No F*cking Way
Republicans hate gender neutral bathrooms. ICE agents with full bladders in Chicago sure could use one right about now.
We have a lot to get to today, but we’re going to start in a familiar place. As a grown adult, who presumably isn’t a far-right lunatic, you probably don’t think much about bathrooms. Secretary Kristi Noem, sometimes known as ICE Barbie, sure has toilets on her mind these days.
Trump has been mobilizing the National Guard of other states to send into Chicago, the latest city on his Fascism ‘R Us tour (no word on whether Geoffrey the Giraffe was rounded up by ICE Agents). You see, Texas once claimed it was the home of “freedom,” whatever that means. I don’t know how much freedom can exist in a state where women’s bodies are regulated with the same kind of severity that other countries approach assault weapons with, where electoral districts are drawn to meet the needs of a desperate president rather than their constituents, but what do I know?
Trump’s efforts to federalize other states’ National Guards (Nationals Guard sounds a little better to me) in Portland failed, and failed bigly! For now, at least. We don’t know how Trump’s sycophants on the Supreme Court will rule.
Back to the bathrooms for a minute. As a trans person, you’ve probably heard me talk about what I call “toilet games.” This country has a long, ugly history of playing toilet games. Before people like Speaker Johnson decided to deprive transgender Congresswoman McBride of the basic right to use the women’s room, we had many, many years of segregating toilets by not only gender, but by race. Toilet nonsense is a sad part of our nation’s history.
As a trans person, I take some conflicted joy in watching ICE Barbie and her cronies being denied the right to pee at a local Chicago police station. When I was first transitioning, back when North Carolina had first received all that backlash for their bathroom laws, I used to get very scared before entering any public restroom.
Taking away someone’s right to pee is an attack on their basic dignity as a human being. That’s kind of ICE’s whole brand. Masked officers break into brown people’s houses, toss shit around, and take old ladies into unmarked vans to god knows where. It’s sick.
But you know what? I’m proud of Chicago. I don’t say that lightly.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker lacks the power to stop Trump from sending the National Guard into the state, but that doesn’t mean he has to cooperate either. If you can’t close the border, take away the right to relieve their bladder. They can all get diapers like the Fanta Fuhrer. Fuck ‘em.
This is the kind of resistance we’ve been waiting for from mainstream Democrats.
Trump’s own supporters in the manosphere are getting tired of this crap. Popular podcaster Theo Von expressed outrage over ICE’s recent behavior. In Donald’s defense, his plans for deportations were hardly a secret. Von, who got his start on the old MTV series Road Rules, one of the precursors to their much more popular The Challenge, doesn’t seem like the sharpest crayon in the box.
There’s a clip that’s been going around from Ken Burns’ legendary Baseball documentary series by conservative writer George Will. I share almost nothing in common with Will, except for a respect for the Federalist Papers and a love for America’s pastime.
Will states that, much like America, “Baseball is the game of the long season, where small incremental differences decide who wins and who loses.” A theme of this column for the past year has centered on agency and the Democratic Party. Many of us want Democrats to do more. The broader, and more difficult question to answer in the immediate present is: how?
Two weeks ago, I admitted that I don’t really like writing about shutdowns. Like toilet games, I am not a fan of shutdowns. They almost always achieve nothing but pain and heartache for the federal workers who are forced to live without their paychecks.
So what’s changed about this shutdown? It’s simple, really. Democrats found their voice. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer just released the best ad of his long political career.
This is the Democratic Party we’ve been waiting for. There is fight in this Democratic Party. There is hunger.
Two weeks ago, I struggled to see the messaging that Democrats were putting forth. I saw no point to this shutdown. The Dems summarized their messaging with three simple words:
No. Fucking. Way.
If the Obamacare subsidies expire, all of us are going to pay a lot more in premiums. Premiums are already ridiculous. Trump promised to lower costs on day one. Plenty of unfortunate fools believed him. The only thing he’s lowered is America’s standing in the world, and maybe the seat on his new Qatari jet.
This is the fourth government shutdown in the past fifteen years. The 2013 shutdown, which occurred about a week after Ted Cruz delivered his infamous “Green Eggs and Ham” speech, centered around House Republicans trying to repeal Obamacare.
The next two centered around Trump’s favorite MacGuffin, his big, beautiful wall that Mexico was never going to pay for. The first one only lasted for three days in January 2018. The next one was a lot longer, lasting from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, preventing Donald from spending Christmas at his beloved Mar-a-Lago, instead being forced to spend it alone in the White House, presumably with three ghosts.
Republicans took the blame for all three shutdowns, and they deserved it. Shutdowns are not really the outlet for repealing legislation or appropriating billions of dollars for a vanity project. Speaker Johnson and other top Republicans have essentially been trying to argue this point with regard to the Obamacare subsidies, but they’re making quite a few miscalculations.
Republicans currently control the White House and both chambers of Congress. If we’re being reasonable, those majorities do entitle them to certain legislative spoils. Certain being the keyword.
Our system of government, for better or for worse, is not designed to be ruled by one party. Funding for the government requires 60 votes in the Senate. Republicans only have 53. Math isn’t my strong suit, but I’m pretty sure 53 is less than 60.
Democrats have no obligation to rubber-stamp a spending package they had no say in drafting. Republicans had plenty of seats at the table for the other shutdowns. They controlled the House in 2013. That shutdown was only ended after former Speaker John Boehner cut a deal with Democrats, having lost all the Freedom Caucus crazies on his rightward flank, the same people who later threw him out as speaker.
Shutdowns largely boil down to optics. Democrats finally found their message, aided of course by Trump’s Republican Party, which has spent the whole year taking a sledgehammer to plenty of government agencies that had already been funded by Congress.
Speaker Johnson already looks like a petty little baby. More than two weeks ago, Adelita Grijavla won the race for Arizona’s 7th congressional district, succeeding her father, Raul, who passed away in office back in March. Speaker Johnson has taken the fairly unprecedented step of delaying Congresswoman-elect Grijalva’s swearing-in ceremony for one obvious reason.
Grijalva would be the deciding vote in the release of the Epstein Files. All House Democrats, and a few rogue Republicans, are lined up to release the treasure trove of documents, believed to be highly damaging to the Fanta Fuhrer.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch Trump loyalist, put it bluntly, “Aren’t we all against convicted pedophiles and anyone who enables them?”
No. They’re not. Republicans apparently love to protect convicted pedophiles. Why else would Trump be continuing to flout a potential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell? This shit is completely nuts, which is completely par for the course for the GOP.
Which leads us to our next WTF moment. The Justice Department is supposed to be independent of the White House. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday left no question where her loyalties lie.
Bondi went to war with Senators Whitehouse, Blumenthal, Padilla, Schiff, and Durbin, among others. I searched for a highlight reel of her testimony, and couldn’t find one that was under an hour long. It was that crazy.
Remember Tom Homan? We talked about him last week. The FBI caught him accepting a $50,000 bribe in a brown paper bag. Bondi has nothing to say about that.
Donald’s Epstein photographs? Nothing there either, according to Pam. Bondi has served as Trump’s personal lawyer before. That’s not her job as AG, not that anyone told her.
This Epstein defense is getting so pathetic. I’ve been skeptical that there’s anything that could take down Trump in there, for good reason. Nothing has stuck to him before.
Witnesses have given sworn testimony that Epstein had compromising pictures of Trump in his safe, which was later raided by the FBI. If that’s true, the photographs would be as close to a smoking gun as the Nixon tapes were, back during Watergate. The “photoshop” defense only gets you so far.
Speaker Johnson can’t delay Congresswoman-elect Grijalva’s swearing-in forever. A federal judge could administer the oath of office, which is a bit of a moot point for now since the government is currently shut down. Mike and Pam can’t hide forever.
There is one more topic I wanted to get to today, of particular personal interest to me. Longtime readers know that I’m quite a fan of Presidential Libraries. We talked a lot about the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) back in May when Trump was busy finding a way to hang onto his new Qatari jet.
I may have bored you with talk of records and archives. At various points, I wondered how relevant that information was. Surprise, surprise, NARA is back in the news again.
The Eisenhower Presidential Library is an adorable campus in the small city of Abilene, Kansas. Abilene only has 6,400 residents, slightly larger than the readership of this newsletter. I’m not sure why a place that only has 6,400 people qualifies as a city, but as a trans person, I respect the town’s right to self-identify.
To my knowledge, Donald Trump has never visited the Eisenhower Library. The Eisenhower Library has an artifact on display that Donald desperately wanted to gift to King Charles. He fired the head of the Eisenhower Library, Todd Arrington, when he refused to hand over a sword to be used as a pressie for a foreign head of state.
The story is deeply weird. The initial request made to the Eisenhower Library came from a non-government email named “giftgirl2025,” from a junior State Department liaison. The sword in question was itself donated to the Library, making it an awkward choice to be gifted away. Not that Trump cares, but it’s also pretty illegal for a president to pillage NARA for artifacts to give away.
Would King Charles even care about the sword? He’s got a lot of toys of his own in his various castles. Like many career officials in NARA, Arrington is not a particularly political man. He is almost certainly a nerdy public servant, doing his best to serve his non-controversial Presidential Library in a tiny city that few outside of Kansas have ever heard of.
Remember the inflation that Trump promised to bring down? Remember healthcare? Kind of important. Naturally, Trump spends his time worrying about swords.
I’ve been in a similar position. If you’re not a video game connoisseur, you might not be familiar with the Pokémon series that releases two separate versions in its mainline entries, starting with Pokémon Red & Blue. Certain Pokémon are exclusive to each version, requiring gaymers to either purchase both games, or trade with their buddies to fulfill the franchise mantra of “Gotta catch em all.”
I was in a long-term relationship with a cis woman when the mainline entries to Pokemon’s eighth generation, Sword and Shield, were released in 2019. My ex and I bought the combo package with both games. My ex was obsessed with swords. Of the two, Sword had the cooler Pokémon.
All of my other friends had Sword. Knowing how much my ex loved swords, I agreed to take Shield. I had just had bottom surgery, which removed my own sword. I didn’t want Shield, but I compromised, because I’m not a big baby. Nobody was broken up with, or fired, because I got stuck with the crappier game. Life went on. You might think that’s a silly example, but I doubt that Trump shares any of his toys with Melania.
Is life really going on with Trump? Maybe not. We’ve waited a long time for The Resistance to show up. It seems like the cavalry has finally started to arrive.
I don’t want to make promises that the Democrats will save Obamacare, or deliver the Epstein Files. Denying ICE agents the opportunity to relieve their bladders isn’t going to save democracy, but it’s a start.
To get back to the baseball metaphor, democracy requires patience. That’s not always easy, especially with the tens of millions of Republican voters who show up each cycle to cast a ballot against their own interests. It drives me nuts.
But I see a Democratic Party that has finally found its voice. The best baseball team loses a third of the time. The Democrats have endured a lot of pain lately.
Trump often makes it seem like he can rip up democracy in a day. Watching Pam Bondi debase the entire Justice Department doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that trust in our institutions can ever be repaired. It’s easy to find darkness in these chaotic times.
Hope is a harder commodity, but it’s there. From judges who still uphold their oaths to the Constitution, to the convenience store owners who refuse to pour a cup of coffee for ICE agents, people at every layer of our society are pushing back. We probably haven’t seen the bottom of the depths of Trump’s depravity just yet. But no matter how far down the rabbit hole we venture, three words still come to mind as we stare down the carnage wrought by this insane political party.
No. Fucking. Way.
Programming note: I haven’t forgotten about the Kamala Harris book review I teased last week. I’ve been swamped with other work, but plan to share my thoughts on Friday. Nothing in it seemed to be worth dedicating a full column to, but it was an interesting read. As always, many thanks to our paid subscribers who make long columns like this possible. Much love, fam.
I hope you're right and the Dems have finally found a voice. I still have my doubts.