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jackiecalmes.bsky.social
National columnist, LATimes. Ex-NYT & WSJ in DC, covering White House, Congresses & campaigns. Author of "Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party & Its Capture of the Court." Mom....On Threads: jkcalmes
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Column: It's a break-glass moment just weeks into Trump's term, amid the constant, cruel and unconstitutional chaos at home and abroad. Yet nothing seems to be behind the glass -- none of the responders is proving up to the emergency. That leaves one group. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Brave to @jeffstein.bsky.social, WaPo's chief economics correspondent, for not wasting any time in stating what must be stated. Hopefully the first of many.

Traditionally, the deputy FBI director has been a career FBI agent. Donald Trump tonight announced he is appointing as deputy director Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conspiracy theorist who has never spent a day inside the FBI.

Column: Trump has “a hyper-fixation” about winning a Nobel Peace Prize, as an aide said. He shouldn't count on adding that gold to his gilt-laden digs, not when his way of peacemaking is ethnic cleansing in Gaza, appeasing Putin in Ukraine & breaking the world order. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

A quick search of Cotton’s accounts show that the first time he posted a single word critical of USAID was 5 days ago, despite serving in the Senate for 10 years and the House before that.

COLUMN: Varying his MAGA mantra, Candidate Trump liked to say he'd make America safe again. Promise broken: By purging the FBI, CIA & USAID; putting toadies in charge of nat'l sec; freeing 1/6 extremists; rifling our data, & alienating allies, he's made us less safe. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

The WH press sec vowed not to lie but she did that here: “Today’s jobs report reveals the Biden economy was far worse than anyone thought..." Virtually NO economist would agree. Biden left a "Goldilocks economy," said one. As for jobs, Trump is killing 'em with his purges & tariffs.

News today from Mississippi Today: -8 county health depts no longer provide immunizations, preventive screening & reproductive health services. -New report details disproportionately high death rate from cervical cancer for Black women in the Delta. But Trump wants to own & make Gaza a Riviera.

Column: Trump wasn't joking when he said he'd be a dictator just on Day 1, but he did undersell his plans: He's acted like one daily, breaking laws & constitutional amendments with his orders & sowing chaos with oligarch pal Elon Musk, unchecked by a GOP-run Congress. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

More evidence of just how much more respected the USA is under Trump. NOT.

Seconding Robin. I'm now told the author was aware of the edits pre-publication. BUT...the LATimes owner's posting of a link to Reinhart's op-ed implied that the author, like the owner, is pro-RFK Jr. Which he is NOT so, of course. This LAT columnist is sorry, too, @EricReinhart

Outrageous. Trump comes out and rotely reads a prepeared statement of sympathy re the DC air tragedy, and now he's riffing that Democrats & DEI are to blame. Buttigieg? "good line of bullshit...he's run [Transportation] right into the ground with his DEI." Beyond shameless, utterly inappropriate.

Column: It’s a truism of politics: If any issue transcends partisanship, it’s disaster aid. Only Trump, who doesn't see himself as a POTUS for all Americans, just for those who voted for him, would condition aid to a blue state. It's unprecedented. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Ex-FBI chief Chris Wray warned that DVEs--domestic violent extremists--were a top threat & “not going away anytime soon.” Trump made sure of that by his Jan. 6 clemency, egged on by his FBI pick, Kash Patel. Their focus on Trump's enemies will distract from real ones: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Nancy Leftenant-Colon, who in 1948 became the first Black nurse to serve in the regular U.S. armed forces after years of being barred from a segregated military, died on Jan. 8. She was 104.

Trump has fired 12 inspectors general without providing the 30-day notice to Congress required by law. He really is pushing the legal limits of his power and daring Congress to stop him. I’ll discuss at 10 AM ET on MSNBC.

When I was sexually assaulted as a young reporter, silence was instinctive: It was my word against his; he was an older authority figure. Over the years that changed. Now we've regressed. After Kavanaugh & Hegseth, few will dare speak out. Is that what they mean by make America great again?

Trump last night fired 17 inspectors-general. IGs were historically a nonpartisan position. Trump however takes the view, "You can get away with a lot more when nobody is watching." www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/u...

Why wasn't JD Vance in the chair for this Hegseth vote? We've known all along he might be needed to break a tie.

If not for McConnell, Trump wouldn't have gotten 3 SCOTUS picks in a single term. And if not for McConnell's machinations, Trump might well have been convicted for Jan. 6 incitement. And wouldn't be president today.

Trump reacts by saying, "No surprise with that judge.” Again, the judge was a Reagan nominee. And he said the case was the easiest to decide in his four decades on the bench.

CHECK: The Reagan-appointed judge who struck down Trump's order nullifying birthright citizenship scolded Trump lawyers: “Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”

Well put.

New column: Alas, Trump quickly kept a campaign promise by his blanket pardon of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But in doing so he broke another, made on Jan. 7, 2021: that perpetrators of the "heinous attack" would "pay." He didn't, so they didn't. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

For Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, that's one really white audience at the Inauguration.

Column: Yet again Trump claims he's inheriting an economic mess from a Democrat. Here's a look at the good economy he actually is bequeathed (again)--take it from experts--to keep in mind when he takes credit for cleaning up a nonexistent disaster. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Column: Republicans love to hate on the FBI for supposedly targeting Trump but they're sure quick to turn to the bureau for sham background checks to save a troubled nominee. In '18 it was Brett Kavanaugh. This week, Pete Hegseth. Again, the ploy seems to have worked. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

62 years ago on Jan. 14: "On this day in 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace said in his inaugural address, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” [Thanks again to Mississippi Today]

CNN has posted an 8-paragraph story on Michelle Obama's decision to skip Trump's inauguration, and about what a break with tradition it is, and NOT ONE graf mentions that Trump skipped Biden's inauguration four years ago.

The tragedy of Merrick Garland is that he could've been a truly supreme justice—but for Republicans' unprecedented blockade of his SCOTUS nomination. Instead Garland became AG, and his strengths weren't the sort for an aggressive prosecution of Donald Trump. Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Well before Carter's death, historians were reassessing his presidency in a kinder light, as they have a few other presidents disdained in their own times. History could perhaps do the same for Biden. And Trump? Don't bet on it. Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Just after Jan. 6, 2021, even most Republicans wouldn't have imagined that in 2025 the day's battle zone--the Capitol--would be getting prepped to swear in the insurrectionists' instigator. But that's democracy for you--a democracy that Trump sought to topple. Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Here's the irony of Senate Republicans & Trump arguing that the New Orleans & Las Vegas attacks argue for quick confirmation of Trump's nat'l security nominees: His & their obsession with attacking Trump's political enemies distracts from DOJ/FBI/DHS keeping their eye on actual domestic extremists.

To review the politics of the past year--past weeks--is to preview the coming one. Trump dominated the news, & the Republicans in Congress. But he tested their limits & his party's narrow margins will test them all. And Biden was essentially gone a year early. Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Mar-a-Lago may not look like a swamp, but it's been a big one since Nov. 5. Not in memory, maybe never, has the nation seen such public displays of kowtowing & deal-making with a president or president-elect by the nation’s rich and well-connected. Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Trump shouldn't be allowed to memory-hole his claims of vote fraud just because he won; he damaged Americans' faith in elections. That this week's electoral college meeting went all but unnoticed--unlike in '20--owes to Democrats accepting the result. Imagine. Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Wray should've forced Trump to fire him. The 50-y-o Senate report on the law setting a 10-year term for FBI chiefs to shield them from WH pressure, says a director “is not an ordinary Cabinet appt'mt...a politically oriented member of the President’s ‘team.'" Column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

President-elect Trump, himself an adjudicated sexual predator, has been unabashed in choosing other alleged sexual miscreants for his Cabinet. Make America great again? For the Don Draper of our times that means bring back the Mad Men era. My column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Biden lied to us in saying he wouldn't pardon his son & a host of other reasons argue against it. But one excuse for the father's mercy trumps those factors: Donald Trump was elected, and is stocking his administration with like-minded avengers. My column: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

@goodwilllibrarian.bsky.social

Perfect.

Looks like Democrats will end up ~7500 votes short of winning the House majority across three districts. That's the difference between having the power of the purse, subpoenas etc — or not — in a nation of 330+ million.