Fraser Sherman's Blog

As historian Kevin Leman says, some day in the future, 1/6 will be a historical footnote. But not yet. We need to remember.

The Necrotic Toddler lost the 2020 election. He then attempted to overthrow the legally elected president and failed. Almost immediately, Republicans and right-wing pundits started lying: there’d been no violence, it was a left-wing false flag, etc. etc. They’ve been lying ever since.

It happened. And despite all the lies and the refusal to put up the plaque to the officers who did their duty that day defending the country, it still happened five years later. The Felon lost. And then turned on this country. While the Republican propaganda machine has done its best to present the 1/6 insurrectionists as martyrs, they were no angels.

But why wouldn’t they turn on it? As W used to say about America’s enemies, Republicans hate us for our freedoms. They are the enemies they pretend they’re fighting. They hate America because it gives women legal equality. It gives POC legal equality. It gives LGBTQ people legal equality. It gives Jews and Muslims legal equality. They can’t stand that. They don’t want to exist without the hierarchy that assures them being white, male, straight, Christian makes you better than the people who aren’t. As I put it a few months back, “Equal rights movements can imagine what the oppressor does not: an end to oppression.” A lot of them like being the oppressor; others of them can’t imagine they won’t be oppressed in turn. Equality is the future they don’t want. Or dissent or opposition, hence their constant threat to lock up political opponents or cancel the elections. That they back off in the face of opposition and protest doesn’t mean the threat isn’t there.

As we saw this week, they only course-correct for the worse. As Fred Clark puts it, “we have the spectacle of vocal Trump supporters who just a short time ago were celebrating the president as a champion of Lindberg-style isolationism and non-intervention pulling a 180 and now celebrating him as a champion of McKinley-style imperialism and expansionism. They quickly and utterly reversed themselves without blinking, without hesitating or adjusting. Seemingly without even noticing that they were doing so.”

Like a hive mind, they’ve embraced the idea international law does not exist (see here, here, and here) as if it was their fundamental belief. Suddenly that matters is power: if we have the will and the armed force to do X, then X is justified.

This is bullshit: law is not based on “might makes right.” The powerful frequently get to break laws and get away with it but that doesn’t mean there is no law or that only power matters. But while many of them seem willing to push against the Felon over the Epstein files, on this one they give up whatever they believed before the invasion. Though I’m quite sure Stephen Miller’s rant about how the West lettingthe mongrel hordes of our former colonies achieve independence. I bet he’d be horrified if I pointed out Britain could have made a similar argument about the US: states where a majority of the population were slaves, a devastating, bloody civil war fought almost a century after independence … Miller’s principles are white supremacy and fascism, not facts.

The Toddler has already bungled this with a lot of bullshit assumptions. He wants to turn some of Venezuela’s oil into a personal slush fund (one of many). And it’s a payoff to one of his political allies. The Toddler, obsessed with the petromasculinity of manly men drilling for oil, isn’t aware that Venezuela’s vast oil wealth is largely a mirage.

Nevertheless, various members of his administration are talking about taking Cuba, Greenland (yes, that again) and Colombia. Part of this may be bullshit — see who folds out of fear, like so many American institutions — as Marco Rubio claims. Or that may be a desperate attempt to deflect the criticism they’re getting. Either way, I’m glad Colombia’s president pushed back (““Come get me, coward. I’m waiting for you here. Don’t threaten me, I’ll wait for you right here if you want to. I don’t accept invasions, missiles, or assassinations, only intel.”).

I think one of the great failures of Biden’s presidency — and he accomplished some very good stuff — was that we should have prosecuted the Felon for his actions, never mind any concerns about whether it would be unseemly, politicized, etc. That doesn’t mean America’s fascist slide is irreversible but it’s a lot more work now.

I’ll close with this quote from LawDork’s post on 1/6: “Allow me to close on this anniversary with The Washington Post editorial board’s five-year old editorial calling on Pence to “immediately” invoke the 25th Amendment.

“Mr. Trump is a menace, and as long as he remains in the White House, the country will be in danger,” the board wrote. They were right, and January 6, 2026 has — like so many days in the past year — only proven just how right they were.”

As you’re doubtless aware by the time you read this, we just invaded Venezuela, a country we were not at war with, attacked the capital and kidnapped the president. After murdering multiple Venezuelan fishermen in recent attacks on their boats (let us note that delivering drugs to the US is not a capital offense, and nobody was convicted before they were executed. And what little evidence we have indicates they were innocent). And the Felon and his vice president are openly saying it’s to take the oil.

Oh, and the US is going to run the country or at least install a puppet government: “US troops won’t be stationed in Venezuela so long as ousted strongman Nicolás Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, “does what we want” Rodriguez is not sounding conciliatory. That aside, this will probably not go well. Since WW II, our regime changes have worked out disastrously, most recently in Iraq under W. Shakezula makes the same point. And given Tiny Brain’s complete disinterest in following through or honoring commitments, anyone in Venezuela who decides to ally with him may be left out in the cold.

And we have the Felon’s eternal bootlicker Lindsay Graham saying Cuba should be next. Or maybe it’ll be Greenland. I suspect this may be the Felon’s usual belief that if he throws his weight around, his opponents will fold, but maybe not.

Remarkably, we’re seeing pushback on the right. Antisemitic crackpot Candace Owens blames the Jews. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green blames the president (it unsettles me that I have to agree with her about anything). Which brings me to the point of this post: the Felon will do his best to make 2026 suck, but he may be reaching the limits of his abilities.

When the Toddler won in 2024, it was frightening. When he took office and went full shock and awe — deportations, executive orders, death to DEI (i.e., only white men should be in charge of anything), the insane DOGE thing — I could easily see disaster ahead. Especially when so many influential institutions folded. When he started shipping immigrants to hellhole prisons overseas, he talked about doing the same to American-born criminals (except, I assume, rich white dudes like himself).

As Jamelle Bouie says in his newsletter, “In their pursuit of power, Trump and his allies have done a lot of damage to the United States, and the world. But as this year comes to an end, I think it’s clear that they’ve reached the limits of what they can accomplish through brute force alone. More important, Trump’s attempt to consolidate authoritarian power has inspired a large and ferocious backlash, from mass protests and organized efforts to stymie his most draconian plans to election results that show a voting public ready for change.”

Faced with criticism over everything from the Epstein files to rising prices, Bouie says, the Felon’s response was to whine that people don’t appreciate his miraculous performance as President: “he interrupted prime time television to yell at the American people this week because he does not know what to do besides yell. He can’t convince and he can’t persuade and so he demands, in the hope that he can browbeat the public into giving him the praise he thinks he deserves.

I think he’ll find that this isn’t going to work.”

As I’ve said before the administration assumed they’d crush all resistance. When people resisted, they often won.

Paul Krugman made the same point, though I don’t have the link: the Felon’s got nothing left but trying to sell his glorious success … and he’s got no success and he’s no longer much of a salesman. He predicts the MAGA movement will implode much like the Heritage Foundation. I’m not so sure, but it’s a nice thought.

As the invasion of Venezuela shows, it’s not over. The Toddler of the United States has the power to do tremendous damage, whether it’s with bullshit DOJ investigations, mass deportations, selling out the Ukraine, and simply being an incompetent. Insurance premiums for Obamacare are going to rise catastrophically for lots of people this year. A sensible party would score political points by fixing that — but nope, like the radical left of my teenage years they’d sooner see it burn than bend on any point. That’s not going to help them win hearts and minds.

Consider Charlie Kirk. Hundreds of people got fired for pointing out Kirk was a misogynist, racist shit. That’s unfair, unjust and stupid. But they seemed convinced Kirk was a big enough deal the entire country would rise up and support them if they waved his bloodied shirt as their banner. The truth is, nobody outside the movement cared.

It will continue to be bad but I’m beginning to believe it will stop. Which won’t solve everything — the damage won’t repair itself, the creeps who supported the Felon aren’t disappearing — but it’s no small thing either.

And it will take us continuing to resist, to speak out, to protest. As LawDork says, “Whether it’s people protesting on the streets, people filling out their ballot in the voting booth, people observing immigration courts, people serving on juries, people helping their neighbors, or people acting in any of the hundreds of ways people make a difference each day, the need for the “consent of the governed” has been on full display in 2025.

The need for that consent will remain in 2026, and the need to speak out when the government acts contrary to that consent will be all the more important as cases move forward and rulings come down, as Trump and his administration try to do more, and as the midterm elections approach.”

A final thought, from Alexander Herzen: “The future does not exist; it is created by the combination of a thousand causes, some necessary, some accidental, plus human will, which adds unexpected dramatic denouements and coups de theatre. History improvises, she rarely repeats herself…she uses every chance, ever coincidence, she knocks simultaneously at a thousand gates…Who knows which may open?….”