The moment “the pause” was over — the 60-days before an election during which the Justice Department refrains from actions that might affect votes — Donald Trump announced a run for a second term. The Justice Department has a rule not to indict a sitting president. Trump’s maneuver, the earliest presidential candidate announcement ever, was clearly in the hope that this policy might carry over to shield a candidate, too.

He was right. A widely expected indictment, at least for the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago, did not come. Instead, Attorney General
Merrick Garland punted, some would say, announcing the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to handle the two cases, the stolen documents and Trump’s alleged interference with the government process of transferring power to the newly elected president. Smith, remote from American politics, is currently prosecuting war criminals in den Haag, but has already plunged in, apparently.

Garland’s stated reason for the Smith assignment is that for “particularly sensitive matters…in certain extraordinary cases, it is in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor”. Biden suggesting that he will announce his candidacy soon after the turn of the year presents a conflict for Garland. Appointed by Biden, the AG is in the awkward position of criminally prosecuting Biden’s rival. A special counsel removes Garland from the day-to-day workings and decisions of the investigations, although ultimately it will be he who must decide what to do with the special counsel’s recommendations.

The instantaneous reaction was that Trump has won again, rewarded by the DOJ for announcing this soon to avoid indictment. The master of running out the clock, Trump had sued in a Florida district to block Justice’s review of the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago where a Trump appointed judge ruled in his favor, then lobbied for a special master to slow the process, to which Justice acquiesced, and now in this open-and-shut case — Trump took documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act, period — he’s getting a special counsel. Instead of an indictment any day now, it’s who knows when?

Nothing, of course, will placate the Trump apologists. Garland’s Justice has granted Trump indefensible deference for a criminal act for which any one of us would have seen prison eighteen months ago, yet that has not occurred to Fox hosts such as Laura Ingraham who asks, “Does anyone actually believe that this is all in the ‘public interest’?”, or Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who says, “It’s nothing but the Democrat Party’s campaign against President Trump”, or Ohio Representative Jim Jordan who thinks, “If that’s not a political Justice Department, I don’t know what is”, and who is already planning to investigate Smith.

Think positive?

Commentators on the left were thrilled, as if the Trump investigations have suddenly gotten serious whereas heretofore they weren’t. Unlike Mueller’s almost two year investigation, unlike John Durham’s ongoing three year probe that has gone nowhere, this will be different, is their take. Jack Smith will wrap this up expeditiously. There will be none of the mission creep of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s more than four years of trying to take down Bill Clinton that started with an Arkansas real estate deal and led, when that uncovered nothing, to finally discovering Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell made a good case for optimism. Holding up an organization chart of the Department of Justice, he said:

The person currently supervising both of those investigations and possibly prosecutions is Merrick Garland, who is also in charge of supervising the 115,000 people who work at the DOJ including the 35,000 people working at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the 34,000 working at the Bureau of Prisons, the 9,848 people working in the Drug Enforcement Administration, the 5,400 people working in the US Marshall Service, and on and on and on. Merrick Garland has Justice Department employees answering to him all over the world and now Jack Smith has been appointed by the attorney general to spend all day every day concentrating on one thing: the investigation and possibly prosecution of Donald Trump. Jack Smith can make the decisions that previously had to get in line for the attorney general’s attention — [behind] a civil rights division, an anti-trust division, a tax division, an environment and natural resources division — and Jack Smith doesn’t.

Nevertheless, however swiftly Smith moves, it will take extra time, and as we drift into the next stage of America’s perpetual election, any move by Justice will seem that much more political and may give Garland still more pause. Trump may slither through yet again.

It’s not morning in America

Trump’s announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago ran over an hour. For a written speech — evident from him alternately looking left and right — it was strangely disjoint with subjects in no discernible order. You wouldn’t know it from Fox News, which carried the speech, of course. Sean Hannity broke in after about forty minutes for fellow-anchor Pete Hegseth to say, ” This looks like Trump in as good a form as you’ve ever seen him” and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to gush, “This was an absolutely brilliant speech”. Then, why the interruption? “If he keeps on like this tonight, he is unbeatable in 2024”, Huckabee continued.

Commentators on the left had the opposite view. They thought Trump was “listless” and “low energy”, turning a phrase back on Trump that he had used to describe Candidate Jeb Bush in 2016. Historian Michael Beschloss wondered,”Why does he look and sound so morose?” He had “heard funeral orations more cheerful and energetic than that speech.”

People had tried to leave but were blocked by security. That squared with an account by Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director under Obama, now co-host of Showtime’s political program, “The Circus”, who attended a rally that Trump staged the night before Election Day in Dayton, Ohio. She calleed Trump’s deflated performance “late stage Elvis”:

“There was a huge crowd, not to diminish that, maybe 7,000, 10,000 people…They wanted to hear him do the greatest hits. [Instead], It was two solid hours of grievance. It was just all the things that he was treated badly about, people who had dissed him, Letitia James and the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago. They showed a very well-produced video about evil Letitia James and the FBI raid but the crowd did not react at all. When he started speaking, the crowd sat down!. The crowd started to leave. It was nothing about them, and they used to feel like a kinship between Trump and the people, who believed he was fighting for them, and it was just like air out of the balloon. They tried to get a little build the wall chant going. They couldn’t get anything going”.

In his announcement speech, Trump claimed that the U.S. had gone from “We built the greatest economy in the history of the world” under his administration to “Now we are a nation in decline, we are a failing nation” under President Biden. Saying, “Under Biden and the radical Democrats, America has been mocked, derided and brought to its knees, perhaps like never before” had to bring even that low information audience to wonder if he was creating his own reality.

“Our country is in a horrible state. We are in grave trouble”. The man who created the Big Lie to sow distrust in the voting process on which our democracy relies actually said, “Our country is being destroyed before your very eyes”, as if by someone else.

Worse is yet to come, he says: “The citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through”. Crime has been on the increase, true, but “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crimes”? Wherever crime is blood-soaked, that owes to the Second Amendment gun zealotry of his own Republican Party.

His narcissism was rampant. ” What we have built together over the past six years is the greatest movement in history”. His “I alone can fix it” boast was revived with, “I am running because I believe the world has not yet seen the true glory of what this nation can be”. We learned that Ukraine would never have happened had he still been president”, that he “rebuilt the entire military”, that he “used to make deals for our country like you would never believe”. His successes so united the country that…

“The people were calling me, you wouldn’t believe it, people that were so far left, I figured they would never speak to me”.

No, people weren’t calling him nor did “People say, how do you speak before so many people”. The man who slanders everyone to psychologically elevate himself said, “We don’t want to be critics or complainers. I never wanted to be a critic. I never respected critics”. The New York Times compiled the complete list of Trump’s insults on Twitter from the day he announced in 2015 to when he was banned from the service. It’s astounding in length.

Observing him as a candidate in 2016, a number of psychologists diagnosed him as a malignant narcissist, “dangerous” and “untreatable”. We wrote of that five years ago. It’s been apparent all these years, a narcissism beyond what we thought possible. What is remarkable is how America got so accustomed to his illness that the media now pays little attention to his self-delusion, mentioning almost none of what we quote here, and there is still more, which we think should not be overlooked, and spoken in the context of once again vying to be no less than the president of the United States.

Two of America’s otherwise hugely successful entrepreneurs have discovered that they are not immune to the consequences of hubris. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who swallowed up Twitter, is finding it indigestible. Mark Zuckerberg, convinced he sees the future, has embarked on a transformation of Meta Platforms, the renamed Facebook, that is draining the company of billions of dollars and has caused its market value to plunge by 70% over the past year. Meanwhile, TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has rocketed in popularity with Gen Z, making Twitter, Facebook, and Meta’s Instagram seem so last decade.

Setting aside further complications – and they have cascaded – Twitter poses a financial challenge that makes us wonder whether the impetuous Musk ever pushed a pencil. After months of indecision, he had made an offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, then backed out, was sued by the company to force honoring the deal, and decided to go ahead with the transaction rather than defend the lawsuit in Delaware Chancery court where he probably figured he’d lose.

Part of the buyout was leveraged, which means that Twitter was made to take on some $13 billion of the $44 billion in order, effectively, to buy itself for Mr. Musk. Had he used that pencil on only the back of an envelope, he would have realized that the annual interest alone runs to about $1 billion for a company that last year generated about $630 million in cashflow. Going in, Musk has structured a Twitter that does not have enough to pay its lenders.

The situation immediately worsened: advertisers began to pull out. Musk’s proclaimed purpose in buying Twitter was to champion free speech, to lift the ban on those users who had violated company standards, most notable among them being Donald Trump. Envisioning their ads showing up alongside screwball QAnon conspiracy theories, white supremacist screeds, anti-Semitic hate messages, and perhaps Russia disinformation undermining the U.S. (Musk has allegedly spoken with Putin), big name corporate advertisers cancelled or suspended their accounts, causing what Musk confesses is a “massive drop in revenue” that has made the financial shortfall critical. He blamed “activist groups pressuring advertisers” even though no changes had yet been made to relax content moderation and re-admit banned accounts. “We’ve done our absolute best to appease them, and nothing is working”, Musk candidly reported to investors.

One week at the helm, he has keelhauled half of the company’s 7,500 employees, with a number of key executives quitting. Those left are grumbling about a Musk edict that they return to working at their offices 40 hours a week. Five dismissed employees filed a federal lawsuit accusing the company of violating federal and state law by giving almost no advance notice of a mass layoff.

Musk, remaining staff, and people he has brought in from his other companies are huddling to come up with ways to make more money, such as raising the price of subscriptions to $7.99 a month that allows users to post longer videos and podcasts, and a verification service that certifies for a few that users are in fact who they say they are. “We need roughly half our revenue to be subscriptions”, says Musk, a lofty ambition considering that only 10% of the $5 billion in 2021 revenue came from other than advertising, and subscriptions were only a part of that.

Now the Federal Trade Commission has signaled it might step in owing to several top privacy and security executives resigning. The agency is concerned whether Twitter is still in compliance with a 2011 consent decree that requires the company to undertake security and privacy reviews of software changes and new features. The FTC has the muscle to invoke fines in the hundreds of millions if its consent decrees are violated.

Who would have predicted that enormously profitable Meta Platforms (Facebook), with a 3.5 billion customer base, a number almost half the population of the planet, could ever have a problem? Yet the company’s stock price plummeted by a stunning 71% this year, a loss of some $800 billion in market value since its peak just last year in September.

Digital advertising is off across the Internet and Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are not exempt. Apple made privacy changes that prevent those Meta apps from accessing the user behavior on Apple-made phones that was key to fitting advertising to consumer targets more precisely. These are significant impacts, but the primary cause is that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to transform the company, spending billions in pursuit of a personal vision of the future that has investors spooked.

Zuckerberg believes that we will live in the metaverse, an immersive realm accessed by wearing virtual reality headsets where we create cartoon-like avatars to represent ourselves. There, we will have our avatars while away the hours in any of a number of “worlds” for entertainment, socializing, adventure, business, where we meet with co-workers, family, or have chance encounters with people from around the globe who have strapped in at the same time and have sent their avatars roaming, too.

Building the technology for the metaverse will take years and Zuckerberg intends to spend more than $10 billion annually, a bleed out that has investors panicked. An open letter from one investment firm, Altimeter Capital, reported by The Wall Street Journal upbraided the company, telling it to cut the budget to $5 billion a year and the headcount by 20%, accusing the company of “drifting into the land of excess – too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency”.

At the end of the third quarter, Meta had over 87,000 employees, up a whopping 28% from a year ago, at the same time as posting the first quarterly revenue declines in its 18-year history. Spending increased by 19% to bring about a 52% drop in net income compared to a year earlier.

Zuckerberg got the message. Facing up to its problems, Meta has begun laying off thousands of employees. He took responsibility at a company meeting of its executives for his optimism having led to overstaffing. But he is unyielding in his quest. On a call with analysts, Zuckerberg was defiant, saying people would “look back decades from now” and” talk about the importance of the work that was done here”.

Early metaverse usage raises questions

There is already a flagship metaverse named Horizon Worlds. Meta expected it would have 500,000 active users by year-end, but interest has proved to be not that strong; that estimate has been cut to 280,000. Internal documents reported by the Journal say that users tend not to return to Horizon’s worlds after about a month. More than half of the Quest headsets – costing $400 to $1,500 — show no further activity after six months.

That could be attributable to users finding so few fellow avatars in Horizon’s worlds which vastly increased membership could cure, but there is resistance even within Meta. When Zuckerberg urged teams to conduct their meetings in the metaverse, it revealed that a number of employees working on the project did not even own headsets. In a post obtained by The New York Times, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of the metaverse divisions showed his disappointment in disuse, asking

“Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

Zuckerberg does not suffer holdouts lightly. In June, as Reuters reported, he said that “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”

Low usage has has led to disagreement inside Meta, with concurring objections from tech writers in the media, that says the Quest headsets are best used for games and not for Zuckerberg’s goal of personal connection.

The Reality Labs division, which produces the head gear and is responsible for the virtual reality software that forms the metaverse, has sold some 15 million headsets to date. The technology is extraordinary. The priciest headsets, at least, have sensors that monitor body motions and facial expressions that are imparted to the avatars for other users to see. Users complain that avatars have no legs — coming soon, says Meta – which reminds us that code to show avatar leg movements — walking, turning — to match the headset wearer’s is nothing simple. Rolf Illenberger, CEO of virtual reality software company VRdirect, chastises such impatience:

We’re trying to land on the moon and people are complaining that the coffee machine’s not working”.

Mark Zuckberberg’s oft-stated goal for Facebook was connection, to bring people together. He clearly wants to take that from a flat screen that scrolls posts from friends and family to a three-dimensional world of interaction where those same people, in avatar form, can come together to talk and do things jointly. The question is whether the real world will want to spend their days wearing headsets and living virtually. An epic fail could be in the making.

Meanwhile, as if in rebuke to Zuckerberg’s following the most difficult and costly path to owning the future, TikTok has found that what young people want is simply to watch selfie videos of people dancing, singing, cavorting foolishly, while making so many of them instant millionaire “influencers” whose endorsements major consumer product companies crave.

Growth in popularity has been phenomenal, crossing the billion mark of monthly active users in September and rising at an ascending rate as the bar chart shows — a rate faster than Instagram’s meteoric ascent.

TikTok has had a bumpy road getting to now. Its Chinese ownership prompted an August 2020 executive order from former President Trump that banned both TikTok and WeChat. The companies fought the order in court and won, more than once, while the Trump administration pressed that the company be moved to U.S. ownership by an Oracle/Walmart consortium.

President Biden didn’t pursue that option but the concerns are unabated. Direct connection to tens of millions of mostly young Americans puts the Chinese in the position of scooping up the personal data of our citizens. TikTok management in the U.S. assures the U.S. government that nothing of the sort is happening, a pledge of no value because to company can say ‘hand off’ to the Chinese Communist Party. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law rules that all user data must be turned over to the CCP on request. Additionally, the platform could be used to disseminate Chinese propaganda and disinformation, essentially indoctrinating U.S. kids.

An opinion piece by Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin just ran in The Washington Post in which they make these same points and are introducing legislation to ban TikTok. They site these findings by Forbes:

LinkedIn profiles reveal that 23 of ByteDance’s directors previously worked for CCP propaganda outlets, and at least 15 ByteDance employees work for them now. Moreover, the company’s editor in chief, who also happens to be the secretary of its internal CCP committee, stressed that the committee would “take the lead” in “all product lines and business lines” to ensure that ByteDance’s products have “correct political direction.”

That finds President Biden tacking in the opposite direction. He has been cozying up to TikTok. In October he brought eight influencers to the White House, joined by former President Obama, and with tours of Congress and the Supreme Court laid on, the objective being to influence the influencers to bring out the vote for Democrats.