I would argue that it’s only “as if” because he doesn’t want to do that thing specifically, only because he doesn’t know what that means.
The people who are writing all the EOs they’re laying in front of him to sign in unprecedented quantities, they want to trigger a constitutional crisis.
Insofar as Trump is doing mainly what he’s been manipulated into doing, it’s “as if” he’s creating a constitutional crisis in the same way as it’s “as if” Kermit is riding a bicycle.
February 11, 2025 (Tuesday)
On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.
Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.
Lincoln grew up in rural poverty as wealthy enslavers took over prime land in his family’s home state of Kentucky and pushed them across the Ohio River to Indiana, where Nancy Lincoln died. From there, they moved on to the frontier state of Illinois, where Abraham sowed seed, hoed fields, grubbed roots, cut trees, made fences, and harvested crops both at home and for farmers to whom his father hired him out for wages, for the elder Lincoln never managed to get his feet under him after leaving Kentucky.
In 1831, finally an adult, Abraham set out to make his mark in the world, as did thousands of other young men in his dynamic era. But making it on his own wasn’t much easier for the young Lincoln than it had been for his father. He settled in the town of New Salem, a village of about a hundred people on a bluff above the Sangamon River, where he failed as a storekeeper, then cobbled together various jobs, eking out a living splitting rails and making deliveries. Government appointments, first as a postmaster and then as a surveyor, kept him afloat and made him well enough known that in 1834, voters elected him to the state legislature, and he was on his way to prominence.
Lincoln’s time as a young man on the make had made him think hard about the relationship between Americans and their government. In his era, elite southern enslavers insisted that government had no role to play in the country except in protecting property, a concept of government that permitted them to amass fortunes thanks to the labor of their Black neighbors. But Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because its settlers—hard workers, eager to make the town succeed—could not dredge the Sangamon River to promote trade by themselves.
Lincoln later mused, “The legitimate object of government is ‘to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,’… as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.”
Once elected to the presidency, Lincoln joined with members of his new Republican Party to make the government work for the American people. They created national money and the income tax. They took land from speculators and gave it to men willing to farm it. They established public colleges to enable poor men to get an education, the Department of Agriculture to make sure poor men had access to good seeds, and transcontinental railroads so poor men could both get to western lands and get their products back to eastern markets. And they used the power of the federal government to end human enslavement in the United States except as punishment for crime.
A generation later, under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century expanded on Lincoln’s understanding of the role of government in supporting the American people. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Those concerned about the survival of democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.
To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties argued that individuals needed a strong, active government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.
Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”
In the 1920s, the idea that the government should be run as a business eclipsed Roosevelt’s progressive government, but after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s offered a “new deal for the American people.” That New Deal meant that the government would no longer work simply to promote business, but would also regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. World War II accelerated the construction of that active government, and by the time it was over, Americans quite liked the new system.
After the war, Republican Dwight Eisenhower embraced the active government. He explained that in the modern world, the government must protect people from disasters created by forces outside their control, and it must provide social services that would protect people from unemployment, old age, illness, accidents, unsafe food and drugs, homelessness, and disease.
He called his version of the New Deal “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” One of his supporters echoed Lincoln when he explained, “If a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is the proper function of the federal government.” Both Republicans and Democrats embraced this idea, which became known as the “liberal consensus.” In the second half of the twentieth century, they expanded the role of government to protect civil rights, the environment, access to healthcare and education, equal opportunity in employment, and so on.
But those who objected to the liberal consensus rejected the idea that the government had any role to play in the economy or in social welfare and made no distinction between the liberal consensus and international communism. They insisted that the country was made up of “liberals,” who were pushing the nation toward socialism, and “conservatives” like themselves, who were standing alone against the Democrats and Republicans who made up a majority of the country and liked the new business regulations, safety net, infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.
That reactionary mindset came to dominate the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Republicans began to insist that anyone who embraced the liberal consensus of the past several decades was un-American and had no right to govern, no matter how many Americans supported that ideology. And now, forty-five years later, we are watching as a group of reactionaries dismantle the government that serves the needs of ordinary Americans and work, once again, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an elite.
The idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people, Lincoln warned in his era, is “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
February 12, 2025 (Wednesday)
Yesterday afternoon, in a bizarre performance, President Donald Trump hosted reporters in the Oval Office, the formal working space of the President of the United States. As Trump sat quietly behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States as a symbol of international friendship, billionaire Elon Musk held center stage. Musk talked to the reporters, wearing a jacket over a T-shirt, and a “Make America Great Again” ball cap—a likely violation of the Hatch Act, which Trump’s people routinely ignore—while his young son X wandered around the room, at one point exchanging a look with a downcast Trump that observers immediately captioned: “You’re sitting in my daddy’s chair.”
The event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in charge of the U.S. government. The executive order, titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” provides for an operative from DOGE to be assigned to every agency, where that operative will be in charge of all hiring and firing. It also puts downsizing in DOGE’s hands and establishes that only one new employee can be hired to replace four who leave.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that these operatives report to Musk, who is “clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.”
Trump said that Musk had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” but in fact they have produced no evidence of such waste. Today Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said Congress has had no information from Musk or DOGE, and when asked to produce evidence of fraud, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt simply listed things that seemed to be “against the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.”
As both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported today, the big winner from all the cuts to the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that were scrutinizing his businesses.
On the floor of Congress today, Moskowitz pointed out that Musk’s claims to have uncovered waste, fraud, and abuse present a problem for Congress. Led by House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Republicans have not yet managed to fund the government for 2025, but rather than trying to pass the 12 appropriations bills necessary before the March 14 deadline for a government shutdown, Johnson is hoping to pass a continuing resolution that will extend funding as a comprehensive package. Moskowitz pointed out that if, in fact, the government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress should debate each appropriations bill in detail rather than use a continuing resolution that would perpetuate what the Republicans say is billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Long gone is any pretense that the administration will work to lower prices for ordinary Americans. The Consumer Price Index report out today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that inflation surged in January, gaining a half a point as the cost of gas, rents, and groceries went up. Egg prices rose 15.2%. On Monday, Trump levied a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, raising concerns that prices for cars and trucks, as well as appliances and rebar for construction, will also rise.
Today Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) published an op-ed in the Louisville Courier Journal warning that “Kentuckians can’t afford the high cost of Trump’s tariffs,” which could cost the average Kentucky resident $1,200 a year. “[P]reserving the long-term prosperity of American industry and workers requires working with our allies, not against them,” McConnell wrote, and he called for “strengthen[ing] our friendships abroad.”
Trump responded to today’s report by posting on social media: “BIDEN INFLATION UP!”
The Republicans submitted their budget resolution for funding the government today. It called for cuts of $2 trillion to mandatory spending, a category that includes Social Security and Medicare. Two Republican lawmakers told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico that Republicans expect to cut food aid for more than 40 million low-income Americans; Hill’s colleague Grace Yarrow reports the House Agriculture Committee is eyeing about $150 billion in cuts to supplemental nutrition programs. The proposal also calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and an increase of $4 trillion in the debt ceiling.
Today saw a landmark shift in the foreign policy of the United States. Since World War II, the U.S. has stood behind the international organizations that worked to stabilize the globe by creating spaces for countries to work out their differences without resorting to war. Among the principles of those organizations was that bigger countries couldn’t simply take over other, smaller countries, and one of the ways countries enforced that principle was through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the collective security agreement in which signatories agreed that an attack on one would be an attack on all.
In 2016, Trump’s people weakened the U.S. stance against Russia’s incursions on Ukraine by softening the language of that year’s Republican platform, and Russia worked to help Trump get elected, apparently because Putin believed Trump would look the other way as Russia took not only Ukraine’s Crimea but also significant territory in eastern Ukraine. Then, in his first term in office, Trump often took Putin’s side and threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO.
President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to strengthen NATO and pulled together a strong coalition to back Ukraine when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. But when he took office just three weeks ago, Trump alarmed observers by suddenly talking about taking over other countries like Panama and Canada, and Denmark’s territory of Greenland. Such moves would directly undermine the post–World War II international organizations the U.S. has always championed. They would destroy NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian organization that protects North America from aerospace threats, and would also rip apart the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that has joined Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since World War II.
Today it appears Trump is making good on this threat to turn away from the longstanding policy of the U.S. and toward the foreign policy advocated by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Trump has been talking about demanding $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for continued U.S. support, but today, at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group put together under Biden to coordinate assistance to Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested a new U.S. position. Hegseth echoed Putin’s demands, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus giving up two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders. He wanted, he said, to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”
Trump’s social media account—it did not sound like his own words—posted today that he “just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia…. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” thus offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine. And, the post said, they had agreed to start negotiations over Ukraine, although it also specified they had not included Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their talk. The post said that Trump “feel[s] strongly, [the talks] will be successful.”
The Russian government’s readout of the call added that “bilateral economic relations between Russia and the United States were also brought up during the conversation,” language that almost certainly means Putin wants Trump to lift the economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine that have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy.
The Trump administration also swapped U.S. teacher Marc Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a kingpin of Russian cybercrime who operated one of the world’s largest currency exchanges, facilitating drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering. When announcing Fogel’s release, Trump was asked if Russia had given anything in exchange. He answered: “Not much, no. They were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually." Russia refused to include Fogel, who was wrongfully detained in 2021, in the large prisoner swap of June 2024.
Today, the Senate approved Tulsi Gabbard, who has often made comments sympathetic to Russia and who has defended former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia after the Syrian people ousted him, as the U.S. director of national intelligence. All Democrats voted against Gabbard and all Republicans voted in favor of her, with the important exception of Senator Mitch McConnell, who said: “The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.”
Tonight, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom released a joint statement vowing to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and making it clear that “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.”
Portraits in Cowardice. Pretending to have a conscience long after you strangled, dismembered, burned, and buried it.
The pattern I am seeing in Republicans, at least the not-ultra-MAGAt sorts, is that nothing is particularly important to defend unless it affects them personally. McTurtle had polio, the antivaxx shit personally offends him. He stands against it. Great. But all the other unconstitutional, illegal, cruel shit that does not personally affect him? “Nah, I’m good.” The pathological lack of empathy is the hallmark of this neofascism.
Is a requirement to be a Republican
That’s a really good point. Too bad it won’t change any minds.
Fuck you, Mitch. This is as much your fault as it is Trump’s. You had a golden opportunity to ensure this fucker never held office again and you intentionally torpedoed it. You can choose to take a stand now that you’re in your “no longer giving a fuck” stage in your life and career, but it’s too little too late.
You know what, that’s fine. But then the US should have no say or part in any negotiations either.
February 13, 2025 (Thursday)
Four years ago today, on February 13, 2021, Senate Republicans acquitted former president Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial. Although 57 senators, including 7 Republicans, voted to convict Trump for launching the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, that vote did not reach the threshold of 67 votes—two thirds of the Senate—necessary to convict a president in an impeachment trial.
After the trial, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) explained his refusal to convict by saying he did not believe the Senate could convict an ex-president, although McConnell had been instrumental in delaying the impeachment trial until Trump was out of office, perhaps out of concern about dividing the Republican Party between pro-Trump MAGAs and his own establishment wing. McConnell acquitted Trump but, after the vote, blamed Trump alone for the events of January 6, calling his behavior “unconscionable” but adding: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
Four years later, Trump is back in the White House, and today McConnell provided the only Republican vote against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of health and human services, just as yesterday he provided the only Republican vote against the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
Of Kennedy’s confirmation, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said to his colleagues: “It’s truly astounding that the Senate stands on the brink of confirming Mr. Kennedy to lead America’s public health agencies. And if the Senate weren’t gripped in this soon-to-be infamous period of total capitulation, I don’t think this nominee would have made it as far as a hearing…. If I’d told you a couple of years ago, ‘There’s a guy who’s been nominated to run public health nationwide. His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He’s going to run the whole public health system: Medicare, Medicaid, the C[enters] for D[isease] C[ontrol and Prevention], the N[ational] I[nstitutes of] H[ealth]—all of it. He’ll decide how we protect the country from infectious disease, he’ll set the rules for every hospital in the country, he’ll decide what healthcare and medicines get covered by Medicare, he’ll manage our response in the event of a pandemic.’ And then I told you,… ‘Well,… there are a few concerns about this nominee. First of all, zero relevant experience. He’s a trial lawyer, a politician from a famous family. No medical or scientific background, he’s never run a hospital or a health system or anything like that. Second of all… he’s said some pretty wild stuff about public health, over and over and over again, like: he proposed that Covid-19 might be ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews. Ethnically targeted to spare Jews. He said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. For years he’s been persuading American families against routine childhood immunizations. He’s compared the work of the CDC to ‘Nazi death camps.’… If a couple of years ago I told you all that, and I told you that the Senate was about to put America’s health in this man’s hands, you’d probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind.”
All the Senate Republicans but McConnell voted to confirm Kennedy.
But while Senate Republicans are enabling the Trump administration, a significant revolt against it took place today in New York City and Washington, D.C., when at least six prosecutors resigned in protest after Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, ordered them to dismiss corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams.
In September 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted Adams on five counts of wire fraud, campaign finance offenses, and bribery. According to then–U.S. attorney Damian Williams, “Adams abused his position as this City’s highest elected official…to take bribes and solicit illegal campaign contributions. By allegedly taking improper and illegal benefits from foreign nationals—including to allow a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection—Adams put the interests of his benefactors, including a foreign official, above those of his constituents.”
But on February 10, 2025, Bove directed acting interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, who was elevated by the Trump administration just last month, to dismiss the charges against Adams. That same day, Adams told top New York City officials to stay out of the way of immigration enforcement and to refrain from criticizing President Trump.
Yesterday, February 12, Sassoon wrote an 8-page letter of protest to Attorney General Pam Bondi about the order to drop charges against Adams, but to keep open the possibility of future prosecution. She noted that “the evidence against Adams…proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed federal crimes” and suggested that Bove and the Trump administration proposed “dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws.” “[T]he rule of law depends upon the evenhanded administration of justice,” Sassoon wrote, and the “legal judgments of the Department of Justice must be impartial and insulated from political influence.”
“But Adams has argued in substance—and Mr. Bove appears prepared to concede—that Adams should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the Administration’s policy priorities.” Sassoon called Adams’s offer of help to the Trump administration “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for the dismissal of his case.” She recounted a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of her office, in which Adams’s lawyers repeatedly offered an exchange, “indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” Bove ordered the confiscation of notes of the meeting taken by a member of Sassoon’s team.
“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” Sassoon wrote, “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal.” She continued: “I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel….” But if Attorney General Bondi was unwilling to meet or reconsider the dismissal, Sassoon wrote, she was “prepared to offer my resignation.”
Today, in a defensive 8-page letter, Bove attacked Sassoon and accepted her resignation, claiming she was “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution,” and dismissed her suggestion “that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the politics of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General.”
Bove transferred the Adams case to the Public Integrity Section (PIN) in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Rather than dismiss the case, the chief of the Public Integrity Section and the senior career official in the Criminal Division, as well as three of the deputy chiefs at PIN, also resigned. A fourth was giving birth, but Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported that she was expected to resign when she was able.
Today, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration to guarantee the release of more than $3 billion allocated to Pennsylvania’s state agencies. Shapiro noted that multiple federal judges have ordered administration officials to release the funding they have impounded, but that funding has not been restored. The lawsuit details the programs funded with federal money, including repairing abandoned mining lands and contaminated waterways, plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, upgrading energy efficiency for up to 28,000 low-income households to lower utility bills, and so on.
The lawsuit reiterates that “unilaterally suspending funds…violates the U.S. Constitution,” which gives Congress alone the power to write the laws that appropriate funding.
Also today, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the Trump administration to disburse the foreign aid it has impounded. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press note, the judge rejected the administration’s argument that it impounded funds to review each program. He said officials “have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs.”
February 14, 2025 (Friday)
On this day, I always like to tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s terrible 1884 Valentine’s Day and how it led to the Progressive Era. But things are happening too fast these days to leave a gap in the record, so you’ll have to look back at last year—or forward to next—for that story. For this year, here goes:
The administration’s order to drop federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sparked a crisis in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by President Trump’s own appointees.
Yesterday that crisis led to multiple resignations from the department as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than drop the corruption charges. When the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, Emil Bove III, tried to do an end run around the Southern District of New York by taking the case to the Public Integrity Section in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and getting lawyer there to dismiss the case, at least five of them resigned as well.
This crisis is really over whether the Department of Justice will defend the rule of law or declare loyalty to Trump alone. And the crisis is growing.
Bove claims that administration officials did not make an arrangement with Adams to dismiss charges in exchange for his political support. But this morning, Adams and Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan undermined that assertion when they appeared together on the Fox News Channel. "If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams, "I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”
Today, Hagan Scotten, the acting assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned in a blistering letter to Bove, calling his justification for dropping the charges against Adams “transparently pretextual.” “[N]o system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he wrote.
Scotten was awarded two bronze stars as a troop commander in Iraq and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. He pointed out to Bove that “[t]here is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake…. [A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”
He continued: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss the case]. But it was never going to be me. Please consider this my resignation.”
Also this morning, legal analyst Barb McQuade reported that “DOJ leadership has put all Public Integrity Section lawyers into a room with 1 hour to decide who will dismiss Adams indictment or else all will be fired.” “Sending them strength to stand by their oath, which is to support the Constitution, not the president’s political agenda,” she added. According to Jeremy Roebuck, Shayna Jacobs, Mark Berman, and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post, one lawyer at the meeting said the discussion was “gut-wrenching” and “not anything any of us expected to see in America.”
At first, they all agreed to resign together, but then Edward Sullivan, a career federal prosecutor approaching retirement, said he would sign the motion to dismiss the case in a bid to save the jobs of his colleagues.
The crisis was reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes Nixon had recorded in the Oval Office concerning the break-in to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.
In that case, popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people: “I am not a crook.”
The administration’s determination to impose its will on the United States is behind its insistence that Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Denali, the highest peak in North America, by executive order. In 2017, Trump pushed hard to make Americans accept that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than those at President Barack Obama’s, an immediately disprovable lie that seemed unimportant at the time but was key to establishing the primacy of Trump’s vision over reality, an acceptance that led, eventually, to the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and now, apparently, to the lie that Elon Musk is cutting “waste and fraud” from the government when, in fact, he appears simply to be cutting programs he and Trump dislike.
Although tech companies and various media outlets have accepted Trump’s language, the Associated Press has continued to use the internationally accepted, historic name: the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative founded in 1846 that produces and distributes news reports across the country and the world. White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich today claimed that the AP’s use of “Gulf of Mexico” showed its “commitment to misinformation,” and announced that the AP would be barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One.
In the Senate, Alaska’s senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are pushing back on Trump’s name change for Denali, sponsoring a bill to require the mountain to be designated “Denali” on maps, documents, and any official U.S. records.
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) pushed back today on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” on Wednesday when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea.
Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Joe Gould and Jamie Dettmer of Politico identified Carlson as a “pro-Putin broadcaster.”
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”
Hackers pushed back today on Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” website, launched earlier this week after Musk claimed that the group was posting its actions on the DOGE website. At the time, the website was essentially blank. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported that the website was built out on Wednesday and Thursday. It appears not to be on government servers, is not secure, and pulls information from an open database that anyone could edit. Coders promptly added: “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN-roro.” One coder told Koebler that the website “[f]eels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
Indeed, Jennifer Bendery of HuffPost pointed out that one of the errors on the page is that it appears to have posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency. Security clearance lawyer Bradley Moss posted: “If you’re a clearance holder, stay away from the DOGE site. These ignorant virgins are going to find themselves prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act before all is said and done.”
Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.
Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”
Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”
February 15, 2025 (Saturday)
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.
They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope. That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.
That argument began to take hold, and in 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan rode it to the White House with the story of the “welfare queen,” identified as a Cadillac-driving, unemployed moocher from Chicago’s South Side (to signal that the woman was Black). “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” The woman was real, but not typical—she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient—but the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy bled individual enterprise and handed tax dollars to undeserving
Black Americans.
Republicans expanded that trope to denigrate all “liberals” of both parties, who supported an active government, claiming they were all wasting government monies. Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.
That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.
What has happened is that federal spending has expanded by five times as the U.S. has turned both to technology and to federal contractors, who outnumber federal workers by more than two to one. Those contractors are concentrated in the Department of Defense. At the same time, budget deficits have been driven by tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump as well as the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Treasury actually ran a surplus when Democratic president Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s.
When asked, Americans say they don’t actually want to get rid of government programs. A late January poll from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research—a gold-standard pollster for public attitudes—found that only about 29% of Americans wanted to see the elimination of a large number of federal jobs, with 40% opposed (29% had no opinion). Instead, 67% of adults believed the U.S. is spending too little on Social Security, 65% thought it was spending too little on education, 62% thought there is too little aid for the poor, 61% thought there is too little spending on Medicare, and 55% thought there is too little spending on Medicaid. Fifty-one percent thought the U.S. should spend more on border security.
Nonetheless, Trump is echoing forty years of Republican rhetoric when he claims to have a “mandate” to slash government and to purge it of the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that hold the playing field level for Black Americans, women, people of color, and ethnic, religious, and gender minorities.
On February 11, Trump signed an executive order putting billionaire Elon Musk in charge of “large-scale reductions in force,” and yesterday, Musk and his allies began purging the federal government of career employees, beginning with employees still in their probationary period, typically those with less than a year in the job. The Department of Veterans Affairs lost 1,000 people, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau lost more than 100 people, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lost more than 2,400, the U.S. Forest Service lost more than 3,000, the Environmental Protection Agency lost 400, the Small Business Administration lost more than 100, and the Interior Department lost 2,300, including workers at national parks. The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to lose nearly all of its 5,200 workers in their probationary period, including 1,300 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—10% of its workforce—while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost 1,500. “I am heartbroken, more than anything, for the future of science in this country as we gut this institution that has for so long been intentionally shielded as much as possible from politics,” an NIH employee told Will Stone, Pien Huang, and Rob Stein of NPR.
Five government employees’ unions have sued, saying the mass firings violate the formal procedures for reductions in force. Employees say they were already understaffed and there is no way they will be able to keep up the level of their performance under the cuts. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) points out that rather than saving money, “it is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars to fire employees the department just invested months into recruiting, vetting and training.”
On Reddit, federal employees shared their experience. One wrote: “The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my f*cking firing. I make $50K a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”
It certainly appears that those in charge of the firings didn’t know what they were doing: on Thursday they fired more than 300 workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently not aware that they were the people who oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons. Today, Peter Alexander and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News reported that officials are now trying to rehire them but can’t figure out how to reach them because the workers lost access to their work email when they were fired.
The firings of federal employees come after the Trump administration instituted a “freeze” on federal spending. This impoundment of funds is illegal—the Constitution, Congress, and the courts have all established that once Congress has established a program, the president must implement it. But the truth is that Congress implemented these programs for a reason, and members would not kill them because they recognize they are important for all Americans.
Now MAGA voters are now discovering that much of what billionaire Elon Musk is cutting as “waste, fraud, and corruption” is programs that benefit them, often more than they benefit Democratic-dominated states. Dramatically, farmers, who backed Trump by a margin of three to one, are badly hit by the freeze on funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act for conservation of land, soil, and water. “This isn’t just hippie-dippy stuff,” Wisconsin cattle, pig, and poultry farmer Aaron Pape told Linda Qiu and Julie Creswell of the New York Times. “This is affecting mainstream farmers.”
Similarly, the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a blow to the agricultural sector: USAID buys about $2 billion in agricultural products from U.S. farmers every year. It has also supported funding for research at state universities like the University of Tennessee, the University of Missouri, and the University of Louisiana.
Cuts to indirect spending in grants from the National Institutes of Health will also hit hard across the country, and states where Trump won more than 55% of the 2024 vote are no exception. Former college president Michael Nietzel noted in Forbes that Texas stands to lose more than $300 million; Ohio, more than $170 million; and Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida, more than $130 million apiece. These losses will cause thousands of layoffs and, as the Association of American Medical Colleges said, “diminish the nation’s research capacity, slow scientific progress and deprive patients, families and communities across the country of new treatments, diagnostics and preventive interventions.”
Trump said Wednesday he wanted to shutter the Department of Education immediately, calling it “a big con job.” That Department provides grants for schools in low-income communities as well as money for educating students with special needs: eight of the ten states receiving the most federal money for their K–12 schools are dominated by Republicans.
Trump has called the Federal Emergency Management Agency a “disaster” and said states should handle natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes on their own. But states do not have the resilience they need for such short-term emergencies. Once again, while all states receive FEMA money, Republican-dominated states get slightly more of that money than Democratic-dominated states do.
Before the 2024 election, Aaron Zitner, Jon Kamp, and Brian McGill of the Wall Street Journal noted that by 2022, 53% of the counties in the U.S. received at least a quarter of their income from government programs—primarily through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those counties heavily support Republicans, including Trump.
On Friday the Republican-dominated House Budget Committee presented its budget proposal to the House. It calls for adding $4.5 trillion to the budget deficit in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. It also calls for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and supplemental nutrition programs. Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said: “The era of wasteful, woke, and weaponized government is over.”
For forty years, Republican politicians could win elections by insisting that government spending redistributed wealth from hardworking taxpayers to the undeserving because they did not entirely purge the federal programs that their own voters liked. Now Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are purging funds for cancer research, family farms, national parks, food, nuclear security, and medical care—all programs his supporters care about—and threatening to throw the country into an economic tailspin that will badly hurt Republican-dominated states.
A January AP/NORC poll found that only 12% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for billionaires to advise presidents, while 60% thought it would be bad.
Forty years of ideology is under pressure now from reality, and the outcome remains uncertain.
But not as much as they cared about making people who weren’t exactly like them suffer. And they’d do it again, and again, and again, given the chance. These people are permanent roadblocks to progress. They will always put cruelty and hate above any other priorities, even their own lives.
What also concerns me is their reaction to those of us who are used to tightening our belts and helping each other survive the worst of times. When they saw us just living our lives - working hard, or simply existing - they were engaged/enraged enough to vote against their own interests. Now they are suffering, and that makes us even more of a target for folks who…
Under a regime like this, we can expect that to be reflected in law enforcement (lack of enforcement and/or support of brutality). TPTB don’t believe in laws, only bullying, terror, or worse. We’ve already seen which groups were enabled to escape the consequences of their actions on Jan. 6, and must do what we can to keep ourselves safe.
February 16, 2025 (Sunday)
The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.
At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.
Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.
Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.
After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AdF, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.
After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AdF. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AdF. Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It’s heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It’s horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”
Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”
Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AdF and recently spoke by video at an AdF rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AdF, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.
Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.
Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.
Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.
In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.
On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.
On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.
After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”
But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”
Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”
European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.
After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”
Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”
Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”
He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”
A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.
Someone should tell Heather that it’s AfD, not AdF. Not a huge mistake, but know your enemy and all that
Apparently someone has told her-- I checked the current version of that letter, and she has corrected that mistake.
February 17, 2025 (Monday)
Today is Presidents Day, a somewhat vague holiday placed in 1968 on the third Monday in February, near the date of George Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1732, but also traditionally including Abraham Lincoln, who was born on February 12, 1809. Some states celebrate Washington’s birthday, some celebrate Washington’s and Lincoln’s, some celebrate all presidents, some celebrate none.
Washington looms large in our understanding of what it means to lead a democratic country, in large part because in the early years of the republic no one knew how a democratically elected leader should act. Washington knew that anything he did would become the standard for anyone who came after him. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in 1790, the year after he assumed the office of the presidency. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct w[hi]ch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”
Famously, minister and writer Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, wrote down for the citizens of this new nation the qualities they should require in a leader. His The Life of Washington, published in 1800, the year after Washington’s death, was written not to reflect the facts of Washington’s life—biographies would not focus on facts for almost a century—but to show virtues the nation’s youth should imitate and to establish a set of attributes against which future voters could judge those vying to lead the nation.
Weems’s Washington was generous, reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his comrades. To be a good citizen and a good leader meant living a moral and industrious life. Notably, though, the story that generations of Americans remembered and repeated to their children, the story of a young George Washington and the cherry tree, was not in the 1800 incarnation of Weems’s biography. It didn’t show up until a new edition appeared in 1806.
The story is only about a page long. Weems—who clearly made up many of the scenes in the text—wrote that he heard the story “twenty years ago” from “an aged lady, who was a distant relative, and, when a girl, spent much of her time in the family.” Weems claimed it was “too valuable to be lost, and too true to be doubted.”
According to the account, when George was about six years old “he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet, of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping every thing that came in his way. One day, in the garden…he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree…. The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree…, came into the House; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author…. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. ‘George,’ said his father, ‘do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?’
“This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’
“‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.’”
The years between the first appearance of The Life of Washington in 1800 and the edition with the cherry tree story in 1806 had seen a dramatic change in the nation’s political fortunes. The Jeffersonian Republican Party had risen to stand against Washington’s Federalist Party. (The Jeffersonian Republicans, also known as the Democratic-Republicans, were something entirely different from the modern-day Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s.) Federalists distrusted Thomas Jefferson, the party’s leader, who was elected president in 1800 after a bitter and vicious campaign. Federalists thought Jefferson was sneaky and underhanded—a liar, even—and they worried desperately about what would become of the new nation under such a president.
Parson Weems was a Federalist who believed that public greatness depended on private virtues. The insertion of the cherry tree story in the 1806 version of his life of Washington highlighted that honesty was a key virtue for a democratic leader.
In the 1830s, William Holmes McGuffey reproduced the story of Washington and the cherry tree in his wildly popular McGuffey’s Reader series used across the country as textbooks. The story’s message of guilelessness and honesty as a central virtue for a president served Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s after more than a decade in which northern voters felt they had been repeatedly sold out by presidents who abandoned campaign promises and caved to the demands of southern elites. Lincoln brought his reputation as “Honest Abe” into his political career, and his supporters, who had grown up on McGuffey’s Readers, highlighted it.
For all that presidents hid things from the American public—especially information about their health—and spun things to their advantage, there was an expectation that the president wouldn’t lie brazenly to the people. It came as a shock when, in 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported a complicated story that a U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union was a weather research aircraft only to have the Soviets produce the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and state they had captured the remains of the craft, along with a camera and footage of Soviet military installations. The embarrassment of the lie reportedly led Eisenhower to tell an aide: “I would like to resign.”
President Richard Nixon did resign after recordings proved he was lying about his role in the coverup of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex.
When given the opportunity to paint any scenes he wished in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda as it was being rebuilt after the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull chose to portray the moment when Washington resigned his wartime commission after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. Trumbull told President James Madison he had chosen that moment because “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success.”
The portrait of our first president voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator will always be foundational to the true principles of the United States of America and is certainly reason enough to celebrate him. But in 2025, as we navigate an ocean of disinformation under a president who won office thanks to what is actually called the “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election, there is also reason to honor the idea that a democracy depends upon citizens’ ability to make informed decisions about their leaders and their policies. That ability, in turn, depends on leaders’ honesty—a lesson taught more than 200 years ago by a parson who wrote about a future president, a hatchet, and a cherry tree.
Happy Presidents Day.
February 18, 2025 (Tuesday)
In a court filing last night, the Director of the Office of Administration in the Trump administration, Joshua Fisher, clarified the government position of billionaire Elon Musk. In a sworn declaration to the court, Fisher identified Musk as “a Senior Advisor to the President.” He explained: “In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”
Fisher’s statement went on to say that Musk is neither an employee nor the service administrator—that is, the leader—of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The statement is in response to a lawsuit filed by 14 states—New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—contending that Musk’s role is unconstitutional because he has such sweeping power in his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that the Constitution requires that his position be confirmed by the Senate.
President Trump has routinely referred to Musk as DOGE’s leader, and the media routinely refer to “Elon Musk’s DOGE.” Musk has flooded his social media site with claims that DOGE is cutting programs that he claims are wasteful or fraudulent, although so far he has yet to provide any proof of his extravagant claims. In the early hours of Monday, he reposted a picture of a leaner, meaner version of himself dressed as a Roman gladiator with the caption: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.” Musk added: “And I am.”
Beginning on Friday, the Trump administration began mass purges of federal government employees. As Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Emily Davies reported in the Washington Post, the firings were haphazard and riddled with errors, but apparently most of those firings were of employees in the probationary period of employment, typically the first year of service but a status that’s triggered by promotions and lateral transfers as well. About 20 FDA employees who review neurological and physical medical devices were fired, hampering the agency’s ability to evaluate the devices produced by Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. Employment lawyers say the mass firings are illegal because they ignore employee protections.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, had noted: “This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that’s not a federal agency that has access to the entire workings of the federal government to hire, fire, slash contracts, terminate programs, all without any congressional oversight.” Now the Trump administration is attempting to protect Musk by saying he is simply an advisor.
Department of Justice lawyer Joshua Gardner told Chutkan that he could not independently confirm the firings of thousands of federal employees last week, prompting her to note that his ignorance seemed willful: “The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small thing,” she said. “You haven’t been able to learn if that’s true?”
Peter Charalambous of ABC News noted that lawyers from the Department of Justice are also unable to explain what, exactly, DOGE is. They won’t say it’s an “agency,” which, as U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote, would be “subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.” On Friday, Charalambous points out, when reporters asked senior advisor to the Treasury Department’s general counsel Christopher Healy, who runs DOGE, he answered: “I don’t know the answer to that.”
What is clear, though, is that the DOGE team is vacuuming up data from government agencies. It began its run shortly after Trump took office by accessing the Treasury Department payment system, prompting the resignation of career civil servant David Lebryk. Then on February 2 the DOGE people moved on to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) where they struggled with security officers trying to stop them from accessing classified information. By February 12 they were at the General Services Agency, which oversees the government’s real estate.
That pattern has continued. Over the weekend, Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press reported that DOGE was trying to get access to taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), specifically the Integrated Data Retrieval System that enables examinations of tax returns, deep troves of information about hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses. Access to individuals’ bank account numbers and private information has, in the past, been tightly guarded. Indeed, compromising access to that information is a felony.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Committee on Finance, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, wrote to Douglas O’Donnell, acting commissioner of the IRS, demanding information about DOGE’s access to taxpayer information and noting that the request for access raises “serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.”
DOGE worked over the weekend to get access to Social Security Administration databases as well. Amanda Becker of The 19th notes that these records contain information about individuals’ income, addresses, children, retirement benefits, and even medical records. Lisa Rein, Holly Bailey, Jeff Stein, and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported that acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Michelle King, who had been with the agency for decades before Trump elevated her to acting commissioner last month, resigned after a clash over access to the data.
Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported today that workers at the General Services Administration resigned in protest after Musk ally Thomas Shedd, who now runs the group of coders DOGE has embedded in that agency, requested access to “all components of the Notify[DOT]gov system.” That system is used to send mass text messages to the public. Information about it is highly sensitive and gives anyone with access “unilateral, private access to the personal data of members of the public,” according to Koebler. That includes not just names and phone numbers, but information about, for example, whether individuals are enrolled in public benefit programs that are based on financial status.
A White House spokesperson defended DOGE’s access to the IRS by saying that “waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” adding: “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.” But DOGE has been unable to document what it claims are cost-saving measures. On Monday it listed what it said were $16 billion in canceled contracts, but Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer of the New York Times corrected the record, noting that a contract DOGE valued at $8 billion was actually closer to $8 million. Further, they noted, claims of $55 billion in savings lacked documentation.
Musk’s recent claims that the Social Security Administration is sending out payments to tens of millions of dead people more than 100 years old—a claim echoed by President Trump—were wrong: the software system defaults missing birthdates to more than 150 years ago and the Social Security Administration decided not to spend more than $9 million on upgrading its system to include death information. Right-wing podcaster Trish Regan warned DOGE that “it’s critical to present the math CORRECTLY” and noted: “Looks like the team got out over its skis on this one.”
Aside from the many legal problems with the argument that the opaque DOGE can alter programs established by Congress, and the problems with documenting its actual work, it is undeniable that Musk’s team has had access to a treasure trove of information about Americans and American businesses and the ways in which they interact with the government. This information can feed the AI projects that Musk envisions putting at the center of American life. It also opens the way for Musk and his cronies to weaponize private information against business competitors as well as political enemies.
In addition, it can also feed a larger technological project for controlling politics.
The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.
Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”
Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”
February 19, 2025 (Wednesday)
The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.
A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.
Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.
Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.
While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”
Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”
Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.
Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”
“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”
To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.
The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.
The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.
In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.
To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, 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. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.
Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.
Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.
But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.
When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.
When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.
Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”
This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed." Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.
A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.
In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.
“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.
For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.
For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.
What “strategic realities” are those, Pete? Sounds to me like the US is just too weak and its leadership are cowards…is what someone should say to him. Maybe add a double-dog dare.