Find the Cracks in Their Armor and Target Them

by Kindler

No, we cannot waste a minute on despair – we’ve got a war to win.  This is certainly the attitude that Republicans bring to the fight, in their fetishization of the marketplace, the battlefield and the playing field: that winning, at any cost, is all that ever matters.

Democrats and our allies take a more principled and policy-centered approach, but let’s face it, we need to focus a whole lot more on winning.  So let’s disregard all the stupid Trump distractions and train our sights on what will deliver us from this evil, however long it takes.

The first mission – which is actually a fun one! – is to pinpoint Republican vulnerabilities, so that we may begin to systematically exploit them. I’m going to point out a few here and I encourage folks in the comment section to add more.

It’s the Billionaires, Stupid

As blue collar MAGA diehards fume over their wasted plane tickets and hotel rooms for the cancelled outdoor inauguration, they get to watch Trump, warm and dry, rub shoulders in the Capitol with some of the richest guys on Earth, including: Elon Musk ($430.9B), Jeff Bezos ($235.3B), Mark Zuckerberg ($212.6B), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ($1.1B), Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong ($11.9B), gambling empire widow Miriam Adelson ($31.8) and heir to the Ricketts banking fortune, Todd Ricketts ($4B).

But they’re not just here for the party.  As in his last administration, Trump is shamelessly appointing record numbers of billionaires to his administration. Besides his ridiculous task force (not a department!) led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy ($1 billion), that includes:

• Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary (finance – net worth unknown)
• Howard Lutnick: Commerce Secretary (Cantor Fitzgerald CEO – $1.5 billion)
• Linda McMahon: Education Secretary (former WWE CEO – $3B)
• Jared Isaacman: NASA Administrator (payment processing and defense industries – $1.8B)
• Kelly Loeffler: SBA Administrator (married into money – $1.1B)
• Frank Bisiganano, SSA Commissioner (finance – $1B)
• Stephen Feinberg: Deputy DOD Secretary (Cerberus founder – $5B)
• David Sacks: AI and Crypto Czar (Paypal – net worth unknown)
• Ambassadors:
  • Charles Kushner, France (real estate – $1.8B)
  • Warren Stephens, UK (Stephen’s – $3.4B)
  • Tom Barrack: Turkey (finance – $1B)
  • Leandro Rizzuto Jr, OAS (Conair – $3.5B)
  • Tilman Fertitta, Italy (Landry’s and Houston Rockets: $10.4B)
  • Steven Witkoff, Special Envoy to the Middle East (lawyer – $1B)

And no, we’re not going to list all the mere millionaires like Doug Burgum and Mehmet Oz here because we’re talking serious money here, folks!

You don’t need a PhD in Poli. Sci. to figure out that the optics of a candidate constantly claiming to have been running to help the little guy or “forgotten man”, and then turning around in a split-second and appointing every greedy plutocrat he can find to surround him…is not great.

But it’s only going to get worse for them, because now they have to delve into the crafting and implementation of actual policy, and with the robber barons preparing their trillion-dollar tax cuts and looking for government programs to slash to pay for them – Medicaid, top of the list – the class conflicts in the MAGA camp will only keep sharpening.  And our assignment is to do all we can to help split their coalition apart.

MAGA Civil War

The fissures in Trump’s coalition, in fact, are already in full view. The late December spat over H1B visas showed how the take-no-prisoners MAGA political style is not exactly made for holding hands and singing Kumbaya.  With just one issue dispute less than two months after the election, major figures in Trump’s orbit were already engaged in thermonuclear war with each other, with statements like:

• Ramaswamy: “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”
• Laura Loomer: “I got you and all of your Big Tech buddies who are trying to infiltrate the White House to respond and expose yourselves as being in opposition to MAGA immigration policy.”
• Musk: “Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
• Steve Bannon: “We haven’t fought these battles over years and years and years to allow American citizens…to be gutted by the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley.” And “Don’t come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be. If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”

There’s something to be said for the old saying “There’s no honor among thieves.” Holding such an unpleasant, aggressive, uncompromising, anthropomorphic and unlikeable group of people together is an inherently thankless and unsustainable task.

And think about how many more opportunities to get them to fight with each other are likely to pop up.  Will big businesses targeted for workplace immigration raids pressure the White House to back off? Will the voters who swallowed Trump’s claims that he is a peacenik be happy with all the nonsense about invading Panama and seizing Greenland?  If RFK Jr. tries to go after Big Pharma and the likes of Monsanto, will corporate executives find ways to shower Trump in cash and flatter to convince hin to rein Bobby in? And how will the MAGA masses respond when their Trump crypto investments crash and they are left in financial ruin while the Con-Man-in-Chief makes off once again with their moolah?

It’s the task of politics to keep hacking away at your opponents’ coalition while weaving yours together more comfortably, and whatever mischief we can do to stoke the fires in their compound is likely to pay off.

House Majority Shrinkage

Yes, everyone in the GOP is being ordered to kiss the boss’ pinky ring and almost all are complying as meekly as they can.  But math is a stubborn thing, and the tightness of the Republican majority in the House is going to keep making life difficult for them.  After two members join the administration, that majority will go from an already uncomfortable 219-215 majority to a razor thin 217-215 edge.

Mike Johnson retained the Speakership with literally no votes to spare, which means he is the hostage of every one of his members who may have an ax to grind or a reason to fear offending the voters in their district, particularly for those in swing districts. For all that Trump and Musk threaten GOP members with political death if they don’t fall into line, there are already signs of the limits of that strategy.

The chaotic intraparty battle over the budget showed that Trump cannot simply demand something like an increase in the debt ceiling that goes against strongly held conservative viewpoints and expect abject surrender from all.  Hence, the pre-Christmas stumble in which Trump and Johnson lost the votes of 38 Republicans, forcing them to once again lean on Democrats to get a budget bill passed.

There have been a few other warning signs.  The Speaker giving the hatchet to the head of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Turner, for not being sufficiently deferential to Putin has, by some accounts, created a new enemy that Trump and Johnson really don’t need.

Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is fighting the Speaker on an issue of personal concern, a proposal to allow mothers in Congress who have just given birth to vote remotely for six weeks.  Again, she just needs a couple of Republican colleagues to go along with her to beat him on the issue.

Call these hairline fractures, an early sign of a dam not yet anywhere near the brink of collapse. But it’s worth asking how many times the Musk-Trump threat of opposing unhelpful members in their primaries will work before some just go rogue and say, the hell with it.  The “nothing left to lose” attitude can be deadly when dealing with members who still have two years left in their terms.

There are lots of other vulnerabilities for us to target, and many more will become apparent. Trump’s advanced age and how he will increasingly manifest it is one.  Inflation creeping back for all kinds of reasons – from his threatened tariffs and evictions of immigrants to the bird flu crisis driving up egg and chicken prices – is very much another.

Bottom line: don’t feel defeated. We’re still standing and they have many more vulnerabilities than their tough guy chimeras let on.  Instead of moping around in despair, focus on weaving our side more closely together while splitting theirs apart. It’s how American politics has worked for 250 years and it’s time to do all we can to make that pendulum swing back again – even harder and more durably this time.

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