I don’t think it will take them long to solve that mystery. Those with money and power used corruption or influence to elevate themselves at the expense of workers and those they decided to disenfranchise or impoverish. The real challenge will be noting how long it takes people without money and influence to topple the cabal of unchecked capitalism that has taken control of a significant percentage of our government.
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Yes, and I hope it happens during my lifetime. I’ll enthusiastically join the toppling effort, but it’s difficult to imagine a successful toppling happening soon.
Come to think of it, why even say that? It sounds defeatist. Yes, it probably will take decades, but maybe not. Either way, it’s worth fighting for, right now.
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We need to look to South Korea or Ukraine to see how to respond correctly.
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Thank you Pop-Pop! RIP!
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This is something I’ve had conversations about. So of course Operation Barbarossa was a major reason they lost the war, and you can argue that details like the timing were stupid. But as for attacking Russia at all…well, how could they avoid that when it was the whole strategic objective in the first place? Hitler wasn’t looking for Lebensraum in France, he was trying to get them out of the way.
You might as well point out how many resources they wasted attacking their own people which, you know, they did…but if they didn’t they wouldn’t be Nazis.
My conclusion is that Nazis can’t avoid stupid decisions because in the end their goals are stupid. You’d think more people would have taken that incredibly dramatic lesson from the 1940s, but here we are.
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That is the overarching lesson of history - that the selfish drive to aggregate wealth and power among a few at the expense of the many is doomed to failure. Those few are greedy and have trouble collaborating effectively. They fail to listen to experts, incorrectly believing themselves to be the smartest men (because that also appears to be part of the archetype) in the room at all times.
Meanwhile, the much larger, more coordinated majority eventually overwhelms those few.
The only question is how long it takes, and how much misery and damage happens in the process.
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January 25, 2025 (Saturday)
We have all earned a break for this week, but as some of you have heard me say, I write these letters with an eye to what a graduate student will need to know in 150 years. Two things from last night belong in the record of this time, not least because they illustrate President Donald Trump’s deliberate demonstration of dominance over Republican lawmakers.
Last night the Senate confirmed former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth as the defense secretary of the United States of America. As Tom Bowman of NPR notes, since Congress created the position in 1947, in the wake of World War II, every person who has held it has come from a senior position in elected office, industry, or the military. Hegseth has been accused of financial mismanagement at the small nonprofits he directed, has demonstrated alcohol abuse, and paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement. He has experience primarily on the Fox News Channel, where his attacks on “woke” caught Trump’s eye.
The secretary of defense oversees an organization of almost 3 million people and a budget of more than $800 billion, as well as advising the president and working with both allies and rivals around the globe to prevent war. It should go without saying that a candidate like Hegseth could never have been nominated, let alone confirmed, under any other president. But Republicans caved, even on this most vital position for the American people’s safety.
The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS), tried to spin Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience as a plus: “We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as secretary of defense. Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace-through-strength defense policy.”
Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50–50 tie to confirm Hegseth, as Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined all the Democrats and Independents in voting no. Hegseth was sworn in early this morning.
That timing mattered. As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, as soon as Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose “yes” was secured only through an intense pressure campaign, had voted in favor, President Trump informed at least 15 independent inspectors general of U.S. government departments that they were fired, including, as David Nakamura, Lisa Rein, and Matt Viser of the Washington Post noted, those from “the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.” Most were Trump’s own appointees from his first term, put in when he purged the inspectors general more gradually after his first impeachment.
Project 2025 called for the removal of the inspectors general. Just a week ago Ernst and her fellow Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley co-founded a bipartisan caucus—the Inspector General Caucus—to support those inspectors general. Grassley told Politico in November that he intends to defend the inspectors general.
Congress passed a law in 1978 to create inspectors general in 12 government departments. According to Jen Kirby, who explained inspectors general for Vox in 2020, a movement to combat waste in government had been building for a while, and the fraud and misuse of offices in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made it clear that such protections were necessary. Essentially, inspectors general are watchdogs, keeping Congress informed of what’s going on within departments.
Kirby notes that when he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan promptly fired all the inspectors general, claiming he wanted to appoint his own people. Congress members of both parties pushed back, and Reagan rehired at least five of those he had fired. George H.W. Bush also tried to fire the inspectors general but backed down when Congress backed up their protests that they must be independent.
In 2008, Congress expanded the law by creating the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. By 2010 that council covered 68 offices.
During his first term, in the wake of his first impeachment, Trump fired at least five inspectors general he considered disloyal to him, and in 2022, Congress amended the law to require any president who sought to get rid of an inspector general to “communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” Congress called the law the “Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022.”
The chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, responded immediately to the information that Trump wanted to fire inspectors general. Ware recommended that Director of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, who had sent the email firing the inspectors general, “reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss” the inspectors general, because of the requirements of the 2022 law.
This evening, Nakamura, Rein, and Viser reported in the Washington Post that Democrats are outraged at the illegal firings and even some Republicans are expressing concern and have asked the White House for an explanation. For his part, Trump said, incorrectly, that firing inspectors general is “a very standard thing to do.” Several of the inspectors general Trump tried to fire are standing firm on the illegality of the order and plan to show up to work on Monday.
The framers of the Constitution designed impeachment to enable Congress to remove a chief executive who deliberately breaks the law, believing that the determination of senators to hold onto their own power would keep them from allowing a president to seize more than the Constitution had assigned him.
In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton tried to reassure those nervous about the centralization of power in the new Constitution that no man could ever become a dictator because unlike a king, “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”
But the framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties. Partisanship would push politicians to put party over country and eventually would induce even senators to bow to a rogue president. MAGA Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told the Fox News Channel today that he is unconcerned about Trump’s breaking the law written just two years ago. “Well, sometimes inspector generals don’t do the job that they are supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired, and the president is gonna make wise decisions on those.”
There is one more story you’ll be hearing more about from me going forward, but it is important enough to call out tonight because it indicates an important shift in American politics. In an Associated Press/NORC poll released yesterday, only 12% of those polled thought the president relying on billionaires for policy advice is a good thing. Even among Republicans, only 20% think it’s a good thing.
Since the very earliest days of the United States, class was a central lens through which Americans interpreted politics. And yet, in the 1960s, politicians began to focus on race and gender, and we talked very little about class. Now, with Trump embracing the world’s richest man, who invested more than $250 million in his election, and with Trump making it clear through the arrangement of the seating at his inauguration that he is elevating the interests of billionaires to the top of his agenda, class appears to be back on the table.
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I have worked in tech for much of my life. I’m good at my job. With my experience and skills, I would never consider myself qualified to run the fucking company, nor would anybody else who works with me. All these R’s saying how he should run things because he served in the military are just being stupid.
Why not have the self-respect just to say, “I don’t give a shit how bad he is, it’s who Trump wants and that’s that”. It’ll be terrible all the same, but it would at the very least be honest.
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Honesty requires at least trace element levels of empathy, compassion, humility, altruism, long term thinking… the list goes on.
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And these people seem to be pathological liars,who will lie even when it is in their best interests to tell the truth. Like the scorpion hitching a ride across the river who stings it’s helper and drowns itself, because it cannot go against it’s own nature.
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January 26, 2025 (Sunday)
On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln rose before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, to make a speech. Just 28 years old, Lincoln had begun to practice law and had political ambitions. But he was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation. He took as his topic for that January evening, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
Lincoln saw trouble coming, but not from a foreign power, as other countries feared. The destruction of the United States, he warned, could come only from within. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The trouble Lincoln perceived stemmed from the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence. He pointed specifically to two recent events: the 1836 lynching of free Black man Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1837 murder of white abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois.
But the problem of lawlessness was not limited to individual instances, he said. A public practice of ignoring the law eventually broke down all the guardrails designed to protect individuals, while lawbreakers, going unpunished, became convinced they were entitled to act without restraint. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” Lincoln said, “they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
The only way to guard against such destruction, Lincoln said, was to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
Lincoln was quick to clarify that he was not saying all laws were good. Indeed, he said, bad laws should be challenged and repealed. But the underlying structure of the rule of law, based in the Constitution, could not be abandoned without losing democracy.
Lincoln didn’t stop there. He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.
For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.
Lincoln reminded his audience that the torch of American democracy had been passed to them. The Founders had used their passions to create a system of laws, but the time for passion had passed, lest it tear the nation apart. The next generation must support democracy through “sober reason,” he said. He called for Americans to exercise “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
“Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’”
What became known as the Lyceum Address is one of the earliest speeches of Lincoln’s to have been preserved, and at the time it established him as a rising politician and political thinker. But his recognition, in a time of religious fervor and moral crusades, that the law must prevail over individual passions reverberates far beyond the specific crises of the 1830s.
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Prescient words given what we’re seeing these days. Trump is big bad real estate mogul who can’t seem to actually build anything up. All he can do is tear things down. They say you have to break eggs to make omelettes, but todays republicans just break the eggs, and then move on to breaking something else.
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Facebook’s original internal motto was “move fast and break things.” And I think that’s how the modern tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos operate. You hear it in pitches behind startups like Uber and Lyft, that they’re disruptors. It all kinda makes sense.
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There’s a reason why even the Galactic Empire made disruptors illegal…
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January 27, 2025 (Monday)
Yesterday, President Donald Trump began a trade war with Colombia after that country’s president refused to permit two U.S. military airplanes full of deportees to land in Colombia. As Regina Garcia Cano and Astrid Suárez of the Associated Press pointed out, Colombia and the U.S. had an existing agreement for deportations under former president Joe Biden, and it accepted 475 deportation flights from 2020 to 2024, accepting 124 flights in 2024 alone. But the Biden administration used commercial and charter flights, while as national security analyst Juliette Kayyem noted, Trump used a military plane that arrived unannounced.
As Tim Naftali of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs explained: “If a foreign country tries to land its military planes—except in an emergency—without an existing agreement that is an infringement of sovereignty.” Colombia rejected the military planes without prior authorization and offered the use of its presidential plane instead.
Colombia also asked the U.S. to provide notice and decent treatment for its people, an issue that had been raised and resolved in 2023 after migrants arrived in hand and foot cuffs. Colombian president Gustavo Petro noted that the U.S. had committed that it would guarantee dignified conditions for the repatriation of migrants. The plane of migrants landed in Honduras, where Colombia sent its presidential plane to pick them up.
Trump announced that Colombia’s “denial of these flights has jeopardized the National Security and Public Safety of the United States,” and slapped a 25% tariff on products from Colombia, which include about $6 billion of crude petroleum, $1.8 billion of coffee, and $1.6 billion of cut flowers. In addition, he said, the U.S. would revoke the visas of all Colombian “Government Officials, and all Allies and Supporters.” He promptly deported Colombian staff members of the World Bank who were working for international diplomatic organizations in the U.S., and canceled visa appointments at Colombia’s U.S. Embassy.
Rather than backing down, President Petro threatened to levy a retaliatory tariff on U.S. products. Colombia imports 96.7% of the corn it feeds its livestock from the U.S., putting Colombia in the top five export markets for U.S. corn. According to a letter written by a bipartisan group of lawmakers eager to protect that trade, led by Senator Todd Young (R-IN), in 2003 the U.S. exported more than 4 million metric tons of corn to Colombia, which translated to $1.14 billion in sales. “American farmers cannot afford to lose such a vital export market,” the lawmakers wrote, “especially when access to the top U.S. corn export market, Mexico, is already at risk.”
By this morning the economic crisis appeared to be over, although U.S. visa restrictions apparently remain. With prior authorization and better treatment of migrants, Colombia is willing to accept the migrant flights. The White House declared victory, saying: “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again. President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation’s sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States.”
The administration’s handling of the situation with Colombia reveals that their power depends on convincing people to ignore reality and instead to believe in the fantasy world Trump dictates.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced yesterday morning that “[d]eportation flights have begun.” In fact, nothing is “beginning.” In 2024, Colombia accepted on average more than two U.S. flights of migrants a week. And, as immigration scholar Austin Kocher noted, “everyone on this deportation flight was arrested and detained by the Biden administration.”
Over the past four years, Trump and MAGA Republicans repeatedly insisted that Biden had maintained “open borders,” while in fact, what the administration did was to try to address a situation made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.
As Katie Tobin of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains, before the coronavirus pandemic, Venezuela, where the economy was particularly bad under rising authoritarian Nicolás Maduro, sent migrants abroad. By June 2022, 6 million Venezuelans had fled their country; by September 2024, that number was 7.7 million. South American governments welcomed the Venezuelan migrants and others, including Haitians fleeing their country’s political chaos.
But as economies collapsed after the coronavirus crisis, Tobin explains, migrant populations that had settled in South American countries were forced out. From 2019 to 2021, Colombia’s per capita gross domestic product fell 4.6%; Peru’s, 5.3%; Ecuador’s, 2.8%; Brazil’s, 11.7%; and Venezuela’s, 20%. As the U.S. economy grew by 8.38%, Canada’s grew by 13.1%, and Mexico’s dropped only by 0.7%, migrants headed north. In September 2021, when 15,000 Haitians who had originally migrated to Brazil arrived at the U.S. border with Mexico, countries throughout the hemisphere realized that they needed a new regional approach to migration.
After nine months of negotiations, 21 countries announced that they had created a new migration pact for the Western Hemisphere. It provided economic support for Latin American countries that were original destinations for migrants, expanded formal pathways for immigration, and increased border security across the region.
Canada and Mexico were the first countries to buy into the new agreement. The U.S. turned next to strong ally Colombia, which agreed in March 2022, after which Vice President Kamala Harris brought on board Caribbean countries. By June 10, when the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection was announced, twenty-one nations had signed on. U.N. observers were present to demonstrate their support.
The Biden administration insisted that countries begin immediate action, and they did. Tobin notes that Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru have made sweeping new offers of legal status to hundreds of thousands of migrants already living in their countries, while Colombia has offered legal status to 2 million Venezuelans and Brazil has welcomed more than 500,000. Mexico and Guatemala have offered legal pathways to workers.
Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Spain, and the U.S. launched a virtual platform to enable migrants to apply for admission remotely. When Mexico agreed to accept Venezuelans who had crossed into the U.S. unlawfully and at the same time the U.S. announced a legal pathway for 24,000 Venezuelans, border crossings dropped 90% within a week. Biden and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador expanded that initiative to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans.
By 2023, border arrests had fallen by about half. Although Congress failed to pass a strong bipartisan measure to increase border security and fund immigration courts, arrests fell by half again after Biden in June 2024 issued a proclamation that barred migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deemed the border was overwhelmed. By the end of Biden’s term, unlawful border crossings had plummeted to lows that hadn’t been seen since June 2020.
There are new challenges to managing migration as wars, climate change, and economic pressures push migrants out of various parts of Africa and out of China. Many of those migrants are finding their way to Latin America and from there to the U.S. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that 117 million people were displaced by the end of 2023.
Trump won election in part by vowing to shut down immigration, and as soon as he took office he canceled the CBP One app, the virtual platform that allowed migrants to apply for asylum. During the campaign, he vowed to deport those migrants he claimed were criminals, which many interpreted to mean he would only remove those who had committed violent crimes (which the U.S. has always done). But in his first term, Trump’s people considered anyone who entered the U.S. outside of immigration law to be a criminal, and this appears to be the definition his people are using now.
Daily deportation raids in which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested a few hundred people in sweeps began almost as soon as Trump took office. Josh Campbell, Andy Rose, and Nick Valencia of CNN reported that the federal government has flooded the media with video and photos of agents in tactical gear, their vests bearing the words “Police ICE” and “Homeland Security” as they lead individuals in handcuffs. The journalists report that this is not an accident: agents were told to have their agency names clearly displayed for the press.
The presence of television talk show host Dr. Phil (McGraw) with an ICE team in Chicago reinforces the sense that these arrests are designed for the cameras. So does yesterday’s report by Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti of the Washington Post that Trump is disappointed with the sweeps so far and has directed officials to ramp up arrests aggressively, providing quotas for ICE field offices. Today, new secretary of defense Pete Hegseth said the department will “shift” to “the defense of the territorial integrity of the United States of America at the southern border.”
Yesterday’s spat with Colombia’s president enabled Trump to declare victory, but Colombia has been the top U.S. ally in Latin America, a close partner in combating drug trafficking and managing migration. That relationship, which has taken years of careful cultivation, is now threatened.
Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy, posted: “I can’t think of many worse strategic blunders for the U.S., as it competes w/ China, than going nuclear against its oldest strategic ally & last big country in S. America where it enjoys a trade advantage…. Trump certainly expects that b[ecause] 1/3 of Colombian exports go to the U.S. Petro will be forced to back down. But Petro seems to welcome the fight & has already signaled wishes to deepen ties w/ China. Colombia will lose partnership on security it badly needs. Only China stands to gain from this.”
Indeed, China’s ambassador to Colombia promptly noted that “we are at the best moment of our diplomatic relations between China and Colombia, which are now 45 years old.”
Meanwhile, according to former ambassador Luis G. Moreno, the Trump administration has shut down 2,100 courses in the premier training facility for State Department foreign service officers, ostensibly because they are too associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Moreno adds: “Dismantling of a professional diplomatic corps is underway.”
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January 28, 2025 (Tuesday)
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term prepared by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. The plan called for dismantling the nonpartisan civil service and replacing it with officers loyal to an extraordinarily strong executive. It called for that strong executive to take control of the Department of Justice and the military and then, once firmly in power, to impose Christian nationalism on the country.
The members of the Heritage Foundation who wrote Project 2025 are closely aligned with Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s Danube Institute, and their plan looks much like his erosion of democracy to create a dictatorship that enforces white male Christian patriarchy. On Monday, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times reflected on the influence of Hungary on the American right wing, posting: “it has always been wild to me that the model these guys have for the united states is a country that would rival mississippi for poorest state if it became part of this country.”
Once people heard about Project 2025, they came out strongly against it. Trump then maintained he knew nothing about the plan, although many of the people involved in it had been part of his first administration.
On January 24, Nik Popli noted in Time magazine that a number of the people who wrote Project 2025 have been tapped to serve in Trump’s second administration and that nearly two thirds of the executive orders Trump has signed either mirror or partly mirror the plans in that nearly 900-page document. “The real shame is that on the campaign trail, Trump did not level with Americans,” Skye Perryman of the legal organization Democracy Forward told Popli. “He didn’t seek to try to convince Americans that this was his agenda. He acted as if he didn’t have anything to do with Project 2025, when we know and have seen that he’s really seeking to accelerate that agenda.”
On Monday, January 27, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued to agency heads guidance for how to implement what was, in Trump’s first term, known as “Schedule F,” a plan to replace the nonpartisan civil servant system established in 1883 with people loyal to Trump. As soon as he took office, former president Joe Biden rescinded Schedule F, but it has come back in Trump’s second term as “Schedule Policy/Career.”
The plan strips tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections. Don Kettl of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy told Erich Wagner of Government Executive that the new rules say “the responsibility of people in the executive branch is to do what the president says, as he decides it should be done, and anyone who doesn’t is subject to firing…. It’s a flat-out assertion of presidential authority under Article II [of the Constitution] that I’ve never seen put quite so broadly.”
Today, the Trump administration sent an email blast titled “Fork in the Road” to federal workers offering to let them resign and keep their pay until September, a transparent attempt to clear places for loyalists. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that this sure looked like Elon Musk was “spiking the ball,” as this was the same subject line he sent to Twitter employees when he bought the company. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looked at the buyout proposal and noted that “zero legal authority exists to do this.”
Last night, legal commentator Joyce White Vance detailed the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of the Department of Justice. On Monday, Trump’s acting attorney general fired more than a dozen lawyers who worked on the criminal prosecutions of now-president Trump, after reassigning many more. In a statement, an official for the department said that the acting attorney general “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” In a masterpiece of gaslighting, the statement added: “This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”
Vance points out that “[a]n administration can’t fire career federal prosecutors based on their perceived political loyalties.” She continues: “The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.”
Trump appears to be trying to gain control over the military and turn it into a political instrument. In his inaugural address he said he would free the U.S. military “to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.” But, in fact, the stated mission of the U.S. military is “to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.” Those two statements are not the same thing.
As Michael T. Klare wrote today in The Nation, the focus of Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, former Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is not to ensure the nation’s security, but to fight “the ‘Marxists’ in government, the media, and civil society who, he claims, have instilled ‘wokism’ in the US military—that is, a commitment to racial and gender diversity.” When Republican senators balked at confirming Hegseth, Trump’s allies forced him through by a vote of 50–50, with Vice President J.D. Vance, who shares Hegseth’s right-wing religious extremism, casting the deciding vote.
Today, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported that Hegseth has stripped retired former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley of his security detail, revoked his security clearance, and ordered an inspector general to investigate his behavior. Trump appointed Milley but came to despise him because he stood against Trump’s unconstitutional orders.
While strafing the independent civil service, the Justice Department, and the military, the administration is also working to strengthen the hand of the president. Over the weekend, Trump openly broke a law passed by Congress in 2022 to limit his ability to fire inspectors general, and when met with shrugs by Republican enablers, the administration moved to bigger power grabs.
It is ignoring a 1974 law that says the president must disburse monies appropriated by Congress, passed after President Richard Nixon tried to override the power of Congress by “impounding” the money it appropriated for things lawmakers thought would benefit their constituents. Federal money, after all, belongs to the American people. The authors of Project 2025 insist that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and that the president can decide simply to stop funding the things Congress deems important, thus reducing Congress from the lawmaking body the Constitution established to a sort of advisory body.
When Trump tried this in 2019, impounding money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions in order to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Trump’s political rival Joe Biden, the House of Representatives impeached him. Although Republican senators agreed Trump was guilty, they acquitted him, fearing that convicting him would hurt their party in the 2020 elections.
On Friday the Trump administration froze all foreign aid appropriated by Congress. “We get tired of giving massive amounts of money to countries that hate us, don’t we?" Trump said on Monday, but the truth is that American soft power has been crucial in maintaining U.S. global influence since World War II. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) called it “dumb and murderous,” adding: “Tons of kids are just going to die needlessly” as U.S.-funded food supplies for famine-stricken Sudan stop. “The terrorists will benefit” as U.S. money for prisons holding ISIS members dries up. “The point of all this is to destroy U.S. power in the world,” Murphy wrote. “That primarily helps China, who is INCREASING its aid programs as we disappear. China—the place where all of Trump’s billionaires make their products and want deals to open markets. Think there’s a connection?”
International aid groups that depend on U.S. funding appeared shocked. “The recent stop-work cable from the State Department suspends programs that support America’s global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill,” said InterAction, the largest alliance of international aid organizations. "This halt interrupts critical life-saving work including clean water to infants, basic education for kids, ending the trafficking of girls, and providing medications to children and others suffering from disease. It stops assistance in countries critical to U.S. interests, including Taiwan, Syria, and Pakistan. And, it halts decades of life-saving work through PEPFAR [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health program started by President George W. Bush] that helps babies to be born HIV-free.”
International aid organizations hoped the decision would be reversed, but on Monday night the Trump administration accused the leadership of USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, of trying to get around its order to freeze all foreign aid, and it placed dozens of career officials on administrative leave. Still, after an outcry, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio today announced a temporary waiver for certain “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” although what that means is unclear.
On Monday, Trump’s White House budget office went even further in strengthening Trump. It ordered a pause on all federal government grants and loans, requiring them all to guarantee that they ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and stop spending for clean energy initiatives. According to Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage, and Emily Davies of the Washington Post, the memo sent to government agencies said programs affected are “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
Georgetown University Law Center professor Josh Chafetz wrote: “There is simply no plausible argument that the president has the constitutional authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds because he doesn’t like how the money is being spent…. And it’s hard to think of anything more destructive of our constitutional order than a claim that a president can either spend funds that have not been appropriated or refuse to spend funds that have.”
Today, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters: “Last night President Trump plunged the country into chaos…. The Trump administration announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country. In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and, most of all, American families. This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas…. Funds for things like disaster assistance, local law enforcement, rural hospitals, aid to the elderly, food for people in need, all are on the chopping block.” “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional,” Schumer said; “they are the law.”
While it is unclear what this freeze covers, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post says there is general agreement that it includes discretionary spending, including the Head Start early childhood development program and WIC, the nutrition program for mothers and infants. Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) wrote that Trump’s order is “illegal & dictatorial & Americans will die as a result.”
Senator Angus King (I-ME) called Trump’s impoundment of all federal grants and loans “blatantly unconstitutional.” “This is a profound constitutional issue,” he continued. “What happened last night is the most direct assault on the authority of Congress…in the history of the United States.”
This evening a federal judge issued a stay to stop the Trump administration’s freeze on the disbursement of federal monies. Judge Loren L. AliKahn of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has paused the measure until Monday evening while she hears arguments concerning it.
Today, CNN host Jim Acosta, a Trump critic, announced on air he was leaving the channel after its management tried to move him to a middle-of-the-night slot. “People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump,” Acosta said. “Actually, no. That moment came…when I covered…President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island’s political prisoners. As the son of a Cuban refugee I took home this lesson: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I’ve always believed it is the job of the press to hold power to account. I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN and I plan on…doing…that in the future. One final message: Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message: I will not give in to the lies. I will not give into the fear. Post it on your social media.”
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Remember, when Trump overrides the Constitution, especially the concept of 3 different branches of government operating independently of each other for the purpose of checks & balances, the Supreme Court says that’s all in a presidential day’s work.
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January 29, 2025 (Wednesday)
In a conversation with Greg Sargent of the New Republic published today, writer Amanda Marcotte called out an important moment in White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first press conference yesterday.
When a reporter noted that “[e]gg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office,” and asked “what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?” Leavitt answered: “Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I’m not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything—not just eggs—bacon, groceries, gasoline, have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.”
During his campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden for the post-pandemic inflation that afflicted the country, and promised to bring down “the price of everything.” Even before he took office, Trump had begun to walk back his promise, and J.D. Vance has also suggested price relief would “take a little bit of time.” Now coffee and egg prices are at an all-time high, and the administration’s solution is to attack Biden. No matter the incompetencies of the Trump presidency, Marcotte notes, it appears the answer will be: You might not like what we’re doing, but don’t you hate Democrats more?
President Richard Nixon’s team pioneered this strategy before the 1970 midterm elections to rally wavering Republicans around the president’s party. Nixon had won election with a promise that he would end the war in Vietnam honorably, but had, in fact, increased the U.S. presence there. By the end of 1969, with opposition mounting, he insisted that a “silent majority” agreed with his Vietnam policies. Then, at the end of April 1970, he told the American people that he had sent ground troops into Vietnam’s neighbor Cambodia. Protests led to the killing of four college students at Ohio’s Kent State University. Members of Nixon’s key demographic, middle-class white Americans, threatened to abandon him.
Nixon’s advisors urged him to win his voters back by attacking their opponents as lazy, dangerous, and un-American. They called their strategy “positive polarization” because it stoked the anger they needed voters to feel in order to show up to vote, a development they saw as positive. Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon urging him to take much stronger control over the nation, to manipulate the media, and to go to war with his opponents, whom he considered illegitimate, warning: “[W]e are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise—it will be their kind of society or ours.”
Nixon so internalized this advice that by 1972 he was willing to sabotage his Democratic opponent’s campaign in order to win, convinced that a Democratic victory would destroy America. He ended up having to resign when his participation in covering up the bugging of the Democratic National Convention’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel surfaced, but in his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan picked up the rhetorical technique of dividing the country in two.
In part, that depended on constructing a false world, claiming when challenged on his stories of government mismanagement that a “liberal media” was determined to undermine him. When voters elected him, Reagan began the dismantling of the post–World War II government that protected equality before the law, equal access to resources, and the right to have a say in government. Whenever it seemed that voters were turning against the Republicans’ policies, which moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans doubled down on the idea that popular government programs were “socialist” or “Marxist,” designed to redistribute wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving “liberals.”
By 2020, accompanying that rhetoric with voter suppression and a flood of money into Republican election war chests had made many Republican voters loyal to the party above the country. So convinced were they that the government was corrupt and that they were fighting a war for America that they were willing to die of Covid in order to “own the Libs.” And in 2021 they tried to overturn democracy in order to keep their leader in power.
Now, in 2025, the impulse simply to hurt Democrats no matter how badly such actions would hurt the country showed in a social media post today by Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) that the Senate should confirm Trump’s deeply problematic nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because “no Cabinet nominee could damage the political future of Democrats more than RFK.”
Kennedy is before the Senate Finance Committee today in confirmation hearings to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Food and Drug Administration, among other agencies. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who opposes the vaccines that have slashed deadly illnesses in the U.S., and has attacked the institutions he would oversee; more than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter opposing his confirmation.
Yesterday, Kennedy’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, broke her silence about him to write an open letter to senators. She warned that he “lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience” and, calling him a “predator,” warned that he has “gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life.”
Forcing the Republican agenda by continuing to portray political opponents as dangerous to America because of wasteful spending and misguided priorities has reached cartoonish extremes. Trump has nonsensically claimed that thanks to him, the U.S. military has “TURNED ON THE WATER” in California, apparently misunderstanding that the Army Corps of Engineers had conducted maintenance on federal water pumps for three days and turned them back on when the maintenance was complete.
Yesterday, Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration tried to stop all foreign aid because Biden supposedly sent $50 million of condoms to Gaza and that the administration was just focusing on being “good stewards of tax dollars.” The story is simply false. The U.S. Agency for International Development spent about $7 million on condoms in 2023, the vast majority of which went to Africa through anti-AIDS programs; Trump’s first administration made similar investments.
At the same time they are portraying Democrats as wasteful and misguided, Trump and MAGA Republicans are claiming Democratic accomplishments for themselves. Last night, Trump claimed he had “just asked Elon Musk and [SpaceX] to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” and Musk chipped in that it was “[t]errible that the Biden administration left them there so long.” In fact, as fact-checkers quickly noted, NASA says the astronauts whose damaged spaceship has returned to Earth are not stuck in space but are staffing the space station, and that a SpaceX capsule has been docked at the station since September in an arrangement made by the Biden administration to bring them back to Earth as soon as a new crew arrives.
True MAGA is buying the lies the administration is selling—Fox News Channel pundit Jesse Watters suggested Gazans were using condoms as balloons to float explosives into Israel—but it is possible Nixon’s system of polarization is reaching the end of its rope.
Key to Trump’s 2024 win was his insistence that violent crime was skyrocketing in the U.S.—in fact, it was plummeting—and he vowed to deport “criminal” migrants. Since he took office, a number of made-for-television sweeps have tried to demonstrate that he is making America safer. But his commutations and pardons of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes has made that a hard sell, especially as one is now wanted for soliciting sex with a minor and another has been killed by Indiana police for resisting arrest. In addition, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that Trump officials ordered prosecutors to divert resources away from truly dangerous drug traffickers to go after undocumented immigrants.
Those who believed Trump would not come for anyone but “criminals” are learning otherwise: NBC News reported on Monday that nearly half the migrants arrested in a Chicago sweep on Sunday either had nonviolent offenses or had committed no offense. While the Trump administration defends its sweeps by saying it considers anyone who has broken immigration law to be a criminal, being undocumented is in fact a civil offense, not a crime, and many of Trump’s supporters did not think he would make such general sweeps.
But the biggest wake-up call for those embracing the longtime language of polarization is that when Trump on Tuesday shut down all federal funding and grants to stop what he called the “Marxist” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives of the government, he was attacking virtually all Americans. The administration’s pause of all federal funding and grants until it could make sure “DEI” had been purged out of them cut everything from Meals on Wheels, a food delivery program for shut-ins, to education, local law enforcement, and the Medicaid on which programs for the elderly depend.
The outcry was so strong that today the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to rescind its previous memo freezing all federal programs. But Leavitt immediately contradicted the apparent content of the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that the plan seemed to be “to create as much chaos as possible.” That chaos keeps attention on the administration, and it appeared to be a way for the White House to upend lawsuits against the freeze. So far, that has not worked. U.S. District Judge John McConnell said he was inclined to grant a restraining order, noting that “the administration is acting with a distinction without a difference.”
The Trump administration’s cutting of the federal funding on which Americans depend in the name of opposition to “Marxism” and “DEI” contrasts spectacularly with its embrace of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk; the billionaires in Trump’s Cabinet; and the billionaires who have poured money into the Trump administration.
CNN’s Chris Isidore notes that government subsidies built Musk’s fortune and that he continues to receive government contracts worth billions of dollars. In addition to government contracts, Trump’s tax policy favors the very rich. On Monday, January 27, the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee billionaire Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary. In his confirmation hearings, Bessent told the Senate that he believes extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts is “the single most important economic issue of the day…. If we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity.”
Republicans identify the rapidly growing federal deficit as a crisis for which Democrats are to blame, but in fact, President Bill Clinton—with an assist from Republican president George H.W. Bush—eliminated the federal deficit in the 1990s. What threw the deficit into the red was the tax cuts and unfunded wars under George W. Bush, along with Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy and corporations. The U.S. Treasury estimates that extending the TCJA as is—Trump has mused on deeper cuts—would cost $4.2 trillion over the next ten years.
Slashing the federal funding that supports ordinary Americans will make it easier to fund federal contracts and further tax cuts for the wealthy. With that tradeoff so visible in 2025, will “owning the Libs” still be worth it?
Trump seemed to be worried that it might not be. This afternoon he threw red meat directly at the MAGA base with an announcement that he would be signing an executive order to open a 30,000-person-capacity migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
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