That's what you rooting for. Actually you're rooting for death, destruction and the displacement of millions of people. Maybe do yourself a favor and put on the brilliant anti war Avocado album. revisit it. The Left has become card carrying fan club members of Bush and Cheaney. It's disgusting.
Excuse me? Avocado was written and produced, IMHO, as an anti American war of choice protest. Iraq did not threaten our security and didn’t have WMD. The war was started under false pretexts and it was sold to the ‘Murican public through lies and deceit.
How does this compare with how and why the war in Ukraine started? How many US troops are in Ukraine and how many have been killed? Avocado was released in 2006, after three years of war. Maybe Kid Pebble can release an anti-Ukraine war album? With the Village People and call it Disco-Rock for Pease.
The way you all talk on here you want US troops on the ground there. History has a funny was of repeating itself.
I'm not blind. I can see it coming Looks like lightning In my child's eyes I'm not frantic I can feel it coming.
I have not read one post advocating for US boots on the ground but if you don’t think there aren’t covert US forces there, maybe withdrawn, you don’t understand world conflict between superpowers and the difference between democracy and authoritarianism and fighting against one and defending the other.
I try to give us all a break on the weekend, but today seems like a day for which we need a record.
The president remains at Walter Reed Hospital. His condition is unclear. His doctors gave a cheery if vague picture of his health this morning, but minutes later, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows gave an off-the-record report to the press pool that told a different story. “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care,” Meadows said. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.” Meadows had been caught on tape asking to go off the record, so his identity was revealed.
Furious, Trump went to Twitter to say he was “feeling well!” In the evening, he released a four-minute video showing him sitting up at a conference table, saying in a rambling monologue that he would be back to campaigning soon. The video had been edited.
In his briefing to reporters, Dr. Sean Conley dated Trump’s diagnosis to Wednesday, a day earlier than Trump had admitted publicly. That new information meant that Trump was contagious at Tuesday’s debate, and that he knew he was contagious when he attended a fundraiser at his Bedminster golf club on Thursday, maskless. It would also mean that Trump knew he was sick before his adviser Hope Hicks’s diagnosis. After the press conference, the White House released a document saying that Conley had misspoken.
Over the course of the day, more members of Trump’s inner circle announced they have tested positive for coronavirus: former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Nick Luna, Trump’s personal assistant, are all infected; Christie is in the hospital. It also became clear that the White House had made little or no effort to trace who had contact with the infected officials.
Meanwhile, White House sources told reporters that Trump had fought against going to Walter Reed Hospital so close to the election, fearing he would look weak. His doctors gave him no choice. He finally gave in, but waited until after the stock market closed on Friday to make the trip. He is not being treated with hydroxychloroquine, which he repeatedly touted as an effective cure for Covid-19, but rather with the anti-viral drug remdesivir.
Trump has built his case for reelection on the idea that the coronavirus either is not that serious or has run its course. He has ridiculed the idea of wearing masks, and refused to follow the safety protocols health experts recommended. Now he and his wife are sick, and coronavirus is spreading through his inner circle, apparently through a super spreader event last weekend at the White House, when Trump announced he was nominating Amy Coney Barrett to take the Supreme Court seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Trump’s strategy of downplaying the virus to convince Americans it was over has backfired spectacularly, with the nation watching aghast as the disease spreads through the White House and officials there seem unable to come up with a straight story about what’s happening. Interviewed by Isaac Chotiner for the New Yorker, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who has long-time sources in the White House, said that people there are “incredibly anxious…. For their own safety. For the safety of the country. I think they are scared for the president…. And I think they are just shell-shocked.”
According to Haberman, Trump “is very, very reluctant to have information about his health out there…. Any perception of weakness for him is some kind of psychic wound.” She explained how the upcoming election makes this sentiment particularly powerful right now. “This is his worst nightmare. Not just getting sick with this, but any scenario where he is out of sight and being tended to and Joe Biden is out campaigning.”
Indeed, Biden has taken to the campaign trail. With just a month left before the election, he is on the road while Trump’s campaign is paralyzed. Biden adviser Anita Dunn explained to Politico that he is practicing what he has been preaching. “There is no reason not to show the country that, yes, you can go about your business—if you do it safely, if you wear masks, if you socially distance…. The vice president has talked about this since March.”
The timing of the Trumps’ illness coincided with the final push from the Biden campaign. It has pulled its negative ads out of respect for the Trumps, it says, but had likely planned to anyway in order to focus on an uplifting message of change in the last month of the campaign. In any case, at this point the Biden campaign hardly has to draw attention to how poorly the administration had handled the coronavirus pandemic. With Trump in the hospital with Covid-19, it’s pretty obvious.
“They all know it’s over,” a Republican close to the Trump campaign told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman. Another said, “This is spiraling out of control.”
It was a bad week politically for the president anyway. It was only a week ago—on Sunday—that the New York Times released information about his taxes, revealing that he is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and has avoided almost all U.S. taxes for years. Just two days later—Tuesday—the first presidential debate saw Trump blustering and bullying in what he thought was a demonstration that his supporters would love. Maybe members of his base did, but a New York Times/Siena College poll released today indicates that most voters were repelled by Trump’s behavior. Biden is up seven points among likely voters in Pennsylvania, and five points in Florida. By Thursday, we knew that Hope Hicks had tested positive for coronavirus, and shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Friday, we knew that the president and the First Lady had also tested positive.
If there was any good news in all this for the Trump campaign, it was that the tape released Thursday of the First Lady saying “who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff and decorations?” and “Give me a f****** break” about children separated from their parents has largely been forgotten. So has the statement of former national security adviser H.R. McMaster that the president is “aiding and abetting” Putin because he refuses to acknowledge that Russians are attacking the 2020 election.
Despite the growing crisis in the administration, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is still trying to get Barrett confirmed before the election, even if nothing else gets done. He has announced the Senate will not conduct business again until October 19, meaning it cannot take up the coronavirus bill the House just passed. Nonetheless, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will meet to consider Barrett’s nomination, despite the fact that two members of the committee are infected with coronavirus. Those two say they will quarantine for just ten days so they can emerge in time for Barrett’s confirmation hearings beginning on October 12.
And while we are watching coronavirus infect the president and those around him, it also continues to spread around the rest of the country. The United States as a whole on Friday saw the highest count of new cases since August: 54,411. Deaths are down, but still 906 Americans died on Friday from Covid-19.
Looking back at this I'm glad Trump lost to Biden in a way. I think that loss really made him laser focused and he's coming into DC blazing. The bitter part is all the damage done by the COVID propaganda.. What they did to our kids and metal health as a country will never be forgiven. Never forget what the Left did to us during COVID.
right, I wonder what the 1.2 million dead here in the US may say in response.....
I blame both administrations but mostly Bidens for not protecting the most vulnerable first. Over 95% of the deaths were people with 3 or more major health problems. Again you do zero research and tout the company line. Do better.
interesting as fuckstick was pres when the vax first came out. and as I recall the most vulnerable WERE first in line in Nov of 20. I wasn't eligible until the following june I think it was. Fucksticks further meddling was denouncing the one good thing that happened under his watch. flipping back and forth on it to to his current stance ALL VAX BAD, and which I think is to end the free tests available during bidens term.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
for the new to this thread poster, what I dont post is her citations which on adbook are in the first comment. and when received via email its listed as well. Like any academic worth a shit would do.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
In an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Musk brandished a chainsaw like that Argentina's president Javier Milei used to symbolize the drastic cuts he intended to make to his country’s government, then posted that image to X, labeling it “The DogeFather,” although the administration has recently told a court that Musk is neither an employee nor the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Politico called Musk’s behavior “eccentric.”
While attendees cheered Musk on, outside CPAC there appears to be a storm brewing. While Trump and his team have claimed they have a mandate, in fact more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024, and his early approval ratings were only 47%, the lowest of any president going back to 1953, when Gallup began checking them. His approval has not grown as he has called himself a “king” and openly mused about running for a third term.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released yesterday shows that even that “honeymoon” is over. Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.
Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.
As Aaron Blake points out in the Washington Post, a new CNN poll, also released yesterday, shows that Musk is a major factor in Trump’s declining ratings. By nearly two to one, Americans see Musk having a prominent role in the administration as a “bad thing.” The ratio was 54 to 28. The Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Americans disapprove of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary” by the wide margin of 52 to 26. Sixty-three percent of Americans are worried about Musk’s team getting access to their data.
Meanwhile, Jessica Piper of Politico noted that 62% of Americans in the CNN poll said that Trump has not done enough to try to reduce prices, and today’s economic news bears out that concern: not only are egg prices at an all-time high, but also consumer sentiment dropped to a 15-month low as people worry that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement: “[T]he American people actually feel great about the direction of the country…. What’s to hate? We are undoing the widely unpopular agenda of the previous office holder, uprooting waste, fraud, and abuse, and chugging along on the great American Comeback.”
Phone calls swamping the congressional switchboards and constituents turning out for town halls with House members disprove Fields’s statement. In packed rooms with overflow spaces, constituents have shown up this week both to demand that their representatives take a stand against Musk’s slashing of the federal government and access to personal data, and to protest Trump’s claim to be a king. In an eastern Oregon district that Trump won by 68%, constituents shouted at Representative Cliff Bentz: “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich,” and “tax the billionaires.” In a solid-red Atlanta suburb, the crowd was so angry at Representative Richard McCormick that he has apparently gone to ground, bailing on a CNN interview about the disastrous town hall at the last minute.
That Trump is feeling the pressure from voters showed this week when he appeared to offer two major distractions: a pledge to consider using money from savings found by the “Department of Government Efficiency” to provide rebates to taxpayers—although so far it hasn’t shown any savings and economists say the promise of checks is unrealistic—and a claim that he would release a list of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.
Trump is also under pressure from the law.
The Associated Press sued three officials in the Trump administration today for blocking AP journalists from presidential events because the AP continues to use the traditional name “Gulf of Mexico” for the gulf that Trump is trying to rename. The AP is suing over the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Today, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction to stop Musk and the DOGE team from accessing Americans’ private information in the Treasury Department’s central payment system. Eighteen states had filed the lawsuit.
Tonight, a federal court granted a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion, finding that they violate the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.
Trump is also under pressure from principled state governors.
In his State of the State Address on Wednesday, February 19, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker noted that “it’s in fashion at the federal level right now to just indiscriminately slash school funding, healthcare coverage, support for farmers, and veterans’ services. They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies. But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.”
He recalled: ““Here in Illinois, ten years ago we saw the consequences of a rampant ideological gutting of government. It genuinely harmed people. Our citizens hated it. Trust me—I won an entire election based in part on just how much they hated it.”
Pritzker went on to address the dangers of the Trump administration directly. “We don’t have kings in America,” he said, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one…. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
He recalled how ordinary Illinoisans outnumbered Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978 by about 2,000 to 20, and noted: “Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.” Today, Maine governor Janet Mills took the fight against Trump’s overreach directly to him. At a meeting of the nation’s governors, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.
The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump's executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity.
Trump asked if the governor of Maine was in the room.
“Yeah, I’m here,” replied Governor Mills.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked.
“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said.
“We are the federal law,” Trump said. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t….”
“We’re going to follow the law,” she said.
“You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not going to get any federal funding,” he said.
Mills answered: “We’ll see you in court.”
As Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times put it: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”
Hours later, the Trump administration launched an investigation into Maine’s Department of Education, specifically its policy on transgender athletes. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said that any attempt to cut federal funding for the states over the issue “would be illegal and in direct violation of federal court orders…. Fortunately,” he said in a statement, “the rule of law still applies in this country, and I will do everything in my power to defend Maine’s laws and block efforts by the president to bully and threaten us.”
“[W]hat is at stake here [is] the rule of law in our country,” Mills said in a statement. “No President…can withhold Federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws.”
“Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last. Today, the President of the United States has targeted one particular group on one particular issue which Maine law has addressed. But you must ask yourself: who and what will he target next, and what will he do? Will it be you? Will it be because of your race or your religion? Will it be because you look different or think differently? Where does it end? In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it—and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so.”
“[D]o not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.”
Americans’ sense that Musk has too much power is likely to be heightened by tonight’s report from Andrea Shalal and Joey Roulette of Reuters that the United States is trying to force Ukraine to sign away rights to its critical minerals by threatening to cut off access to Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukraine turned to that system after the Russians destroyed its communications services.
And Americans’ concerns about Trump acting like a dictator are unlikely to be calmed by tonight’s news that Trump has abruptly purged the leadership of the military in apparent unconcern over the message that such a sweeping purge sends to adversaries. He has fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.”
The vice chief of the Air Force, General James Slife, has also been fired, and Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Trump has indicated he intends to nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan “Razin” Caine to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky of CNN call this “an extraordinary move,” since Caine is retired and is not a four-star general, a legal requirement, and will need a presidential waiver to take the job. Trump has referred to Caine as right out of “central casting.”
Defense One, which covers U.S. defense and international security, called the firings a “bloodbath.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
That's what you rooting for. Actually you're rooting for death, destruction and the displacement of millions of people. Maybe do yourself a favor and put on the brilliant anti war Avocado album. revisit it. The Left has become card carrying fan club members of Bush and Cheaney. It's disgusting.
Excuse me? Avocado was written and produced, IMHO, as an anti American war of choice protest. Iraq did not threaten our security and didn’t have WMD. The war was started under false pretexts and it was sold to the ‘Murican public through lies and deceit.
How does this compare with how and why the war in Ukraine started? How many US troops are in Ukraine and how many have been killed? Avocado was released in 2006, after three years of war. Maybe Kid Pebble can release an anti-Ukraine war album? With the Village People and call it Disco-Rock for Pease.
The way you all talk on here you want US troops on the ground there. History has a funny was of repeating itself.
I'm not blind. I can see it coming Looks like lightning In my child's eyes I'm not frantic I can feel it coming.
Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.
In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.
Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”
National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”
Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.
While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.
In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.
In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.
When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.
It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.
In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.
In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”
That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."
Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”
Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.
This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”
Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”
No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”
Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.
While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.
And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Something is shifting,” scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder posted on Bluesky yesterday. “They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”
Rather than backing down on their unpopular programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are intensifying their behavior as if trying to grab power before it slips away.
Trump’s blanket pardons of the people convicted for violent behavior in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were highly unpopular, with 83% of Americans opposed to those pardons. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent. And yet, on February 20, the Trump Justice Department expanded those pardons to cover gun and drug charges against two former January 6 defendants that were turned up during Federal Bureau of Investigation searches related to the January 6 attack.
Then, on February 21, a number of people pardoned after committing violent crimes, including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—who was sentenced to 22 years in prison—and Proud Boy Ethan Nordean (18 years) and Dominic Pezzola (10 years), as well as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes (18 years) and Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who sat with his feet on a desk in then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office (four and a half years), held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to announce they were going to sue the Justice Department for prosecuting them.
Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that the group followed the route they took around the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then posed for photos chanting as they had that day: “Whose house? Our house.” Protesters nearby heckled the group, and when one of them put her phone near Tarrio’s face while he was talking to a photographer, he batted her arm away. Capitol Police officers promptly arrested him for assault.
A number of the January 6 rioters were visiting the Capitol from the nearby Conservative Political Action Conference being held in Maryland. There, MAGA participants continued to normalize Nazi imagery as both Steve Bannon and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui threw fascist-style salutes to the crowd.
Yesterday, Tarrio posted a video of himself following officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 through the lobby of a Washington hotel where the anti-Trump Principles First conference was taking place. According to Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, Tarrio followed officers Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, and Aquilino Gonell, saying: “You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 f*cking years. Now you don’t want to look in my eyes, you f*cking cowards.” Fanone turned and told him: “You’re a traitor to this country.”
Today, the hotel had to be evacuated after someone claiming to be “MAGA” emailed a threat claiming to have rigged four bombs: two in the hotel, one in Fanone’s mother’s mailbox, and one in the mailbox of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic. After listing the names of several of the conference attendees—and singling out Fanone—the email said they “all deserve to die.” The perpetrator claimed to be acting “[t]o honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump.”
Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are also ramping up their behavior even as the public is starting to turn against the government cuts that are badly hurting American veterans, American farmers, and U.S. medical research. The courts keep ruling against their efforts and their claims of finding “waste, fraud, and abuse” are being widely debunked. Rather than rethinking their course in the face of opposition, they seem to be becoming more belligerent.
On Saturday, Trump urged Musk to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, although the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential advisor. “Will do, Mr. President,” Musk replied. He then posted a command to federal employees: “Consistent with [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Shortly after, emails went out giving workers 48 hours to list five things they had accomplished in the past week.
This sparked outrage among Americans who noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. S.V. Date of HuffPost noted on February 18 that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on 9 of his first 30 days in office and that Trump’s golf outings had already cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million.
Reddit was flooded with potential responses to Musk’s demand, scorching it and Musk. The demand also exposed a rift in the administration, as department heads—including Kash Patel, the newly confirmed head of the FBI, as well as officials at the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of the Navy—asserted their authority to review the workers in their own departments, telling them not to respond to Musk’s demand.
Then users pointed out that the new government employee email system the Department of Government Efficiency team set up explicitly says that using it is voluntary, and that resignations of federal employees must be voluntary. Musk responded by sending out a poll on X asking whether X users think federal employees should be “required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished” in the past week.
The entire exercise made it look as if the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus are dangerously loose. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “Drunk on power and ketamine.”
Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another,” Locke wrote.
Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, “with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws.” Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to “uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.”
“Otherwise,” Neem writes, “Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency.” He continues: “Trump’s actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself.”
In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is “grossly unconstitutional.” Trump’s concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is “absolutely straight up unconstitutional,” King said, “and it’s illegal.”
“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”
“This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It's the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don't want to buck the President, we'll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat's a copout. It's our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That's what we swear to when we enter this body.”
“What's it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what's going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What's it going to take?”
“[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we've got to respond to it. I'm just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat's what the framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that's what we're headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”
Senator King, along with Maine governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state.
On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. “I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” she said. “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
On July 28, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen (R-ME), who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority to draw up articles of impeachment against Republican president Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, “I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office; it’s just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment.”
Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate coverup came to light. “Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president,” Cohen recalled. “That’s when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, ‘We were wrong, and you were right, and we’ll support this.’ ”
It’s a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”
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Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”
For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.
At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.
“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.
In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”
As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.
Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.
On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”
The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”
Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”
“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”
It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.
On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.
The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.
“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”
Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.
Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.
John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
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On Friday, February 21, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg posted: “A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”
Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now: How should the U.S. raise money, and how should it spend money?
Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.
Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.
But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.
Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.
That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.
Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of “continuing resolutions,” measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next ten years, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail—including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments—that deficit jumps closer to $11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump’s claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers.
So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now, though, there is a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric: the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow.
On January 21, 2025, the U.S. Treasury had to begin using extraordinary measures to pay the debt obligations Congress has authorized. In order for Trump and the Republicans to get their tax cuts, that debt ceiling will have to be raised. But a number of MAGA Republicans are already furious at the growing debt and the budget deficits that feed it, and they say they will not raise that ceiling unless there are extreme cuts to the federal budget. Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it is actually Republican-dominated districts that receive the bulk of federal monies.
This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that is claiming to slash federal spending, although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five-biggest ticket items it had touted on its “wall of receipts.”
As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation, but they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the project over to Musk.
They are making it a point to look the other way when people, including judges, ask under what authorization Musk and his team are operating. Today, once again, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say who was in charge of DOGE, a day after Matt Bai reported in the Washington Post that two of Musk’s DOGE employees, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, used their access to payment systems to override explicit orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and shut off funding to the United States Agency for International Development. Bai reports that Farritor is 23-year-old dropout from the University of Nebraska who interned at SpaceX; Kliger, 25, spreads conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” attended Berkeley, and is now installed at the Treasury Department.
This afternoon the White House said that Amy Gleason, a former official at the U.S. Digital Service, the agency that Trump’s executive order may have turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, is serving as the acting administrator of DOGE. Reporters reached her by phone in Mexico.
In an interview with NPR, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman, explained that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary’s democracy into “a system that's designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values” in what became “a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class.” Trump and MAGAs see Orbán as a model, and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that manages civilian aviation and that Trump and DOGE gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet system for its information technology networks.
But even if Musk is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52–48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats and Independents, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not to advance that resolution.
Today the House was supposed to vote on its own budget resolution, and it is here that the stark contrast Buttigieg identified shows most strongly. The House resolution calls for cutting $4.5 trillion in taxes, primarily for the wealthy and corporations, while also adding $100 billion for immigration and border security, $90 billion for Homeland Security, and $100 billion in military spending. It enables those cuts and spending, at least in the short term, by raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
The plan offsets those tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts, including $880 billion over the next decade in cuts to the part of the budget that covers Medicare and Medicaid, and $230 billion in cuts to the part of the budget that covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. House speaker Mike Johnson claimed that all the cuts would come from the same place Musk claims, without evidence, to be cutting: “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
As Buttigieg noted, this budget cuts benefits for the poorest Americans in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, but the proposed cuts are not enough to get all MAGAs, many of whom want far more draconian cuts, on board. Johnson needed either to corral them or to get Democratic votes.
For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S.: on Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that “[t]he top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion in wealth,” while “[t]he bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth.”
Shauneen Miranda of the New Jersey Monitor reported the statement of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) today that 24% of Americans get their healthcare from Medicaid, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say that two thirds of nursing home patients receive Medicaid. Cuts would devastate American families. “For what, because Elon Musk needs another billion dollars?” Murphy asked. “The scope of this greed is something that we have never, ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”
At a press conference, House Democrats called out what Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) called “this billionaire budget resolution.” “I know that I and my colleagues here today are ready to go to the mat and fight all the way until we stop this budget and finally demand that, instead of a tax break for greedy billionaires, that we actually tax those greedy billionaires and expand the programs that working people deserve,” Casar said.
It took pressure from Trump to get the House resolution across the line this evening. It ultimately passed by a vote of 217 to 215, with only one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting with all the Democrats against it. Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave, so Representative Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) flew across the country with her one-month-old son to “vote NO on this disastrous budget proposal.”
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This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”
Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.
But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.
Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.
Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.
In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.
Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.
Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.
Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”
Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”
A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.
Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself. Trump didn’t turn to Vice President J.D. Vance until 56 minutes into the meeting, and Vance spoke for only 36 seconds.
But Trump appeared to be aware of the popular anger at Musk’s power over the government and today dared the Cabinet members to suggest they weren’t happy with the arrangements. “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump wrote on his social media channel this morning. “The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!”
“Is anybody unhappy?” Trump asked the Cabinet officers during the meeting. When they applauded in response, he commented: “I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”
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Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.
In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.
Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.
Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”
Zelensky answered that he was just answering the questions Vance was showering on him. “You are in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump said. “We’re going to feel very good.”
Zelensky answered: “You will feel influenced.”
Trump disagreed. “We are going to feel very good and very strong.”
“I am telling you,” Zelensky said. “You will feel influenced.”
Trump appeared to lose control at that point, ranting at Zelensky that Ukraine was losing and that he must accept a ceasefire, but also complaining about former president Joe Biden and Barack Obama and echoing Putin’s talking points. When he could get a word in, Zelensky reiterated that he would not accept a ceasefire without guarantees of security and pointed out that Putin had broken a ceasefire agreement in the past.
Later, when a reporter picked up on that question and asked what would happen if Russia broke a ceasefire agreement, Trump became enraged. Among other things, he said: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt….” Trump referred to what he calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” that Russia had worked to elect him in 2016. That effort, though, was not a hoax: the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released an exhaustive report detailing that effort.
One of the things Russian operatives believed Trump’s team had agreed to, the report said, was Russia’s annexation of the parts of eastern Ukraine it is now trying to grab through military occupation.
Then Trump continued to rant at the reporter, rehashing his version of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop at some length, tying in former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) in a larger stew that brought up Trump’s history with both Russia and Ukraine and their roles in his quest to hold power. Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, when Russia worked to elect him, and Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.
Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.
After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.
This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.” Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
Simpson was referring to the course the United States has taken in the past month as the administration of President Donald Trump has hacked the United States away from 80 years of alliances and partnerships with democratic nations in favor of forging ties with autocrats like Russian president Vladimir Putin.
On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself: that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.
Then, on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin as they berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly trying to bully him into agreeing to the ceasefire conditions that Putin and Trump want to end a war Russia started by invading Ukraine.
The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends.
After yesterday’s Oval Office debacle, democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky.
In London today, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer greeted Zelensky with an enthusiastic hug and in front of cameras told him: "You are very, very welcome here…. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
In the last interview that former secretary of state Antony Blinken gave before leaving office, he talked about the importance of alliances and the strong hand the Biden administration was leaving for the incoming Trump administration. Now, a little over a month later, that interview provides a striking contrast to the course the Trump administration has steered.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
0
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,800
John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.” Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
Simpson was referring to the course the United States has taken in the past month as the administration of President Donald Trump has hacked the United States away from 80 years of alliances and partnerships with democratic nations in favor of forging ties with autocrats like Russian president Vladimir Putin.
On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself: that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.
Then, on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin as they berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly trying to bully him into agreeing to the ceasefire conditions that Putin and Trump want to end a war Russia started by invading Ukraine.
The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends.
After yesterday’s Oval Office debacle, democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky.
In London today, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer greeted Zelensky with an enthusiastic hug and in front of cameras told him: "You are very, very welcome here…. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
In the last interview that former secretary of state Antony Blinken gave before leaving office, he talked about the importance of alliances and the strong hand the Biden administration was leaving for the incoming Trump administration. Now, a little over a month later, that interview provides a striking contrast to the course the Trump administration has steered.
Us: "Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin."
The rest of the world: "democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and
Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President
Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia,
the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland,
Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European
Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all
posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky."
This letter was one of the saddest things I've read in my life. What the hell happened to my country?
"Don't give in to the lies. Don't give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth. And to hope."
John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.” Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
Simpson was referring to the course the United States has taken in the past month as the administration of President Donald Trump has hacked the United States away from 80 years of alliances and partnerships with democratic nations in favor of forging ties with autocrats like Russian president Vladimir Putin.
On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself: that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.
Then, on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin as they berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly trying to bully him into agreeing to the ceasefire conditions that Putin and Trump want to end a war Russia started by invading Ukraine.
The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends.
After yesterday’s Oval Office debacle, democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky.
In London today, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer greeted Zelensky with an enthusiastic hug and in front of cameras told him: "You are very, very welcome here…. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
In the last interview that former secretary of state Antony Blinken gave before leaving office, he talked about the importance of alliances and the strong hand the Biden administration was leaving for the incoming Trump administration. Now, a little over a month later, that interview provides a striking contrast to the course the Trump administration has steered.
Us: "Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin."
The rest of the world: "democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and
Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President
Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia,
the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland,
Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European
Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all
posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky."
This letter was one of the saddest things I've read in my life. What the hell happened to my country?
On February 28, the same day that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Martin Matishak of The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, broke the story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.
Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.
On Face the Nation this morning, Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, contradicted that information. “Considering what I know, what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would I’m certain not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States operations,” he said. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, Turner was in line to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in this Congress until House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) removed him from that slot and from the intelligence committee altogether.
And yet, as Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.
Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.
“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”
Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”
Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”
Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.
Trump has made dismissing as a hoax what he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia” central to his political narrative. But Russian operatives did, in fact, work to elect him in 2016. A 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Putin ordered hacks of Democratic computer networks, and at two crucial moments WikiLeaks, which the Senate committee concluded was allied with the Russians, dumped illegally obtained emails that were intended to hurt the candidacy of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.
Russian operatives also flooded social media with disinformation, not necessarily explicitly endorsing Trump, but spreading lies about Clinton to depress Democratic turnout, or to rile up those on the right by falsely claiming that Democrats intended to ban the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. The goal of the propaganda was not simply to elect Trump. It was to pit the far ends of the political spectrum against the middle, tearing the nation apart.
Fake accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook drove wedges between Americans over issues of race, immigration, and gun rights. Craig Timberg and Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Facebook officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.
That effort was not a one-shot deal: Russians worked to influence the 2020 presidential election, too. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US.” But “[u]nlike in 2016,” the report said, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”
Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded.
In October 2024, Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned in an interview with CBS News that Russia was bombarding voters with propaganda to divide Americans before that year’s election, as well. Operatives were not just posting fake stories and replying to posts, but were also using AI to manufacture fake videos and laundering Russian talking points through social media influencers. Just a month before, news had broken that Russia was funding Tenet Media, a company that hired right-wing personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen, who repeated Russian talking points.
Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech. Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.
On February 20, Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes, and Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is firing or reassigning officials at the FBI and CISA who had worked on protecting elections. That includes those trying to stop foreign propaganda and disinformation and those combating cyberattacks and attempts to disrupt voting systems.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story that two members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” are now installed at CISA: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” and Kyle Schutt, a 38-year-old software engineer. Kim Zetter of Wired reported that since 2018, CISA has “helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”
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As seemed evident even at the time, the ambush of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday was a setup to provide justification for cutting off congressionally approved aid to Ukraine as it tries to fight off Russia’s invasion. That “impoundment” of funds Congress has determined should go to Ukraine is illegal under the terms of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, and it is unconstitutional because the Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to set government spending and to make laws. The president’s job is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
It was for a similar impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds for Ukraine, holding them back until Zelensky agreed to tilt the 2020 election by smearing Joe Biden, that the House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2019. It is not hard to imagine that Trump chose to repeat that performance, in public this time, as a demonstration of his determination to act as he wishes regardless of laws and Constitution.
On Sunday, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a series of memos he and other senior career officials had written, recording in detail how the cuts to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” at the agency will lead to “preventable death” and make the U.S. less safe. The cuts will “no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” one memo read.
Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States.
Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to create a system for waivers to protect that lifesaving aid, the cuts appear random and the system for reversing them remains unworkable. The programs remain shuttered. Enrich blamed "political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation."
On Sunday, Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”
Dangerous cuts are taking place in the United States, as well. On Friday, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk called Social Security, the basis of the U.S. social safety net, a “Ponzi scheme.” Also on Friday, the Social Security Administration announced that it will consolidate the current ten regional offices it maintains into four and cut at least 7,000 jobs from an agency that is already at a 50-year staffing low. Erich Wagner of Government Executive reported that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) team had canceled the leases for 45 of the agency’s field offices and is urging employees to quit.
The acting commissioner of the agency, Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer who got his post after sharing sensitive information with DOGE, blamed former president Joe Biden for the cuts. In contrast, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that the system currently delivers 99.7% of retirement benefits accurately and on time. He warned that the administration is hollowing it out, and when it can no longer function, Republicans will say it needs the private sector to take it over. He called the cuts “a prelude to privatization.”
“The public is going to suffer terribly as a result of this,” a senior official told NPR. “Local field offices will close, hold times will increase, and people will be sicker, hungry, or die when checks don't arrive or a disability hearing is delayed just one month too late.”
In South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, more than 200 wildfires began to burn over the weekend as dry conditions and high winds drove the flames. Firefighters from the Forest Service helped to contain the fires, but they were understaffed even before Trump took office. Now, with the new cuts to the service, prevention measures are impossible and there aren’t enough people to fight fires effectively and safely. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster (R) declared a state of emergency on Sunday.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo picked up something many of us missed, posting today that Trump’s February 11 “workforce optimization” executive order is a clear blueprint for the end goal of all the cuts to the federal government. The order says that departments and agencies must plan to cut all functions and employees who are not designated as essential during a government shutdown. As Marshall notes, this is basically a blueprint for a skeleton crew version of government.
But for all that the administration, led by DOGE, insists that the U.S. has no money for the government services that help ordinary people, it appears to think there is plenty of money to help wealthy supporters. In February, the cryptocurrency bitcoin experienced its biggest monthly drop since June 2022, falling by 17.5%. On Sunday, in a post on his social media site, Trump announced that the government will create a strategic stockpile of five cryptocurrencies, spending tax dollars to buy them.
Supporters say that such an investment could pay off in decades, when that currency has appreciated to become worth trillions of dollars. But, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN notes, “for every bitcoin evangelist, there is an academic or banker from across the political spectrum who will point out that cryptocurrency investments might just as easily go up in smoke, which would be an unfortunate thing to happen to taxpayer dollars.”
The first three currencies Trump announced were not well known, and the announcement sent their prices soaring. Hours later, he added the names of the two biggest cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. After the initial surges, by Monday prices for the currencies had fallen roughly back to where they had been before the announcement, making the announcement look like a pump-and-dump scheme. Economist Peter Schiff, a Trump supporter, called for a full congressional investigation, suggesting that someone other than Trump might have written the social media posts that set off the frenzy and wondering who was buying and selling in that short window of time.
Also on Sunday, the administration announced it would stop enforcing anti-money-laundering laws that were put in place over Trump’s veto in 2021 at the end of his first term and required shell companies to identify the people who own or control them. Referring to the law as a “Biden rule,” Trump called the announcement that he would not enforce it “Exciting News!” The Trump Organization frequently uses shell companies.
A world in which the government does not regulate business or address social welfare or infrastructure, claiming instead to promote economic development by funneling resources to wealthy business leaders, looks much like the late-nineteenth-century world that Trump praises. Trump insists that President William McKinley, who was president from 1897 to 1901, created the nation’s most prosperous era by imposing high tariffs on products from foreign countries.
Trump confirmed today that he will go forward with his own 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on goods from China, adding to the 10% tariffs Trump added to Chinese products in February. While President Joe Biden maintained tariffs on only certain products from China to protect specific industries, it appears Trump’s tariffs will cover all products.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called the tariffs “unjustified” and announced that Canada will put retaliatory tariffs on $20.8 billion worth of U.S. products made primarily in Republican-dominated states, including spirits, beer, wine, cosmetics, appliances, orange juice, peanut butter, clothing, footwear, and paper. A second set of tariffs in a few weeks will target about $90 billion worth of products, including cars and trucks, EVs, products made of steel and aluminum, fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, and dairy products.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum did not provide details of what her country would do but told reporters today: “We have a plan B, C, D.” Chinese officials say that China, too, will impose retaliatory tariffs, singling out agricultural products and placing tariffs of 15% on corn and 10% on soybeans. It also says it will restrict exports to 15 U.S. companies.
The tariffs in place in the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century were less important for the explosive growth of the economy in that era than the flood of foreign capital into private businesses: railroad, mining, cattle, department stores, and finance. By the end of the century, investing in America was such a busy trade that the London Stock Exchange had a separate section for American railroad transactions alone.
And the economic growth of the country did not help everyone equally. While industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt II could build 70-room summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island, the workers whose labor kept the mines and factories producing toiled fourteen to sixteen hours a day in dangerous conditions for little money, with no workmen’s compensation or disability insurance if they were injured. The era has become known as the Gilded Age, dominated by so-called robber barons.
Today, the stock market dropped dramatically upon news that Trump intended to go through with his tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 650 points, down 1.48%. The S&P fell 1.76%, and the Nasdaq Composite, which focuses on technology stocks, fell 2.64%. Meanwhile, shares of European defense companies jumped to record highs as Europe moves to replace the U.S. support for Ukraine.
Also today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecast a dramatic contraction in the economy in the first quarter of 2025. Evaluating current data according to a mathematical model, it moved from an expected 2.9% growth in gross domestic product at the end of January to –2.8% today. That is just a prediction and there is still room for those numbers to turn around, but they might help to explain why Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is talking about changing the way the U.S. calculates economic growth.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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We've been traveling and between that and the fact that the news has come faster and faster, the letters have crept later and later. Let's take the night off and regroup tomorrow.
Here's a picture of the Pacific Ocean for a change, with thanks to our California friends who have a knack for landing us in the right place at the right time to watch spectacular sunsets.
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In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.
“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.
President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.
The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned that the U.S. was engaged in a titanic struggle between “right and wrong and good and evil.” The Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” preaching “the supremacy of the state” and “its omnipotence over individual man.”
When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.
Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.
But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.
Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.
This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.
To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.
Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.
According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”
That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”
In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.
Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.
Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.
The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”
Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”
In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.
Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.
In a nationally televised speech today, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II.
“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”
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This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”
“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”
The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.
In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politico that President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.
As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.
Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.
As predicted, Trump’s turn of the U.S. toward Russia also means that allies are concerned he or members of his administration will share classified intelligence with Russia, thus exposing the identities of their operatives. They are considering new protocols for sharing information with the United States. The Five Eyes alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. has been formidable since World War II and has been key to countering first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Allied governments are now considering withholding information about sources or analyses from the U.S.
Their concern is likely heightened by the return to Trump’s personal possession of the boxes of documents containing classified information the FBI recovered in August 2022 from Mar-a-Lago. Trump took those boxes back from the Department of Justice and flew them back to Mar-a-Lago on February 28.
A CBS News/YouGov poll from February 26–28 showed that only 4% of the American people sided with Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine.
The unpopularity of the new administration's policies is starting to show. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) told House Republicans on Tuesday to stop holding town halls after several such events have turned raucous as attendees complained about the course of the Trump administration. Trump has blamed paid “troublemakers” for the agitation, and claimed the disruptions are part of the Democrats’ “game.” “[B]ut just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION,” he posted on social media, “it’s not going to work for them!”
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.
Even aside from the angry protests, DOGE is running into trouble. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump referred to DOGE and said it “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” In a filing in a lawsuit against DOGE and Musk, the White House declared that Musk is neither in charge of DOGE nor an employee of it. When pressed, the White House claimed on February 26 that the acting administrator of DOGE is staffer Amy Gleason. Immediately after Trump’s statement, the plaintiffs in that case asked permission to add Trump’s statement to their lawsuit.
Musk has claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste or fraud in the government, and Trump and the White House have touted those statements. But their claims to have found massive savings have been full of errors, and most of their claims have been disproved. DOGE has already had to retract five of its seven biggest claims. As for “savings,” the government spent about $710 billion in the first month of Trump’s term, compared with about $630 billion during the same timeframe last year.
Instead of showing great savings, DOGE’s claims reveal just how poorly Musk and his team understand the work of the federal government. After forcing employees out of their positions, they have had to hire back individuals who are, in fact, crucial to the nation, including the people guarding the U.S. nuclear stockpile. In his Tuesday speech, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.”
Except it’s not. The mice in question were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health. For comparison, S.V. Date noted in HuffPost that in just his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today that people reporting on the individual cuts to U.S. scientific and health-related grants are missing the larger picture: “DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States…. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening.”
Republicans are starting to express some concern about Musk and DOGE. As soon as Trump took office, Musk and his DOGE team took over the Office of Personnel Management, and by February 14 they had begun a massive purge of federal workers. As protests of the cuts began, Trump urged Musk on February 22 to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, prompting Musk to demand that all federal employees explain what they had accomplished in the past week under threat of firing. That request sparked a struggle in the executive branch as cabinet officers told the employees in their departments to ignore Musk. Then, on February 27, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the firings were likely illegal and temporarily halted them.
On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) weighed in on the conflict when he told CNN that the power to hire and fire employees properly belongs to Cabinet secretaries.
Yesterday, Musk met with Republican— but no Democratic— members of Congress. Senators reportedly asked Musk—an unelected bureaucrat whose actions are likely illegal—to tell them more about what’s going on. According to Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor, and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post, Musk gave some of the senators his phone number and said he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that Musk told the senators he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get cuts they dislike reversed.
This whole exchange is bonkers. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: “How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?”
Later, Musk met with House Republicans and offered to set up a similar way for the members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee to reach him. When representatives complained about the random cuts that were so upsetting constituents. Musk defended DOGE’s mistakes by saying that he “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”
This morning, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of a group of state attorneys general from 22 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, saying that Trump does not have the authority to freeze funding appropriated by Congress. McConnell wrote that the spending freeze "fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government." As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, McConnell issued a preliminary injunction that will stay in place until the case, called New York v. Trump, works its way through the courts. The injunction applies only in the states that sued, though, leaving Republican-dominated states out in the cold.
Today, Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries that they, and not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Dasha Burns and Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that Trump told the secretaries that Musk only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.
Trump is also apparently feeling pressure over his tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on imports from China that went into effect on Tuesday, which economists warned would create inflation and cut economic growth. Today, Trump first said he would exempt car and truck parts from the tariffs, then expanded exemptions to include goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) Trump signed in his first term. Administration officials say other tariffs will go into effect at different times in the future.
The stock market has dropped dramatically over the past three days owing to both the tariffs and the uncertainty over their implementation. But Trump denied his abrupt change had anything to do with the stock market.
“I’m not even looking at the market,” Trump said, “because long term, the United States will be very strong with what’s happening.”
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Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”
The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.
Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.
The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.
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Comments
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
interesting as fuckstick was pres when the vax first came out. and as I recall the most vulnerable WERE first in line in Nov of 20. I wasn't eligible until the following june I think it was. Fucksticks further meddling was denouncing the one good thing that happened under his watch. flipping back and forth on it to to his current stance ALL VAX BAD, and which I think is to end the free tests available during bidens term.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
In an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Musk brandished a chainsaw like that Argentina's president Javier Milei used to symbolize the drastic cuts he intended to make to his country’s government, then posted that image to X, labeling it “The DogeFather,” although the administration has recently told a court that Musk is neither an employee nor the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Politico called Musk’s behavior “eccentric.”
While attendees cheered Musk on, outside CPAC there appears to be a storm brewing. While Trump and his team have claimed they have a mandate, in fact more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024, and his early approval ratings were only 47%, the lowest of any president going back to 1953, when Gallup began checking them. His approval has not grown as he has called himself a “king” and openly mused about running for a third term.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released yesterday shows that even that “honeymoon” is over. Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.
Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.
As Aaron Blake points out in the Washington Post, a new CNN poll, also released yesterday, shows that Musk is a major factor in Trump’s declining ratings. By nearly two to one, Americans see Musk having a prominent role in the administration as a “bad thing.” The ratio was 54 to 28. The Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Americans disapprove of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary” by the wide margin of 52 to 26. Sixty-three percent of Americans are worried about Musk’s team getting access to their data.
Meanwhile, Jessica Piper of Politico noted that 62% of Americans in the CNN poll said that Trump has not done enough to try to reduce prices, and today’s economic news bears out that concern: not only are egg prices at an all-time high, but also consumer sentiment dropped to a 15-month low as people worry that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement: “[T]he American people actually feel great about the direction of the country…. What’s to hate? We are undoing the widely unpopular agenda of the previous office holder, uprooting waste, fraud, and abuse, and chugging along on the great American Comeback.”
Phone calls swamping the congressional switchboards and constituents turning out for town halls with House members disprove Fields’s statement. In packed rooms with overflow spaces, constituents have shown up this week both to demand that their representatives take a stand against Musk’s slashing of the federal government and access to personal data, and to protest Trump’s claim to be a king. In an eastern Oregon district that Trump won by 68%, constituents shouted at Representative Cliff Bentz: “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich,” and “tax the billionaires.” In a solid-red Atlanta suburb, the crowd was so angry at Representative Richard McCormick that he has apparently gone to ground, bailing on a CNN interview about the disastrous town hall at the last minute.
That Trump is feeling the pressure from voters showed this week when he appeared to offer two major distractions: a pledge to consider using money from savings found by the “Department of Government Efficiency” to provide rebates to taxpayers—although so far it hasn’t shown any savings and economists say the promise of checks is unrealistic—and a claim that he would release a list of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.
Trump is also under pressure from the law.
The Associated Press sued three officials in the Trump administration today for blocking AP journalists from presidential events because the AP continues to use the traditional name “Gulf of Mexico” for the gulf that Trump is trying to rename. The AP is suing over the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Today, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction to stop Musk and the DOGE team from accessing Americans’ private information in the Treasury Department’s central payment system. Eighteen states had filed the lawsuit.
Tonight, a federal court granted a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion, finding that they violate the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.
Trump is also under pressure from principled state governors.
In his State of the State Address on Wednesday, February 19, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker noted that “it’s in fashion at the federal level right now to just indiscriminately slash school funding, healthcare coverage, support for farmers, and veterans’ services. They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies. But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.”
He recalled: ““Here in Illinois, ten years ago we saw the consequences of a rampant ideological gutting of government. It genuinely harmed people. Our citizens hated it. Trust me—I won an entire election based in part on just how much they hated it.”
Pritzker went on to address the dangers of the Trump administration directly. “We don’t have kings in America,” he said, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one…. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
He recalled how ordinary Illinoisans outnumbered Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978 by about 2,000 to 20, and noted: “Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
Today, Maine governor Janet Mills took the fight against Trump’s overreach directly to him. At a meeting of the nation’s governors, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.
The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump's executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity.
Trump asked if the governor of Maine was in the room.
“Yeah, I’m here,” replied Governor Mills.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked.
“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said.
“We are the federal law,” Trump said. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t….”
“We’re going to follow the law,” she said.
“You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not going to get any federal funding,” he said.
Mills answered: “We’ll see you in court.”
As Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times put it: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”
Hours later, the Trump administration launched an investigation into Maine’s Department of Education, specifically its policy on transgender athletes. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said that any attempt to cut federal funding for the states over the issue “would be illegal and in direct violation of federal court orders…. Fortunately,” he said in a statement, “the rule of law still applies in this country, and I will do everything in my power to defend Maine’s laws and block efforts by the president to bully and threaten us.”
“[W]hat is at stake here [is] the rule of law in our country,” Mills said in a statement. “No President…can withhold Federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws.”
“Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last. Today, the President of the United States has targeted one particular group on one particular issue which Maine law has addressed. But you must ask yourself: who and what will he target next, and what will he do? Will it be you? Will it be because of your race or your religion? Will it be because you look different or think differently? Where does it end? In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it—and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so.”
“[D]o not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.”
Americans’ sense that Musk has too much power is likely to be heightened by tonight’s report from Andrea Shalal and Joey Roulette of Reuters that the United States is trying to force Ukraine to sign away rights to its critical minerals by threatening to cut off access to Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukraine turned to that system after the Russians destroyed its communications services.
And Americans’ concerns about Trump acting like a dictator are unlikely to be calmed by tonight’s news that Trump has abruptly purged the leadership of the military in apparent unconcern over the message that such a sweeping purge sends to adversaries. He has fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.”
The vice chief of the Air Force, General James Slife, has also been fired, and Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Trump has indicated he intends to nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan “Razin” Caine to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky of CNN call this “an extraordinary move,” since Caine is retired and is not a four-star general, a legal requirement, and will need a presidential waiver to take the job. Trump has referred to Caine as right out of “central casting.”
Defense One, which covers U.S. defense and international security, called the firings a “bloodbath.”
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https://x.com/JesusChryslerII/status/1892922702576386075
Sorry for the twitter link.
Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.
In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.
Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”
National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”
Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.
While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.
In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.
In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.
When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.
It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.
In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.
In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”
That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."
Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”
Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.
This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”
Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”
No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”
Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.
While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.
And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”
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Something is shifting,” scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder posted on Bluesky yesterday. “They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”
Rather than backing down on their unpopular programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are intensifying their behavior as if trying to grab power before it slips away.
Trump’s blanket pardons of the people convicted for violent behavior in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were highly unpopular, with 83% of Americans opposed to those pardons. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent. And yet, on February 20, the Trump Justice Department expanded those pardons to cover gun and drug charges against two former January 6 defendants that were turned up during Federal Bureau of Investigation searches related to the January 6 attack.
Then, on February 21, a number of people pardoned after committing violent crimes, including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—who was sentenced to 22 years in prison—and Proud Boy Ethan Nordean (18 years) and Dominic Pezzola (10 years), as well as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes (18 years) and Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who sat with his feet on a desk in then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office (four and a half years), held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to announce they were going to sue the Justice Department for prosecuting them.
Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that the group followed the route they took around the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then posed for photos chanting as they had that day: “Whose house? Our house.” Protesters nearby heckled the group, and when one of them put her phone near Tarrio’s face while he was talking to a photographer, he batted her arm away. Capitol Police officers promptly arrested him for assault.
A number of the January 6 rioters were visiting the Capitol from the nearby Conservative Political Action Conference being held in Maryland. There, MAGA participants continued to normalize Nazi imagery as both Steve Bannon and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui threw fascist-style salutes to the crowd.
Yesterday, Tarrio posted a video of himself following officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 through the lobby of a Washington hotel where the anti-Trump Principles First conference was taking place. According to Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, Tarrio followed officers Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, and Aquilino Gonell, saying: “You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 f*cking years. Now you don’t want to look in my eyes, you f*cking cowards.” Fanone turned and told him: “You’re a traitor to this country.”
Today, the hotel had to be evacuated after someone claiming to be “MAGA” emailed a threat claiming to have rigged four bombs: two in the hotel, one in Fanone’s mother’s mailbox, and one in the mailbox of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic. After listing the names of several of the conference attendees—and singling out Fanone—the email said they “all deserve to die.” The perpetrator claimed to be acting “[t]o honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump.”
Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are also ramping up their behavior even as the public is starting to turn against the government cuts that are badly hurting American veterans, American farmers, and U.S. medical research. The courts keep ruling against their efforts and their claims of finding “waste, fraud, and abuse” are being widely debunked. Rather than rethinking their course in the face of opposition, they seem to be becoming more belligerent.
On Saturday, Trump urged Musk to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, although the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential advisor. “Will do, Mr. President,” Musk replied. He then posted a command to federal employees: “Consistent with [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Shortly after, emails went out giving workers 48 hours to list five things they had accomplished in the past week.
This sparked outrage among Americans who noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. S.V. Date of HuffPost noted on February 18 that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on 9 of his first 30 days in office and that Trump’s golf outings had already cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million.
Reddit was flooded with potential responses to Musk’s demand, scorching it and Musk. The demand also exposed a rift in the administration, as department heads—including Kash Patel, the newly confirmed head of the FBI, as well as officials at the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of the Navy—asserted their authority to review the workers in their own departments, telling them not to respond to Musk’s demand.
Then users pointed out that the new government employee email system the Department of Government Efficiency team set up explicitly says that using it is voluntary, and that resignations of federal employees must be voluntary. Musk responded by sending out a poll on X asking whether X users think federal employees should be “required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished” in the past week.
The entire exercise made it look as if the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus are dangerously loose. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “Drunk on power and ketamine.”
Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another,” Locke wrote.
Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, “with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws.” Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to “uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.”
“Otherwise,” Neem writes, “Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency.” He continues: “Trump’s actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself.”
In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is “grossly unconstitutional.” Trump’s concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is “absolutely straight up unconstitutional,” King said, “and it’s illegal.”
“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”
“This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It's the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don't want to buck the President, we'll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat's a copout. It's our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That's what we swear to when we enter this body.”
“What's it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what's going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What's it going to take?”
“[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we've got to respond to it. I'm just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat's what the framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that's what we're headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”
Senator King, along with Maine governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state.
On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. “I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” she said. “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
On July 28, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen (R-ME), who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority to draw up articles of impeachment against Republican president Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, “I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office; it’s just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment.”
Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate coverup came to light. “Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president,” Cohen recalled. “That’s when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, ‘We were wrong, and you were right, and we’ll support this.’ ”
It’s a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”
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Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”
For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.
At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.
“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.
In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”
As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.
Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.
On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”
The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”
Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”
“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”
It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.
On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.
The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.
“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”
Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.
Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.
John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
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On Friday, February 21, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg posted: “A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”
Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now: How should the U.S. raise money, and how should it spend money?
Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.
Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.
But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.
Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.
That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.
Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of “continuing resolutions,” measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next ten years, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail—including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments—that deficit jumps closer to $11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump’s claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers.
So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now, though, there is a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric: the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow.
On January 21, 2025, the U.S. Treasury had to begin using extraordinary measures to pay the debt obligations Congress has authorized. In order for Trump and the Republicans to get their tax cuts, that debt ceiling will have to be raised. But a number of MAGA Republicans are already furious at the growing debt and the budget deficits that feed it, and they say they will not raise that ceiling unless there are extreme cuts to the federal budget. Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it is actually Republican-dominated districts that receive the bulk of federal monies.
This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that is claiming to slash federal spending, although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five-biggest ticket items it had touted on its “wall of receipts.”
As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation, but they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the project over to Musk.
They are making it a point to look the other way when people, including judges, ask under what authorization Musk and his team are operating. Today, once again, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say who was in charge of DOGE, a day after Matt Bai reported in the Washington Post that two of Musk’s DOGE employees, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, used their access to payment systems to override explicit orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and shut off funding to the United States Agency for International Development. Bai reports that Farritor is 23-year-old dropout from the University of Nebraska who interned at SpaceX; Kliger, 25, spreads conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” attended Berkeley, and is now installed at the Treasury Department.
This afternoon the White House said that Amy Gleason, a former official at the U.S. Digital Service, the agency that Trump’s executive order may have turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, is serving as the acting administrator of DOGE. Reporters reached her by phone in Mexico.
In an interview with NPR, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman, explained that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary’s democracy into “a system that's designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values” in what became “a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class.” Trump and MAGAs see Orbán as a model, and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that manages civilian aviation and that Trump and DOGE gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet system for its information technology networks.
But even if Musk is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52–48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats and Independents, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not to advance that resolution.
Today the House was supposed to vote on its own budget resolution, and it is here that the stark contrast Buttigieg identified shows most strongly. The House resolution calls for cutting $4.5 trillion in taxes, primarily for the wealthy and corporations, while also adding $100 billion for immigration and border security, $90 billion for Homeland Security, and $100 billion in military spending. It enables those cuts and spending, at least in the short term, by raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
The plan offsets those tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts, including $880 billion over the next decade in cuts to the part of the budget that covers Medicare and Medicaid, and $230 billion in cuts to the part of the budget that covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. House speaker Mike Johnson claimed that all the cuts would come from the same place Musk claims, without evidence, to be cutting: “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
As Buttigieg noted, this budget cuts benefits for the poorest Americans in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, but the proposed cuts are not enough to get all MAGAs, many of whom want far more draconian cuts, on board. Johnson needed either to corral them or to get Democratic votes.
For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S.: on Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that “[t]he top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion in wealth,” while “[t]he bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth.”
Shauneen Miranda of the New Jersey Monitor reported the statement of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) today that 24% of Americans get their healthcare from Medicaid, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say that two thirds of nursing home patients receive Medicaid. Cuts would devastate American families. “For what, because Elon Musk needs another billion dollars?” Murphy asked. “The scope of this greed is something that we have never, ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”
At a press conference, House Democrats called out what Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) called “this billionaire budget resolution.” “I know that I and my colleagues here today are ready to go to the mat and fight all the way until we stop this budget and finally demand that, instead of a tax break for greedy billionaires, that we actually tax those greedy billionaires and expand the programs that working people deserve,” Casar said.
It took pressure from Trump to get the House resolution across the line this evening. It ultimately passed by a vote of 217 to 215, with only one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting with all the Democrats against it. Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave, so Representative Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) flew across the country with her one-month-old son to “vote NO on this disastrous budget proposal.”
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This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”
Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.
But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.
Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.
Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.
In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.
Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.
Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.
Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”
Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”
A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.
Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself. Trump didn’t turn to Vice President J.D. Vance until 56 minutes into the meeting, and Vance spoke for only 36 seconds.
But Trump appeared to be aware of the popular anger at Musk’s power over the government and today dared the Cabinet members to suggest they weren’t happy with the arrangements. “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump wrote on his social media channel this morning. “The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!”
“Is anybody unhappy?” Trump asked the Cabinet officers during the meeting. When they applauded in response, he commented: “I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”
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Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.
In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.
Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.
Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”
Zelensky answered that he was just answering the questions Vance was showering on him. “You are in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump said. “We’re going to feel very good.”
Zelensky answered: “You will feel influenced.”
Trump disagreed. “We are going to feel very good and very strong.”
“I am telling you,” Zelensky said. “You will feel influenced.”
Trump appeared to lose control at that point, ranting at Zelensky that Ukraine was losing and that he must accept a ceasefire, but also complaining about former president Joe Biden and Barack Obama and echoing Putin’s talking points. When he could get a word in, Zelensky reiterated that he would not accept a ceasefire without guarantees of security and pointed out that Putin had broken a ceasefire agreement in the past.
Later, when a reporter picked up on that question and asked what would happen if Russia broke a ceasefire agreement, Trump became enraged. Among other things, he said: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt….” Trump referred to what he calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” that Russia had worked to elect him in 2016. That effort, though, was not a hoax: the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released an exhaustive report detailing that effort.
One of the things Russian operatives believed Trump’s team had agreed to, the report said, was Russia’s annexation of the parts of eastern Ukraine it is now trying to grab through military occupation.
Then Trump continued to rant at the reporter, rehashing his version of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop at some length, tying in former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) in a larger stew that brought up Trump’s history with both Russia and Ukraine and their roles in his quest to hold power. Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, when Russia worked to elect him, and Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.
Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.
After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.
This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”
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John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.” Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
Simpson was referring to the course the United States has taken in the past month as the administration of President Donald Trump has hacked the United States away from 80 years of alliances and partnerships with democratic nations in favor of forging ties with autocrats like Russian president Vladimir Putin.
On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself: that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.
Then, on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian president Vladimir Putin as they berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly trying to bully him into agreeing to the ceasefire conditions that Putin and Trump want to end a war Russia started by invading Ukraine.
The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends.
After yesterday’s Oval Office debacle, democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance’s embrace of Russia and Putin and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky.
In London today, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer greeted Zelensky with an enthusiastic hug and in front of cameras told him: "You are very, very welcome here…. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
In the last interview that former secretary of state Antony Blinken gave before leaving office, he talked about the importance of alliances and the strong hand the Biden administration was leaving for the incoming Trump administration. Now, a little over a month later, that interview provides a striking contrast to the course the Trump administration has steered.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
On February 28, the same day that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Martin Matishak of The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, broke the story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.
Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.
On Face the Nation this morning, Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, contradicted that information. “Considering what I know, what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would I’m certain not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States operations,” he said. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, Turner was in line to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in this Congress until House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) removed him from that slot and from the intelligence committee altogether.
And yet, as Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.
Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.
“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”
Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”
Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”
Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.
Trump has made dismissing as a hoax what he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia” central to his political narrative. But Russian operatives did, in fact, work to elect him in 2016. A 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Putin ordered hacks of Democratic computer networks, and at two crucial moments WikiLeaks, which the Senate committee concluded was allied with the Russians, dumped illegally obtained emails that were intended to hurt the candidacy of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.
Russian operatives also flooded social media with disinformation, not necessarily explicitly endorsing Trump, but spreading lies about Clinton to depress Democratic turnout, or to rile up those on the right by falsely claiming that Democrats intended to ban the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. The goal of the propaganda was not simply to elect Trump. It was to pit the far ends of the political spectrum against the middle, tearing the nation apart.
Fake accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook drove wedges between Americans over issues of race, immigration, and gun rights. Craig Timberg and Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Facebook officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.
That effort was not a one-shot deal: Russians worked to influence the 2020 presidential election, too. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US.” But “[u]nlike in 2016,” the report said, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”
Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded.
In October 2024, Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned in an interview with CBS News that Russia was bombarding voters with propaganda to divide Americans before that year’s election, as well. Operatives were not just posting fake stories and replying to posts, but were also using AI to manufacture fake videos and laundering Russian talking points through social media influencers. Just a month before, news had broken that Russia was funding Tenet Media, a company that hired right-wing personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen, who repeated Russian talking points.
Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech. Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.
On February 20, Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes, and Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is firing or reassigning officials at the FBI and CISA who had worked on protecting elections. That includes those trying to stop foreign propaganda and disinformation and those combating cyberattacks and attempts to disrupt voting systems.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story that two members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” are now installed at CISA: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” and Kyle Schutt, a 38-year-old software engineer. Kim Zetter of Wired reported that since 2018, CISA has “helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”
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As seemed evident even at the time, the ambush of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday was a setup to provide justification for cutting off congressionally approved aid to Ukraine as it tries to fight off Russia’s invasion. That “impoundment” of funds Congress has determined should go to Ukraine is illegal under the terms of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, and it is unconstitutional because the Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to set government spending and to make laws. The president’s job is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
It was for a similar impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds for Ukraine, holding them back until Zelensky agreed to tilt the 2020 election by smearing Joe Biden, that the House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2019. It is not hard to imagine that Trump chose to repeat that performance, in public this time, as a demonstration of his determination to act as he wishes regardless of laws and Constitution.
On Sunday, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a series of memos he and other senior career officials had written, recording in detail how the cuts to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” at the agency will lead to “preventable death” and make the U.S. less safe. The cuts will “no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” one memo read.
Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States.
Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to create a system for waivers to protect that lifesaving aid, the cuts appear random and the system for reversing them remains unworkable. The programs remain shuttered. Enrich blamed "political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation."
On Sunday, Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”
Dangerous cuts are taking place in the United States, as well. On Friday, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk called Social Security, the basis of the U.S. social safety net, a “Ponzi scheme.” Also on Friday, the Social Security Administration announced that it will consolidate the current ten regional offices it maintains into four and cut at least 7,000 jobs from an agency that is already at a 50-year staffing low. Erich Wagner of Government Executive reported that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) team had canceled the leases for 45 of the agency’s field offices and is urging employees to quit.
The acting commissioner of the agency, Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer who got his post after sharing sensitive information with DOGE, blamed former president Joe Biden for the cuts. In contrast, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that the system currently delivers 99.7% of retirement benefits accurately and on time. He warned that the administration is hollowing it out, and when it can no longer function, Republicans will say it needs the private sector to take it over. He called the cuts “a prelude to privatization.”
“The public is going to suffer terribly as a result of this,” a senior official told NPR. “Local field offices will close, hold times will increase, and people will be sicker, hungry, or die when checks don't arrive or a disability hearing is delayed just one month too late.”
In South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, more than 200 wildfires began to burn over the weekend as dry conditions and high winds drove the flames. Firefighters from the Forest Service helped to contain the fires, but they were understaffed even before Trump took office. Now, with the new cuts to the service, prevention measures are impossible and there aren’t enough people to fight fires effectively and safely. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster (R) declared a state of emergency on Sunday.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo picked up something many of us missed, posting today that Trump’s February 11 “workforce optimization” executive order is a clear blueprint for the end goal of all the cuts to the federal government. The order says that departments and agencies must plan to cut all functions and employees who are not designated as essential during a government shutdown. As Marshall notes, this is basically a blueprint for a skeleton crew version of government.
But for all that the administration, led by DOGE, insists that the U.S. has no money for the government services that help ordinary people, it appears to think there is plenty of money to help wealthy supporters. In February, the cryptocurrency bitcoin experienced its biggest monthly drop since June 2022, falling by 17.5%. On Sunday, in a post on his social media site, Trump announced that the government will create a strategic stockpile of five cryptocurrencies, spending tax dollars to buy them.
Supporters say that such an investment could pay off in decades, when that currency has appreciated to become worth trillions of dollars. But, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN notes, “for every bitcoin evangelist, there is an academic or banker from across the political spectrum who will point out that cryptocurrency investments might just as easily go up in smoke, which would be an unfortunate thing to happen to taxpayer dollars.”
The first three currencies Trump announced were not well known, and the announcement sent their prices soaring. Hours later, he added the names of the two biggest cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. After the initial surges, by Monday prices for the currencies had fallen roughly back to where they had been before the announcement, making the announcement look like a pump-and-dump scheme. Economist Peter Schiff, a Trump supporter, called for a full congressional investigation, suggesting that someone other than Trump might have written the social media posts that set off the frenzy and wondering who was buying and selling in that short window of time.
Also on Sunday, the administration announced it would stop enforcing anti-money-laundering laws that were put in place over Trump’s veto in 2021 at the end of his first term and required shell companies to identify the people who own or control them. Referring to the law as a “Biden rule,” Trump called the announcement that he would not enforce it “Exciting News!” The Trump Organization frequently uses shell companies.
A world in which the government does not regulate business or address social welfare or infrastructure, claiming instead to promote economic development by funneling resources to wealthy business leaders, looks much like the late-nineteenth-century world that Trump praises. Trump insists that President William McKinley, who was president from 1897 to 1901, created the nation’s most prosperous era by imposing high tariffs on products from foreign countries.
Trump confirmed today that he will go forward with his own 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on goods from China, adding to the 10% tariffs Trump added to Chinese products in February. While President Joe Biden maintained tariffs on only certain products from China to protect specific industries, it appears Trump’s tariffs will cover all products.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called the tariffs “unjustified” and announced that Canada will put retaliatory tariffs on $20.8 billion worth of U.S. products made primarily in Republican-dominated states, including spirits, beer, wine, cosmetics, appliances, orange juice, peanut butter, clothing, footwear, and paper. A second set of tariffs in a few weeks will target about $90 billion worth of products, including cars and trucks, EVs, products made of steel and aluminum, fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, and dairy products.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum did not provide details of what her country would do but told reporters today: “We have a plan B, C, D.” Chinese officials say that China, too, will impose retaliatory tariffs, singling out agricultural products and placing tariffs of 15% on corn and 10% on soybeans. It also says it will restrict exports to 15 U.S. companies.
The tariffs in place in the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century were less important for the explosive growth of the economy in that era than the flood of foreign capital into private businesses: railroad, mining, cattle, department stores, and finance. By the end of the century, investing in America was such a busy trade that the London Stock Exchange had a separate section for American railroad transactions alone.
And the economic growth of the country did not help everyone equally. While industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt II could build 70-room summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island, the workers whose labor kept the mines and factories producing toiled fourteen to sixteen hours a day in dangerous conditions for little money, with no workmen’s compensation or disability insurance if they were injured. The era has become known as the Gilded Age, dominated by so-called robber barons.
Today, the stock market dropped dramatically upon news that Trump intended to go through with his tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 650 points, down 1.48%. The S&P fell 1.76%, and the Nasdaq Composite, which focuses on technology stocks, fell 2.64%. Meanwhile, shares of European defense companies jumped to record highs as Europe moves to replace the U.S. support for Ukraine.
Also today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecast a dramatic contraction in the economy in the first quarter of 2025. Evaluating current data according to a mathematical model, it moved from an expected 2.9% growth in gross domestic product at the end of January to –2.8% today. That is just a prediction and there is still room for those numbers to turn around, but they might help to explain why Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is talking about changing the way the U.S. calculates economic growth.
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We've been traveling and between that and the fact that the news has come faster and faster, the letters have crept later and later. Let's take the night off and regroup tomorrow.
Here's a picture of the Pacific Ocean for a change, with thanks to our California friends who have a knack for landing us in the right place at the right time to watch spectacular sunsets.
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In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.
“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.
President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.
The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned that the U.S. was engaged in a titanic struggle between “right and wrong and good and evil.” The Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” preaching “the supremacy of the state” and “its omnipotence over individual man.”
When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.
Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.
But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.
Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.
This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.
To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.
Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.
According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”
That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”
In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.
Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.
Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.
The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”
Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”
In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.
Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.
In a nationally televised speech today, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II.
“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”
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This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”
“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”
The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.
In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politico that President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.
As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.
Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.
As predicted, Trump’s turn of the U.S. toward Russia also means that allies are concerned he or members of his administration will share classified intelligence with Russia, thus exposing the identities of their operatives. They are considering new protocols for sharing information with the United States. The Five Eyes alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. has been formidable since World War II and has been key to countering first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Allied governments are now considering withholding information about sources or analyses from the U.S.
Their concern is likely heightened by the return to Trump’s personal possession of the boxes of documents containing classified information the FBI recovered in August 2022 from Mar-a-Lago. Trump took those boxes back from the Department of Justice and flew them back to Mar-a-Lago on February 28.
A CBS News/YouGov poll from February 26–28 showed that only 4% of the American people sided with Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine.
The unpopularity of the new administration's policies is starting to show. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) told House Republicans on Tuesday to stop holding town halls after several such events have turned raucous as attendees complained about the course of the Trump administration. Trump has blamed paid “troublemakers” for the agitation, and claimed the disruptions are part of the Democrats’ “game.” “[B]ut just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION,” he posted on social media, “it’s not going to work for them!”
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.
Even aside from the angry protests, DOGE is running into trouble. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump referred to DOGE and said it “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” In a filing in a lawsuit against DOGE and Musk, the White House declared that Musk is neither in charge of DOGE nor an employee of it. When pressed, the White House claimed on February 26 that the acting administrator of DOGE is staffer Amy Gleason. Immediately after Trump’s statement, the plaintiffs in that case asked permission to add Trump’s statement to their lawsuit.
Musk has claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste or fraud in the government, and Trump and the White House have touted those statements. But their claims to have found massive savings have been full of errors, and most of their claims have been disproved. DOGE has already had to retract five of its seven biggest claims. As for “savings,” the government spent about $710 billion in the first month of Trump’s term, compared with about $630 billion during the same timeframe last year.
Instead of showing great savings, DOGE’s claims reveal just how poorly Musk and his team understand the work of the federal government. After forcing employees out of their positions, they have had to hire back individuals who are, in fact, crucial to the nation, including the people guarding the U.S. nuclear stockpile. In his Tuesday speech, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.”
Except it’s not. The mice in question were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health. For comparison, S.V. Date noted in HuffPost that in just his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today that people reporting on the individual cuts to U.S. scientific and health-related grants are missing the larger picture: “DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States…. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening.”
Republicans are starting to express some concern about Musk and DOGE. As soon as Trump took office, Musk and his DOGE team took over the Office of Personnel Management, and by February 14 they had begun a massive purge of federal workers. As protests of the cuts began, Trump urged Musk on February 22 to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, prompting Musk to demand that all federal employees explain what they had accomplished in the past week under threat of firing. That request sparked a struggle in the executive branch as cabinet officers told the employees in their departments to ignore Musk. Then, on February 27, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the firings were likely illegal and temporarily halted them.
On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) weighed in on the conflict when he told CNN that the power to hire and fire employees properly belongs to Cabinet secretaries.
Yesterday, Musk met with Republican— but no Democratic— members of Congress. Senators reportedly asked Musk—an unelected bureaucrat whose actions are likely illegal—to tell them more about what’s going on. According to Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor, and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post, Musk gave some of the senators his phone number and said he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that Musk told the senators he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get cuts they dislike reversed.
This whole exchange is bonkers. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: “How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?”
Later, Musk met with House Republicans and offered to set up a similar way for the members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee to reach him. When representatives complained about the random cuts that were so upsetting constituents. Musk defended DOGE’s mistakes by saying that he “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”
This morning, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of a group of state attorneys general from 22 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, saying that Trump does not have the authority to freeze funding appropriated by Congress. McConnell wrote that the spending freeze "fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government." As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, McConnell issued a preliminary injunction that will stay in place until the case, called New York v. Trump, works its way through the courts. The injunction applies only in the states that sued, though, leaving Republican-dominated states out in the cold.
Today, Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries that they, and not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Dasha Burns and Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that Trump told the secretaries that Musk only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.
Trump is also apparently feeling pressure over his tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on imports from China that went into effect on Tuesday, which economists warned would create inflation and cut economic growth. Today, Trump first said he would exempt car and truck parts from the tariffs, then expanded exemptions to include goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) Trump signed in his first term. Administration officials say other tariffs will go into effect at different times in the future.
The stock market has dropped dramatically over the past three days owing to both the tariffs and the uncertainty over their implementation. But Trump denied his abrupt change had anything to do with the stock market.
“I’m not even looking at the market,” Trump said, “because long term, the United States will be very strong with what’s happening.”
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Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”
The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.
Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.
The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.
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