Democrat Politics

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know.

Elon Musk’s latest attempt to save X ignores the real problem

A cesspool is still a cesspool even if there’s a bow on it.

What the heck is going on with Sen. John Fetterman?

The man is certainly full of surprises.

Republicans are totally cool with Trump pardoning Jan. 6 rioters

What’s a little insurrection among friends, anyway?

Fox News skips sordid history of ex-employee named ambassador to Greece

Some key background seems to be missing.

Biden to block Trump from appointing dozens of judges as GOP seethes

And they call Biden a lame duck. …

Cartoon: Drain the swamp

Just another billionaire playground.

Trump’s pick for Greece ambassador compared nation to dog peeing on rug

“Nothing says diplomacy and respect better than describing a country as a bad puppy peeing on a rug.”

RKF Jr. wants a Trump gig for his daughter-in-law too

Conspiracists be conspiracizing.

Trump picks conspiracy theorist Kari Lake to be his Voice of America

Turns out, Trump does reward vacuuming before he comes over.

Trump backtracks on vow to lower grocery costs

Sure, blame it on the supply chain.

Facebook CEO gives Trump a million ‘Zuck bucks’ for inauguration

It’s just a drop in the bucket for the world’s fourth-richest person.

Trump suddenly doesn’t want to talk about the bigotry he campaigned on

How convenient.

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On Thursday, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman became the first Senate Democrat to meet with Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s problematic pick to lead the Department of Defense. Oddly, Fetterman hasn’t ruled out supporting Hegseth, whose own mother once wrote him an angry email calling him an abuser of women. (She now says she doesn’t hold the same view of her son.)

“He could theoretically become the head of the Defense Department,” Fetterman told Politico in explaining his logic. “I’ve discovered in my time in D.C. that that’s important. And, ‘Are you having a conversation with someone?’ I don’t know why that’s shocking.”

Fetterman also said he’s aware of “some” allegations against Hegseth. Those include, but are not limited to, Hegseth allegedly raping a woman in 2017—Hegseth said the sex was consensual—and supposedly drinking on the job. But that hasn’t stopped the Pennsylvania senator from being open to joining Republicans in confirming the Fox News host.

Fetterman said he’s not sure why it’d be “controversial” to meet with Hegseth—and even suggested the two might find common ground on some issues. And on its own, meeting with the likely next defense secretary may not be a strange thing. But that’s not the only eyebrow-raising action Fetterman has taken recently. 

On Wednesday, Fetterman apparently became the first Democratic senator to join Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. And in his debut post, he made the surprising call to pardon Trump in his New York hush money case.

Fetterman also said he was a “hard YES” on confirming Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York as the next ambassador to the United Nations.

xAlways was a hard YES for @EliseStefanik but it was a pleasure to have a conversation.I support defunding UNRWA for its documented Hamas infiltration and fully look forward to her holding the @UN accountable for its endemic antisemitism and blatant anti-Israel views. https://t.co/DvyYIYCd0h— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) December 11, 2024

Stefanik isn’t the first Trump Cabinet pick that Fetterman has voiced his support for. In November, he said he would vote to confirm Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as the next secretary of state. 

xUnsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own. That being said, my colleague @SenMarcoRubio is a strong choice and I look forward to voting for his confirmation. pic.twitter.com/OUIDx5KK4J— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) November 12, 2024

Once a self-described progressive, Fetterman has pivoted to the right since winning his 2022 Senate election. But backing Trump’s Cabinet picks isn’t the first time the senator has found himself on the outs with the progressive movement. He’s one of many Democrats to make stringently pro-Israel statements during its ongoing war in Gaza. In that, he found allies in the Democratic Party, such as New York Rep. Ritchie Torres. 

However, Fetterman is making the case that he hasn’t abandoned progressivism—but that the movement dumped him. 

“I didn’t leave the label, it left me on that,” Fetterman said in a June interview with comedian Bill Maher.

But a review of his history with the label makes his change appear more cynical in nature. After all, the senator happily embraced the label for years and courted the endorsement of independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, when Fetterman successfully ran to be Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor. Now, though, Fetterman seems more keen to taunt progressivism than to embrace it.

It’s a convenient scapegoat for Fetterman to blame the left for his shift to the right. It keeps his name in the limelight while making him seem to be some sort of brave truth-teller who isn’t afraid to stand up to his own party. 

However, he might find it hard to have it both ways, with both parties, especially during a time when center-left and establishment Democrats are coming under fire for frequently losing elections and major policy fights.  

At least for now, Fetterman hasn’t made clear what his end goal is in fighting his own party’s interests. But in the short-term, he is apparently trying to fill the void of the non-Republican rabble-rouser now that independent Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are leaving. 

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Elon Musk is hoping his ethically dubious generative AI tool, Grok, will help stem the continuing exodus from his social media site X. Musk has launched a free version of the AI chatbot Grok to X users without Premium accounts.

Digital market intelligence company Similarweb estimates that the number of daily active users on X has dropped from 32.3 million to 29.6 million, an 8.4% decrease, since early October in the U.S. The exodus coincides with Musk’s takeover of the @America handle on Oct. 6, in order to promote Donald Trump’s presidential run. 

The social media company has become a cesspool of right-wing hate and misinformation since Musk acquired it in October 2022 for $44 billion. It has shed around 80% of its value since Musk took over, and has continued to bleed users ever since. Numerous news organizations and journalists fled the site in November, in anticipation of dubious changes to X’s terms of service. 

A cartoon by Tim Campbell.

Donald Trump said he doesn’t want to talk about transgender rights issues anymore, despite demonizing the transgender community throughout his 2024 campaign.

In an interview with Time magazine published on Thursday, which named Trump “Person of the Year,” Trump declined to say whether he supports transgender people who want to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. 

“I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it’s a very small number of people we’re talking about, and it’s ripped apart our country, so they’ll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees,” Trump said in the interview with Time. “I am a big believer in the Supreme Court, and I’m going to go by their rulings, and so far, I think their rulings have been rulings that people are going along with, but we’re talking about a very small number of people, and we’re talking about it, and it gets massive coverage, and it’s not a lot of people.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee.

The news of the seven-figure donation comes just a few weeks after Zuckerberg went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for a private dinner with the president-elect. A spokesperson for Meta told the BBC at the time, “Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming administration.”

Earlier in the year, Zuckerberg praised Trump as a “badass” for pumping his fist after Trump was shot at during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 

Donald Trump admitted in an interview with Time magazine that he likely cannot lower the cost of groceries—a key promise of his campaign that helped him get elected despite the fact that he faced multiple criminal indictments.

“Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,” Trump said in his rambling and incoherent interview with Time, which is helping to sanitize the felon-elect by giving him its “Person of the Year” award.

Trump went on to spew a bunch of gibberish about ports in Palos Verdes, California, and how fixing the supply chain there will lower grocery costs—at least, it seems like that was his point. His answer is so inarticulate it’s hard to follow.

Buckle up, here’s the rest of his grocery response:

I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken. You see it. You go out to the docks and you see all these containers. And I own property in California, in Palos Verdes. They’re very nice. And I passed the docks, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, for 17 years, I saw containers and, you know, they’d come off and they’d be taken away—big areas, you know, you know, in that area, you know, where they have the big, the big ships coming in—big, the port. And I’d see this for years as I was out there inspecting property and things, because they own a lot in California. And I look down and I see containers that are, that are 12, 13, 14 containers. You wouldn’t believe they can hold each other. It’s like crazy. No, the supply chain is is broken. I think a very bad thing is this, what they’re doing with the cars. I think they lost also because of cars. You know, there are a lot of reasons, but the car mandate is a disaster. The electric, the EV mandate.

“A month after the election Trump admits his promises on voters’ top issue were lies,” Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia wrote Thursday in a post on BlueSky. “He will not lower costs, in fact his plans will lead to Americans paying higher prices.”

President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It’s the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

The commutations announced Thursday are for people who have served out home confinement sentences for at least one year after they were released. Prisons were uniquely bad for spreading the virus and some inmates were released in part to stop the spread. At one point, 1 in 5 prisoners had COVID-19, according to a tally kept by The Associated Press.

Biden said he would be taking more steps in the weeks ahead and would continue to review clemency petitions. The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330, shortly before leaving office in 2017.

“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”

Donald Trump has chosen former local TV anchor, conspiracy theorist, and two-time election loser Kari Lake to head Voice of America. As head of the network, she will be in charge of reporters and will shape how America is perceived around the world.

VOA is an international media network funded by the United States founded in 1942. The network reaches approximately 326 million people per week and has been the international face of America at pivotal moments in world history.

Donald Trump Jr. is pretending he and fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle are hunky-dory amid cheating rumors and breakup drama.

As readers might recall, photos of Don Jr. canoodling with socialite Bettina Anderson surfaced Tuesday morning. The candid snapshots showed the couple holding hands after an intimate birthday dinner, with his fiancée nowhere in sight. 

Soon after headlines about Junior’s extracurricular dating activity began to pile up, his equally unfaithful felon-elect father swooped in and nominated former Fox News personality Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece.

Ignoring the drama—and potentially celebrating his ex’s sendoff—Don Jr. cheered Guilfoyle on in a tweet Tuesday night.

“I am so proud of Kimberly. She loves America and she always has wanted to serve the country as an Ambassador,” he posted on X. “She will be an amazing leader for America First.”

While Guilfoyle has retweeted other praise from senators like Marsha Blackburn and former Fox News colleague Geraldo Rivera, she noticeably didn’t interact with Junior’s remarks.

This silence, in particular, says a lot.