White House Paranoid Pettiness

Springsteen Drops EP in Response to Trump Tirades

It’s bad enough that the current President of the United States is reducing the constitution to tatters and turning government into his personal concierge service. Trump and his hirelings are now making it personal when criticized, and past grudges are being revived.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who Trump fired in 2017, posted an Instagram photo of shells arranged to read “86 47.” The term 86 comes from the hospitality industry, where it started as shorthand for out-of-stock and evolved into code for excluding patrons for bad behavior.

Now, Trumpworld is breathlessly claiming the former lawman’s picture as a coded call to assassinate the 47th president. Funny thing about that, I seem to recall the term “86 46” being used in MAGA-land in reference to former president Joe Biden. I don’t recall any hub-bub over its use on tee shirts, baseball caps, and stickers.

Comey said he just saw the shells on a walk, thought it was a political message, took a photo and posted it online, deleting it once MAGA outrage erupted.

Trump took time out from hob-knobbing with terrorism financiers to declare himself the victim, declaring Comey “knew exactly” what it meant.

Homeland Security boss Kristi Noem, always looking for another excuse to appear on Fox News, promised an investigation. Tulsi Gabbard, fighting to keep her agency alive, called the picture “a hit” and “a call to action to murder the President of the United States,” saying Comey should be thrown in jail.

FBI Director Kash Patel looked up from the roulette wheel (allegedly) and offered support. The Secret Service was said to be “investigating,” and Comey volunteered to be questioned on the matter. The protective agency was so impressed by his offer of cooperation that they dispatched a couple of agents to give him a ride to their office.

Substacker/Podcaster Ed Krassenstein subsequently had Secret Service agents show up at his home after tweeting the number 8647. He says he was calling for Trump’s impeachment, and he’s probably telling the truth as everybody knows podcasters never leave their parent’s basement.

Later on Krassenstein felt obligated to post a statement about non-violence on Twitter/X. I think he missed an opportunity to translate adversity into marketing success. MAGAts certainly followed that path.

From Krassencast - Protecting Democracy During Trump 2.0:

• These are the same people who sold "8646" T-shirts to call for Biden’s impeachment. The same folks who say "murder" figuratively all the time on social media without consequence. The same influencers who twist words like “woke,” “CRT,” and “DEI” into weapons to stoke division.

• And now they’re trying to turn a protest slogan into a criminal offense.

• Let’s not kid ourselves: This is what authoritarianism looks like in the early stages. Weaponizing federal power to harass political critics. Manufacturing outrage to silence dissent. Treating peaceful protest as a threat.

In a subsequent post he articulated about how this sort of harassment is part of “the recipe authoritarians now use to turn peaceful criticism into a federal investigation.”

He ended with:

• I’m not deleting a single character. I’ll keep tweeting “8647” in the literal, legal sense—because the scariest thing to an aspiring strongman isn’t a hashtag; it’s a populace that refuses to shut up.

• Share this if you agree that a doorbell shouldn’t drown out the First Amendment.

Personally I feel we should all be using the number 8647 as often as possible in as many font-styles as you can conjure.

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Bossman Bruce Springsteen is currently touring Europe, drawing huge crowds at every venue. He opened his tour in Manchester, England, with a warning to the audience about authoritarianism, saying that America "is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration."

The entire speech is worth listening to, and has been repeated in some form at all his shows, which have drawn massive crowds like nobody’s ever seen before.

Obviously, the President of the United States keeps track of such things, and responded with a pitiful post end with a non-very subtle threat.

Via CNN’s Reliable Sources:

• Last night in Manchester, England, Springsteen went for round three. He did not mention Trump's tirade; instead, he repeated the speeches verbatim and sent a clear message by switching up the night's opening song. This time it was "No Surrender."

• >> This morning, Springsteen dug in even further, surprise-releasing a six-song live EP recorded the first night of the tour, including most of his anti-Trump speeches.

• >> Neil Young jumped into the fray on Tuesday to call out Trump's threats against Springsteen and other musicians. "I am not scared of you. Neither are the rest of us," Young wrote on his website. "STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT ROCKERS ARE SAYING. Think about saving America from the mess you made."

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While Trump was at it, he jumped on the opportunity to (once again) throw insults Taylor Swift’s way. Once the president gets going, it’s like watching monkeys fling poo at zoo visitors.

There’s widespread speculation that the President chose to insult/threaten musicians in order to draw attention away from:

1. Moody's downgrading America's credit rating for the first time in history?

2. His Trojan House Gift from the Qatari government

3. Failure of the Bill Beautiful Budget Bill to move out of a House committee.

4. All of the above

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The president of the American Federation of Musicians issued a statement in response to Trump

“The American Federation of Musicians will not remain silent as two of our members — Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift — are singled out and personally attacked by the President of the United States. Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift are not just brilliant musicians, they are role models and inspirations to millions of people in the United States and across the world. Whether it’s ‘Born in the USA’ or the Eras Tour, their music is timeless, impactful, and has deep cultural meaning. Musicians have the right to freedom of expression, and we stand in solidarity with all our members.”

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Now that the Big-Ass Bad-News Budget Bill is in trouble —even a compromise won’t be welcomed by the Senate—our President is on a cultural tear. He’s proclaiming the federal government will conduct a “major investigation” into how much money Kamala Harris paid celebrity musicians to endorse her during her 2024 campaign, including the likes of Springsteen, Beyoncé, and U2’s Bono.

On Tuesday, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Rolling Stone that the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission would “act independently in [their] decision-making” as to whether or not they would get involved, as they have final jurisdiction over such an investigation.

Of course Dear Leader’s claims about performers being paid to endorse are belied by filings with the Federal Election Commission. His claim about Beyonce receiving $11 million to walk on stage and endorse Harris without performing was pulled from thin air.

“Campaign finance laws require campaigns to pay fair-market value to vendors. If she failed to pay any of these companies for performing services at an event or rally, it would constitute an illegal in-kind contribution to the campaign in two ways: The contribution would exceed donation limits, and companies are not permitted to donate directly to candidates,” reported Rolling Stone.

In other cultural utterances, the president ranted and raved on Monday night about how the 2020 election was stolen from him in a speech before the Kennedy Center Board of Directors.

He did take time out to complain about the Kennedy Center’s programming, promising big changes.

“The programming was out of control with rampant political propaganda, DEI, and inappropriate shows,” Trump said. “They had dance parties for quote ‘queer and trans youth.’ And I guess that’s all right for certain people.… But that wasn’t working out too well.”

And then it was bad to the usual whining, which his hand-picked directors have all undoubtedly endured before.

***

Remember the magic number is… 8647. Use it wherever you can.

The Trade War Isn’t Over by Paul Krugman

• Does cutting U.S. trade with the world in general by half and reducing trade with China by two thirds sound to you like Trump calling off his trade war? It sounds to me like a massive disruption of the world economy, only slightly less disruptive than what we were looking at last week.

• What about the impact on U.S. families? Tariffs are sales taxes levied on American households; don’t let anyone tell you different. Walmart declared yesterday that it will have to begin raising prices later this month because of the tariffs.

• And tariffs are regressive sales taxes that fall much more heavily on lower-income Americans than on the affluent, for three reasons. First, low-income households spend a higher fraction of their income. Second, compared with the affluent, poor and working-class families spend more on goods, which are facing tariffs, as opposed to services, which aren’t. Finally, the goods whose prices will rise most tend to be items like clothing that loom large in lower-income families’ budgets.

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‘Don’t yap to cops’: why Hasan Piker’s US customs story kicked off a backlash by Julia Carrie Wong at The Guardian

• “The same goes for questioning,” he added. You cannot know the motive for the government’s questions – or who they are investigating.

• That is why it’s so important for activists to stick to silence, according to Thompson Washington. Even if you think, as Piker did, that you are not vulnerable and haven’t done anything wrong, you might not be the target of a government fishing expedition.

• “People need to remember that your best defense is being in solidarity with people and movements that are making systemic change, and that the way we are in solidarity with each other – just a very minor way – is making a collective agreement not to speak to police about anything … because anything that I might say could be used and likely will be used against somebody else,” they said.

• “If they come for me at night, they’re going to come for you in the morning,” they said. “And when they come for me, I’m gonna shut the fuck up, period.”

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The Chicago Sun-Times Published an AI-Generated Summer Reading List Full of Fake Books — And This is Just the Beginning by Parker Molloy at The Present Age

• This is the direct result of the continued hollowing out of the media industry. You can't fire all your fact-checkers and editors and then act shocked when nobody catches glaring errors before publication. You can't replace experienced journalists with AI and expect the same quality. And you certainly can't expect overworked, underpaid freelancers to carefully vet every piece of content when they're responsible for filling 64-page supplements basically on their own.

• Buscaglia told 404 Media he did this as part of a "promotional special section" that wasn't supposed to be targeted to any specific city. "It's supposed to be generic and national," he said. "We never get a list of where things ran." That statement alone tells you everything you need to know about how little editorial oversight was involved in this process.

• The part that really gets me is that this wasn't complex investigative journalism. It was a summer reading list. If AI can't get that right—and a human can't be bothered to check if books actually exist before publishing—how can we trust these same systems and workflows for anything more substantial?