast the OAFPOTUS and his Reichskabinett der Nationalen Rettung for the horrifying ICE raid* on a Chicago apartment building last week: "What do we learn from the Chicago apartment raid plus the growing number of incidents in which ICE agents have physically attacked people who posed no conceivable threat? To me, it says that even 'alarmists' who warned about the threat a Trump administration would pose to democracy underestimated just how evil this administration would be."
• Adam Kinzinger draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS really, really not wanting anyone to read the Epstein files and the Republicans' not caring really one whit about "protecting kids."
• Jamelle Bouie suggests that if Hegseth and the OAFPOTUS want to see "the enemy within," they should glance at the nearest mirror. Jen Rubin concurs.
• In his latest column on the OAFPOTUS's bullshit, Glenn Kessler mocks the TACO King for "crying 'witch hunt' while stirring the cauldron."
• Josh Marshall applauds California governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois governor JB Pritzker for being willing to use the power they have to prevent the rending of our nation.
• Matt Yglesias wants to shake some sense into the "groups" who have clearly learned nothing from Kamala Harris's embarrassing loss last November.
• Pilot and journalist James Fallows once again reminds people that it's safe to fly during a government shutdown. Of course, since all the air-traffic control trainers were furloughed...
• The Times has yet another essay about craft breweries shutting down because there are just too darn many of them. (Since the Brews & Choos Project started in February 2020, 22 of the 146 breweries I've visited have closed—plus another 7 I didn't get to.)

Finally, Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford goes over the numbers: September was warm and very dry. October is shaping up to be as well, despite the forecast calling for rain tonight and cooler temperatures through Saturday.

* Seriously, doesn't anyone in ICE realize that people will talk about them 30 years from now the way we talk today about the Schutzstaffel?

The stupidest person ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk has made most of the world feel sad for us. Let's check on why:

• Matthew Yglesias digs into the abject idiocy of the OAFPOTUS's war on Tylenol.
• Jeff Maurer puts on his OAFPOTUS mask and declaims "Tylenol is why I'm like this."

And yet, both Jennifer Rubin and Josh Marshall see the tide turning hard against the administration, though George Packer thinks we now live in an authoritarian state.

Meanwhile,

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called an in-person meeting of all 900 or so general and flag officers next week, an unprecedented move made even weirder by his office not telling any of them why.
• Yascha Mounk shakes his head at former US Senator Kamala Harris's refusal to acknowledge why the Democratic Party lost the last election.

And finally, the mold count in Chicago hit an all-time high on Tuesday of 82,121, which is nothing to sneeze at. The mold count is forecast to remain high until the first frost, which might be in November given the climate predictions this fall.

It took several hours after the Gila River started rising for a general alert to go out. This doesn't appear to be anyone's fault so much as the way the alert system works, which is why a bill recently proposed in the Texas legislature would provide much-needed money to upgrade the system. Unfortunately for Texans who live near rivers, Republicans in the state house killed the bill in the most recent legislative session.

New York State has a similar problem. The Dept of Homeland Security just cancelled a $3 million grant to enhance "last-mile" alerts in extreme weather events, even as recovery workers found more bodies in Texas:

As the Empower website puts it, “By integrating advanced analytics, real-time localized high resolution Mesonet-based weather data, critical infrastructure ‘lifelines,’ social vulnerability data, and novel visualization capabilities, the Empower tool will provide a rapid assessment of changing weather conditions and their potential impacts on communities and critical infrastructure.”

But on Tuesday the grant recipients at State University of New York, Albany were notified by DHS in a termination form dated July 8th that the entire grant was being “terminate[d] for the convenience of the Government.” The order, signed by DHS contracting officer John Whipple, instructed researchers to immediately cease work on the project.

So while the Texas disaster last week wasn't the fault of Texas Republicans or the OAFPOTUS's hand-picked clown college, future disasters will certainly have higher tolls because of their actions.

My GOP friends: the Republican Party told you for decades it wanted to "drown the Federal government in a bathtub," and you either didn't believe them or thought that was just fine. At the moment, I don't care which. You will have some explaining to do later on, though.

On my flight yesterday, I finally read Nicholas Confessore's explanation of how US v Skrmetti got to the Supreme Court, and...wow. I am actually shocked at how illiberal and extremist the ACLU's leadership has become, and how far the transgender rights movement has moved to the left:

For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that “saved my life,” as he later wrote. “When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating,” Strangio wrote. “It is survival.” He vowed to work “to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility.”

Like Strangio, the younger people going to work at L.G.B.T.Q. groups leaned further left than their older colleagues. Often identifying as queer — a label that could connote radical politics as much as any sexual or gender identity — they resented the incremental, assimilationist politics that had won the right to same-sex marriage. They sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal — to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them.

When the journalist Abigail Shrier published her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” — casting the rise in dysphoria among teenage girls as a form of social contagion — Strangio tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

An ACLU lawyer arguing in favor of book banning? What the actual? Confessore also elucidates Strangio's views on biology which don't, perhaps, conform with what actual biologists think:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

In interviews and on social media, he has described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with “social power and capital and political power” and to the “fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.” The turn to trans rights would ultimately reopen an old fissure in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement: whether to seek civic equality — or liberation.

It's all of a piece with young people throughout history wanting to change the world and not wanting to wait around for inconvenient things like democracy, I suppose.

Andrew Sullivan has fought Strangio's way of thinking for years, frustrated that the LGBTQ+ movement has shortchanged the Ls and the Gs especially. He has a lot to say about the Skrmetti decision in genral and Strangio in particular:

This disdain for the greatest gay rights victory made him a Grand Marshal in the New York pride parade that year (that’s how far left the gay elite has now gone). His view of his critics was: “I think they genuinely want to take away rights for trans people and kill trans people.” Yeah, I’m not worried about safeguards for children and good scientific evidence; I just want to kill trans people.

Strangio, in line with the deep illiberalism of his movement, refuses to debate anyone who is not fully in agreement with him; won’t provide evidence to back up wild claims; and wouldn’t even agree to be interviewed in person on the record by the trans-friendly NYT! He opposed any journalistic coverage of the debate on child sex changes, and supported targeting the Times: “The NYT’s horrible coverage of and fixation on trans people has been central to the progression of anti-trans bills and policies nationally.”

In front of the Supreme Court, the gist of Strangio’s argument was, well, absurd. It was about puberty blockers that are used medically to stop a condition called “central precocious puberty” — where kids younger than 8 go into puberty because the hypothalamus triggers the pituitary gland prematurely. It can be caused by an endocrine disorder, tumors, rare genetic mutations, or appear without apparent cause in girls. Strangio actually tried to argue that because the drug is used for cis kids for this reason, it cannot be denied much older “trans” children with no precocious puberty who want to change sex before puberty for psychological reasons. Apart from the age and the diagnosis, exactly the same!

Strangio and his fellow nutters have also pushed the gay and lesbian rights movement onto thin political ice — and it’s now cracking beneath our feet. The queer radicals have lost an election, debates in 27 state legislatures, the Biden DOJ, public opinion, the Supreme Court, and now — with this definitive piece and a solid podcast series, The Protocol — the New York Times. And next month, the most famous clinic in the US transing kids, run by Johanna Olson-Kennedy, will shutter. She was a key promoter of the suicide lie. The lawsuits are going to be brutal.

Maybe there’s a chance for what’s left of the former gay groups to recover their liberal principles, support free speech, engage opponents, respect religious dissent, use plain English, and trust rigorous, evidence-based science again. If we can do that, and help kids in gender distress without irreversibly and prematurely medicalizing them, we can begin to regain the broader public trust we have recently lost.

I have personally experienced the results of this radicalization of the left, and I don't just mean the spanking our party received last November. I've been an ally all my life, as gay friends going all the way back to high school will attest (in the '80s, when being openly gay was dangerous), and even I have gotten pushback for not being in line with the Movement.

I really hope the Democratic Party can get back to the center in the next year or we're going to get smacked around again. There's no hope for the Republicans as long as the OAFPOTUS leads them; but we can--and absolutely should--peel off the 25% of their voters who think they've gone off the deep end to the right. Getting people like Strangio off the stage will help. They don't represent the majority of the Party and they certainly don't come close to representing a majority of Americans.

I spent a lot of time outside over the weekend until the temperature started to slide into the single digits (Celsius) last night, so I put off reading online stories in favor of reading real books. I also failed to mention that we had an honest-to-goodness haboob in Northern Illinois on Friday, the first significant one since 1934. Because hey, let's bring back the 1930s in all their glory!

• Adam Kinzinger rolls his eyes at the world's oldest toddler: the OAFPOTUS himself, the biggest champion of the 1930s we have right now.
• Josh Marshall shakes his head at the people in our party who think the electorate is waiting with bated breath to find out which nonessential policies we're going to go with in 2026.
• Jeff Maurer draws similar parallels, this time between HBO/Max/HBO Max/whatever's branding problems and those of the Democratic Party.
• Paul Krugman slaps the GOP hard for its "incredibly cruel" budget—which is their point: "Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards."
• Speaking of cruelty, Jack Goldsmith picks apart Stephen Miller's trolling about habeas corpus, and pleads with journalists to stop falling for this stuff.
• Michael Tomasky says that Kamala Harris's race and gender weren't the problem with her candidacy—it's that the party stopped all conversation about her fitness for the presidency because of her race and gender.
• Tyler Austin Harper agrees, saying that the King Lear analogy with President Biden postulated in Jake Tapper's Original Sin doesn't quite work: his core advisers and his wife bear a lot more responsibility for our 2024 loss than they get credit for.
• Oh, and hey, did anyone in North America notice that the PKK lay down their arms and have ended their 40-year insurgency against Türkiye? It's kind of a big deal.
• In one bit of good news, the critically-endangered piping plovers nesting at Montrose Beach a few hundred meters to the east of where I'm sitting have laid an egg. Good luck, Imani and Sea Rocket!
• The UK has asked if the US Federal Aviation Administration might possibly do their jobs a bit better regulating the Clown Prince of X's rockets, which keep blowing up over the UK's Caribbean territories and littering their beaches with debris.

Finally, Scottish writer Dan Richards looks across the Atlantic and sees that the infrastructure choices we've made have driven us to having only two bad options: slow cars or polluting airplanes. Europe made investments throughout the last 30 years that gave them sleek and comfortable overnight trains.

I last took an overnight European train in September 2013, on what may be my best visit to the UK ever. The Caledonian Sleeper leaves London Euston at 22:30 and gets to Edinburgh at 08:00, for about £250 per person. Put that price against a flight and a hotel, or even an daytime express train and a hotel, and it's not a bad deal. Plus you get a wake-up call with hot tea before arriving.

The OAFPOTUS took office for the second time 99 days ago, which means we already have a few 100-days stories to mention.

First, from Canadian prime minister Mark Carney (Lib.–Nepean), whose party won yesterday's election and has formed a 4th consecutive government:

"As I've been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country," Carney told supporters Monday night. "These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never ... ever happen."

Conservative leader Pierre Polivievre and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh both lost their seats as well.

Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) decries "100 days of disaster:"

In just his first 100 days, Trump has issued more than 130 executive orders, throwing the economy, higher education, the legal system, and much of the federal government into chaos. He pardoned 1,600 insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And most damaging of all, he declared a trade war with China — and pretty much the rest of the world — sending us hurtling toward a severe recession.

If there’s one thing Trump has proven in his first 100 days, it’s that he’s consistently bad at this job.

Former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asks, "are you better off than you were 100 days ago?"

In every presidency, the 100-day milestone is a key moment to check on the status of an administration and of the country. Today, Americans are experiencing an administration marked by historic shows of incompetence, cruelty, and confusion, and a country that is measurably worse off than just a hundred days ago.

At this 100-day mark, I’d encourage you to do everything you can think of to make clear how you feel, not just to your Member of Congress but to people in your life. This is a time to talk with friends and family, even or especially if they have different political views than you do. It’s a moment to listen to any doubts and concerns they may be having - as millions of Americans clearly do - with interest and empathy while sharing your own sincere convictions.

James Fallows takes the moment to laud the people standing up to the OAFPOTUS's clown show:

Mariann Edgar Budde had no way of calculating the risks she might be taking on. Soon after the service, Trump was attacking her by name (as “nasty” and dumb) on social media. A GOP congressman “joked” that she should go onto the ICE deportation list. Other threats were not in jest.

But she stood up and spoke.

Let us remember the story of Bishop Budde, 99 days ago. And remember the people fighting for decent values in all these days ahead.

Jonathan Chait calls it "an unsustainable presidency:"

Historians tend to rate presidencies by the breadth of their accomplishments, on a scale ranging from ineffectual to transformative. The classic measuring stick for 100-day achievements is the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The frenetic first stretch of the New Deal featured a raft of major legislation that established new financial regulations and ambitious public-works projects, helping the economy begin to recover from the Great Depression.

Judged against Roosevelt’s record, the first 100 days of the second Trump term can be deemed a miserable failure. The president has passed no major legislation, and his economic interventions have had the opposite effect of Roosevelt’s, injecting uncertainty into a healthy recovery and seeding an economic crisis.

Trump and his inner circle have consciously patterned themselves after Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, which seized control of the commanding heights of government power to suppress opposition, while permitting its president and his family to siphon vast corrupt fortunes. The Orbánization project has advanced like clockwork.

But one detail seems to have escaped the attention of Trump and his allies: Hungary, outside of its tiny parasitic elite, is a relatively poor country. That ought to have been a sign that, whatever benefits the Orbán model presented to the right-wing ruling class that would carry it out, it held little promise of helping to usher in the “golden age” of prosperity Trump offered the country.

Orbán’s economy has suffered a brain drain as the regime’s cronyism drives its great minds to work in freer societies. Trump’s policies have shown early signs of producing a similar outcome, as would-be international students must now consider whether pursuing an American degree is worth risking getting detained by ICE or having their visa revoked abruptly over minor legal infractions.

Trump’s first 100 days have set the country on an unsustainable course. The clash between the president’s determination to rule and his inability to govern has generated two opposing forces: a weaponized, illiberal state, and a smoldering political backlash. One of them will have to break.

Well, he's only got another 1,362 days to screw everything up even more. How bad can it get?

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.

Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.

The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.

Meanwhile:

• Paul Krugman is shocked—shocked!—that the OAFPOTUS is doing what he threatened to do to the economy. But he's more worried that unelected, unconstrained tech bros have apparently gained access to the Treasury Department payment system.
• Cranky Flyer fears for aviation safety after the OAFPOTUS's unhinged and narcissistic response to the crash of AE 5342 on Wednesday.
• Charls Marohn argues that the response to 67 people dying in a plane crash should be the response to over 100 people dying every day in car crashes.
• John Scalzi explains how his next novel's title got translated into Hungarian as an example of why machines are simply not up to the task of translating yet.

And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.

Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.

Throughout all the bullshit the OAFPOTUS has spewed onto the nation in the past couple of weeks, Ezra Klein wants to remind you of something I have mentioned many times: he's a charlatan, and everything he does is a grift. Don't believe him:

People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency.

The president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president.

Josh Marshall has a slightly different, but overlapping, perspective:

The point is that you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to pull the job off. You’re trying for a rapid-fire dramatic effect that gets your opponent to collapse or stand down. The psychological shock value is the additional weapon that fills the gap between your power and your intended goal. And understanding that is a critical, really the critical first step to combating it.

This stuff isn’t an illusion. It’s happening. It’s real. But you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to make it stick. Otherwise there’s no need for the drama. You just do it. So recognizing that shock and confusion and not falling for it is essential to combating it.

It helps that they're not particularly competent at any of this. Not a lot, but it helps.