In the middle of delicate negotiations, he posts this:
Complete batshit lunacy on the president's Truth Social account. Yes, he really posted this. pic.twitter.com/MaFIqUH1r0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 26, 2025
Tell me he isn’t suffering from extreme delusions of grandeur.
Between the gutting of the Intelligence community and the FBI and the crude, dismissive way he’s dealing with the Palestinians, it will be a miracle if we don’t have a catastrophic terrorist attack.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday floated the idea of replacing a visa program for foreign investors with a so-called “gold card” that could be bought for $5 million as a route to American citizenship.
Trump told reporters he will replace the “EB-5” immigrant investor visa program, which allows foreign investors of large sums of money that create or preserve U.S. jobs to become permanent residents, with a so-called “gold card.”
“We are going to be selling a gold card,” Trump said. “We are going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million,” he added.
“It’s going to give you green card privileges plus its going to be a route to (American) citizenship, and wealthy people would be coming into our country by buying this card,” Trump said, adding that details about the scheme will come out in two weeks.
I honestly have no words except Jesus H. Christ.
Trump added it is possible Russian oligarchs could qualify for the gold cards, when asked by a journalist if those people would be eligible. “Yeah, possibly. Hey. I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people,” he said.
I’ll bet he does.
I’m sorry. It’s time for a shot.
Michelle Goldberg on the appointment of the internet troll Dan Bongino to be the second in command of the FBI. Oh boy:
In writing about our country’s rapid self-immolation, I try to ration Hannah Arendt references, lest every column be about the ways “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, foreshadows the waking nightmare that is this government. But contemplating Bongino’s ascension, it’s hard to avoid the famous Arendt quote, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Trump could have found a smoother and more sophisticated ideologue to help him transform the F.B.I. into a tool of his will, perhaps someone from the Claremont Institute ready to put an erudite spin on authoritarianism. He wanted the jacked-up hothead.
This administration professes a devotion to merit-based hiring, blaming diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for fostering mediocrity. It should go without saying, however, that excellence is of little interest to the Trumpists, who delight in scandalizing a meritocracy that spurned them. Writing of the conditions in which both Hitler and Stalin arose, Arendt described a spirit of deep, corrosive cynicism and nihilistic glee at the inversion of old standards. “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest,” she wrote. Sound familiar?
Does it ever.
She describes our current moment as an interregnum where “Trump and his coterie are laying the foundation for autocracy but have yet to fully consolidate their power” and I think that’s right. The problem is that while we can see what’s happening, there’s still a part of us that believes it’s unthinkable. It’s thinkable. The appointment of Patel and Bongino to run America’s powerful national police force shows just how fragile the system that’s keeping us from finally tipping over really is.
The real impact of DOGE isn't going to be seen in macroeconomic variables because pretending you've made massive savings is not the same thing as actually making massive savings.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) February 25, 2025
But a microeconomic lens yields the more important insight… (1 of 2) pic.twitter.com/Ap7o8Wc92y
Let's use that microeconomic lens and look line-by-line at what DOGE is doing. In each case, the key issue is whether the benefit exceeds the cost. And in dozens of cases Elon is creating huge costs for very little benefit. pic.twitter.com/1MXlBFwibN
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) February 25, 2025
I thought that was a nice succinct rundown of the actual economics of Musk’s trainwreck. Unsurprisingly, they will not end up benefiting Americans in either the short or the long term. He didn’t even mention the cutting off of scientific and medical research funds which will actively cause suffering and death. And I won’t be surprised to see them get rid of any kind of credible data collection and analysis by the government, including the economic data the markets rely upon, which means the world will end up flying blind.
They are not doing this to save money or create efficiency. Why would Musk care about that? They are doing it to create openings for people like him (and Trump) to privatize the government and personally profit. They may actually believe that they are better at everything and that it might end up benefiting the peasants in the long run. (It won’t.) But never think that’s their primary motivation. They want to get rid of regulations, cut taxes and take over the necessary functions of the government at a profit.
Today’s newsletter by Dan Pfeiffer on how to make the GOP pay for this insanity:
I have seen this movie before, beat for beat.
In August of 2010, in the middle of the effort to pass the Affordable Care Act, Congress went home for a month-long recess. At every townhall and interaction with their constituents, they were bombarded with complaints from voters angry about the pending health care bill. Democrats were shaken. The process slowed as the party brainstormed a response to this backlash. More importantly, a media narrative was born. The Affordable Care Act became polarizing — something to fear. Previously, most Americans paid little attention to the arcane efforts towards health care reform. They learned about it from news coverage of people angrily screaming about the dangers of the bill.
We’ve since learned that much of that energy was “astro-turfed” by Republican groups funded by Right Wing billionaires like the Kochs and the Tea Party Movement. It was as much about the election of a Black president as it was the size and scope of government.
The angry townhalls are back. This time, voters are furious about the chaotic, clumsy, and counter-productive cuts from Elon Musk’s DOGE Commission.
I can guarantee that there has been no astroturfing of these. They are 100% organic grassroots.
Pfeiffer has some ideas about the growing alarm among average citizens:
Democrats need to channel and communicate this dissatisfaction. Back in 2017 when Trump was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, there were several efforts to organize attendance at GOP townhalls — oftentimes this meant simply publicizing the details of when and where the townhalls were being held. I have no doubt that many of the same Democratic groups that did this in 2017 are doing it again, but this is priority number one. We need support from the highest echelons of the Democratic Party as well as media personalities with platforms.
He points out that Republicans eventually stopped having town halls at all and that means the Democrats have to start having them. He writes:
Democratic presidential hopefuls (of which there are many) should go to places where the DOGE cuts are most impactful like Atlanta, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, and the Research Triangle in North Carolina and hold townhalls. They should be real townhalls. Open invitation. Don’t pack the crowd with supporters. Prepare for uncomfortable conversations and protestors. The drama will draw coverage and conversation. Lean into the risk.
Yes! Lean into the risk! Get attention and have some faith that if you are in the right people will see that.
He also makes the point that it’s important to be specific about what’s happening. Some of us are moved by paeans to “democracy” but most people need to see what these freaks are doing in detail and often how it affects real people. Using that list in the graph above can help people focus on specific issues. But he warns that people (including politicians) should concentrate on the issues they feel most passionately about and not sound like they’re parroting polling,
He also makes the case that we should center Musk, who people like even less than Trump. (People have heard the complaints about Trump for a decade already.) Musk is an attention magnet and attention is now the currency of the political realm, for better or worse.
All of this sounds reasonable to me but I suspect there has not yet been enough carnage to really get people’s full attention. But it’s coming. And we should be prepared for it.
On the heels of Musk’s inane email to all federal workers over the weekend, telling them to respond with 5 bullet points justifying their work week or get fired, there’s this. It should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.
[…]
All had previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.
This is just creepy:
The day after Trump’s inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk’s’ Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.
“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”
Earlier this month, about 40 staffers in the office were laid off. The firings dealt a devastating blow to the government’s ability to administer and safeguard its own technological footprint, they wrote.
“These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the resignation letter states. “Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s data less safe.” Those who remained, about 65 staffers, were integrated into DOGE’s government-slashing effort. About a third of them quit Tuesday.
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
What’s up with those who are left, I wonder? Are they dedicated to being “guardrails” or are they on board with the dumpster fire? I guess it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that we are very vulnerable right now to a catastrophic failure at the hands of Musk and his little DOGE bros. Look at them in the picture above. Those are the people handling the private data of every American.
Trust ’em?
These people clearly don’t and I suspect they know what they’re talking about. Musk thinks he’s running one of his own companies.
Just FYI: Tesla has about 125,000 employees worldwide, X has about 2800 and Space X has about 13,000. (By contrast, Amazon employs about 1.6 million, Walmart employs over 2.1 million.) Does running those companies give Musk any special insight into how to run the most complex institution in the world– the U.S. Government?
No. The man is a rich megalomaniac and the moron who has empowered him thinks that he is a genius because his uncle taught at MIT. People like that are the reason why legal roadblocks have been constructed to keep this much power out of the hands of such individuals. Sadly, nobody ever contemplated that a president would be so criminally reckless that he would simply ignore the law and put the whole country at risk.
I had no idea how much people loathed the elderly until recently when I saw a lot of comments like that during the pandemic. Even now, you’ll hear echoes of it when people point out that at least a third of Medicaid spending is for people in nursing homes. (I won’t even mention the way even decent, liberal minded people casually and crudely insult old people in regular conversation.) Let’s just say there isn’t much respect, much less simple human empathy, for people over 65 in America.
I hope every American will be lucky enough to be a billionaire when they get old, (or are lucky enough to die young) because being dependent on people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk to uphold programs you depend on is no way to live. And I’m not honestly not sure anymore that a majority of this country would object all that strenuously to ending them.
"Ruh roh", to quote Scooby Doo, on how Americans view the economy.
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February 24, 2025
-Just 20% view it as excellent or good. Worse than at any pt during Trump's 1st term.
-"Yikes": 59% say the economy is getting worse… Worse than at any pre-covid pt during Trump's 1st term.
Danger territory. pic.twitter.com/MF38TDpAm8
I don’t know exactly why people are saying this but it may validate my hypothesis that the “bad economy” vibe is actually a proxy for simple bad vibes. In other words when the country feels unstable people attribute it to a bad economy, even when their own finances are pretty good.
People are right to be nervous about the economy right now. Inflation is up and Trump’s tariffs and mass layoffs of federal workers/contractors are looming threats. But these results suggest something more I think. And I think it’s the same thing that doomed Harris in November: bad vibes about the rise of chaos, instability and violence in our political culture. And some of the people voted for Trump because of them simply didn’t understand where those bad vibes were actually coming from. It wasn’t the price of eggs.
No one is coming to save you.
Certainly not Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). The House minority leader appeared Monday night on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. Maddow noted that people are desperate for Democrats to “fight harder, to not be nice, to break protocol,” get arrested even. To lead the resistance. She tried but couldn’t draw a flicker of passion from the technocratic Jeffries. Quizzed on what Democrats are doing to fight the Musk-Trump cabal, Jeffries presented as if guest-hosting “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
“It’s all hands on deck in the Congress. It’s all hands on deck in the courts. And it’s certainly all hands on deck in communities across the country,” Jeffries, 54, insisted in a tone that was anything but insistent.
Like many older Democrats in his caucus who learned their politics decades ago (and stopped learning), Jeffries brings the wrong skill set to the job of fighting Musk-Trump’s efforts to cut up the republic like a stolen car in a chop-shop.
The growing resistance is very grassroots, Maddow observed, very organic and bottom-up.
“But what they are trying to push up and push forward is you and your colleagues,” she prodded, “to try to further empower you and further inspire you … to find new tactics, to find new avenues, to find new leverage.” Jeffries’s reply was flatter than Peter Cook’s homily on “Mawwage.”
Jeffries posted the video to YouTube as though proud of it.
“Democrats in Congress are growing rattled by the historic flood of calls from their grassroots supporters demanding they do more to combat the Trump administration,” Axios reports:
What we’re hearing: At a closed-door meeting of House Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee on Monday, members voiced frustration with activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible that have facilitated thousands of calls to members’ offices, according to several lawmakers who were present.
- “There were a lot of people who were like, ‘We’ve got to stop the groups from doing this’ … people are concerned that they’re saying we’re not doing enough, but we’re not in the majority,” said one member.
- “People are pissed,” said a senior House Democrat who was also at the meeting, adding that Jeffries himself is “very frustrated.”
- A Jeffries spokesperson disputed that characterization and noted to Axios that their office regularly engages with dozens of stakeholder groups, including MoveOn and Indivisible, including as recently as Monday
No one is coming to save you.
Common Cause writes this morning that if you couldn’t get through to your representatives in Congress recently, it’s because the phone lines are jammed (that’s why my fallback is an efax). Common Cause has this ask:
Together, we’re asking our leaders: What are you going to do to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump from stripping our government for parts?
Republicans are, unsurprisingly, going along with their heist – though if you ask them what they think when a camera isn’t rolling, many aren’t 100% bought in. But unfortunately, Democrats aren’t doing enough either – and while some are waking up, we’re in a full-blown crisis, and it’s time they started acting like it.
That’s why Common Cause has launched our Fire Elon Musk campaign – because every day lawmakers wait to act is another day these billionaires get closer to putting a “Going Out of Business” sign on our democracy so they can sell it off to the highest bidder.
And our pressure is clearly working. Earlier this month, you helped force the Trump Administration to walk back their draconian freeze on federal aid – Trump’s first major political defeat of his second term.
Make no mistake, Tom: Elon Musk failed. Donald Trump failed. And you won. Their tyrannical playbook is no match for YOU, and for the people powered movement we’re building together.
[…]
The first and most important thing to remember is that no matter how our opponents want to pretend they are kings, or corporate executives whose only duty is to increase their profits – we’re still a democracy, end of story.
So, we won’t accept Congress rubber stamping Trump’s nominees and his divisive agenda while he lets Elon Musk turn our federal government into his personal playground.
You can join the fight or be political roadkill.
No one is coming to save you.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
MSNBC’s new network president, Rebecca Kutler, saluted He Who Would Be King last week and said, “Yes, Sir! How low?” Kutler offered in sacrifice a half-dozen of its anchors (and their production teams). The network plans to relocate some to new ensemble-format shows.
Former Obama administration official, Brandon Friedman, posted an image of ousted anchors (above) and remarked, “Seen together, hoo boy. Message received.”
Timothy Snyder warned us. And warned us again. And again. “Do Not Obey in Advance.”
Democracy Now! spoke with Snyder back in December on how corporate America was “bending” to Donald Trump “following ABC News’s decision to settle a Trump defamation case by donating $15 million to his future presidential library.”
“There is a problem when the people who have the most money set the example of yielding to power first,” Snyder said. “It’s textbook anticipatory obedience.”
Lester Holt is exiting his slot as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” after a decade. Ayman Mohyeldin is losing his weekend evening show. Alex Wagner will surrender her 9 p.m. weekday show to Jen Psaki once Rachel Maddow completes her first 100 days of the Trump administration stint in that time slot, The Guardian reports:
Along with Mohyeldin’s weekend evening show, the network is also cancelling Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart’s shows.
The plan is for Capehart, like Mohyeldin, to host a new show, and Phang would continue as a legal correspondent. Wagner will stay with the network as a senior political analyst.
The cancellation of Joy Reid from her 7 p.m. weekday show — it ended Monday — was perhaps the most jarring. Enough that Rachel Maddow spoke out against the network’s decision during her show Monday night, with a focus on Reid’s firing.
“Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door,” she said of Reid.
Maddow described it as “unnerving” and “indefensible” for the network’s only two non-white primetime hosts lose their shows. Meanwhile, dozens of producers and staffers are facing layoffs or being invited to reapply for new jobs, she said.
“That has never happened at this scale in this way before when it comes to programming changes – presumably because it’s not the right way to treat people,” she said. “This is a difficult time in the news business but it does not need to be this difficult.”
Oval Office Man reacted specifically to Reid’s firing:
“Lowlife Chairman of “Concast,” Brian Roberts, the owner of Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC, has finally gotten the nerve up to fire one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Based on her ratings, which were virtually non-existent, she should have been “canned” long ago, along with everyone else who works there.”
In “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Snyder warns, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then they offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Contrarywise, the Associated Press refused to join Bootlickers Anonymous in rebuffing Trump’s demand to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” What people call it is not important to him. What is important is that he can compel people’s obedience when he insists that up is down and the past is alterable. In real time, we are watching a Trumpian retread of “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Scott Nover opines on the hypocrisy of Big Hair Brother’s “language-policing demands” at Slate:
For Trump, Musk, and the team of billionaires—elected and unelected—running the government, the hypocrisy is the point. The real language police are inside the White House, and they’re running with a nouveau take on “alternative facts” all these years later. If the AP isn’t able to push back successfully when it’s extorted for narrative control, then we’re already entering something else altogether: a truly Orwellian time in American politics. When free speech is only what the government says it is, then we don’t really have free speech.
But Kutler heard Trump’s personal decision to ban the Associated Press from the White House Press Room loud and clear. MSNBC offered itself without being asked, as ABC did. Barely one month into the Trump 2.0 administration she reinforced for Donald Trump that other news outlets would cave to his will to maintain their access.
The waters between Texas and Florida have always been called the Gulf of America.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink