In the meantime, Democratic members of Congress also hold town halls and meetings. Here is @RepPaulTonko from New York. His constituents aren't happy, as they want him to do more to stop the destruction of government.#DemsUnited #DemVoice1 pic.twitter.com/aPKF0V9Of4
— Izzy Ⓜ️Ⓜ️ 🇺🇸🦅 (@1zzyzyx1) February 22, 2025
I feel pretty confident that it’s going to come to that, unfortunately. It’s hard to imagine how it can go any other way.
Media Matters is documenting comments from callers on right wing radio. Here are some of them:
Fox host and loyal Trump ally Sean Hannity told a listener who was pleading for the jobs of military vets in the federal government that “there will be other opportunities.” The caller elaborated on their experience: “One of our tenants just recently got laid off from the USDA, and he’s a stable vet, multiple deployments overseas. And yeah, the guy is without a job now, and I’m just afraid that, you know, stuff like this is going to get out there.” The caller noted Hannity’s “soft spot for military and police and EMS and all those guys” and said that it’s “just a little concerning that we don’t let these guys, you know, fall off the wagon here and get neglected, because they’ve done so much for our country.” [Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show, 2/21/25]
Another caller to Hannity’s show asked him to stand up for “rank and file” agents: “This appears to be a misstep in the wrong direction.” Hannity responded by saying, “There are going to have to be hard questions for rank and file members in terms of their priority and whether or not they challenged some of the higher-ups.” [Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show, 2/5/25]
A listener called into The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show to say that they are “not happy with his [Trump’s] recent comments on Ukraine.” Travis appeared to cut the caller off, asking of Russia’s war with Ukraine, “How do you think this should end?” [OutKick, The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, 2/21/25]
A caller into Hannity’s show who described themselves as a “strong supporter of this administration” pleaded for advice with the firings: “How do you make life decisions?” Hannity responded by saying, “The main focus is going to be on limiting the bureaucracy. How many of these jobs are redundant? … Just make yourself as essential as possible.” The caller elaborated: “Mr. Musk talks about cutting, you know, $2 trillion. Well, that’s beyond what the entire discretionary budget every year is, you know, roughly 1.7, 1.8 for discretionary. You would have to eliminate everything, the entire federal government to hit that.” [Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show, 2/6/25]
A caller to The Alex Jones Show accused Trump of “lying” about birthright citizenship: “If they want to pass this, we’re going to get rid of 150 million U.S. citizens.” Jones responded by asking the caller if they like the “Chinese flying here one week before they have their baby, getting all their health care paid for?” The caller expressed that their “concern is I was born in this country.” [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 2/20/25]
A Canadian listener called into Hannity’s radio show to discuss boycotts there against the U.S.: “You’ve disrespected us to this point, and we have to respond.” The caller told Hannity that Canadians are “buying Canadian” and are not going to Florida for vacation, concluding that the “boycott’s already begun.” Hannity retorted: “Who would be hurt worse by” a “boycott war” between the U.S. and Canada? [Premier Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 2/25/25]
A caller told Hannity, “I cannot agree with you on the Gaza situation.” They continued, “As far as making those people leave their land and not being able to return, that’s just totally wrong.” Hannity defended Trump’s plan as “rebuilding Gaza, creating jobs, [and] building innovation,” to which the caller responded “that’s not innovative. That’s racist,” because “the president said those people cannot return” and “most of these people don’t have anything to do with Hamas.” When Hannity claimed that “the people in Gaza voted in Hamas’ leadership,” the caller told him that “what you’re saying is that everybody there is a terrorist, and that’s racist.” [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 2/13/25]
A listener called into Hannity’s show to discuss their child’s cancer diagnosis and advocate for cancer research funding: “With the lack of funding, basically, all you get is parents like me who have had a kid with this, starting organizations and coming up with money to carry on the research for them. So that’s why I wanted to call and … advocate for research.” Hannity responded by arguing that “most of the solutions for cancer are going to be found in the private sector, not with public money.” The caller noted that “with such a small number of kids getting this [cancer diagnosis], yeah, it’s definitely something that doesn’t get looked at as much.” Hannity responded that “even if the government spent … $300 million on this particular cancer tomorrow, it’s not going to be your answer.” [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 2/12/25]
Chris Stigall, host of The Chris Stigall Podcast, noted that he’s received “quite a bit of outreach from you federal workers.” He read one email from a listener who remarked that “it’s difficult to get beyond your disrespect and disregard for federal employees.” Stigall noted that the email is “not the only one of these that I got on both X and in email.” Stigall responded to the reader’s email: “I’m going to talk to you like an adult here for a minute. Grow up. Grow up. If you work for the federal government, you need to grow up, respectfully.” [The Chris Stigall Podcast, 2/24/25]
A caller to Fox host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show accused Trump of trying to “bribe” people with DOGE dividends. The caller noted, “The last tax break that Trump gave was $1.9 trillion and 65% with the people making over a $130,000 a year. … If you’re going to get after the excess spending, you have to go after a military waste and the rich — make the rich pay. Instead, he’s trying out for a $5,000 bribe to people.” [Fox News Radio, Brian Kilmeade Show, 2/21/25]
A caller to Fox host Mark Levin’s radio show makes impassioned plea concerning the legal status of his fiancé: “We’ve been planning on getting married now for a few months. And it seems like I’ve read on the news now that, if you were paroled into the United States, you can’t file any forms, for immigration.” The caller also expressed concern with people turning against Ukraine, where his fiancé and her family are from. [Westwood One, The Mark Levin Show, 2/19/25]
It’s interesting because these shows have screeners so I assume they wanted their audiences to hear these complaints so that the hosts could knock them down. I don’t think they actually did. Those retorts are lame and I would guess that a lot of listeners get that.
The best way to make people understand what’s going on is to relay real stories of real people being affected by this chaotic purge. I’m surprised they are even letting them on the air. They have to realize that even allowing them to voice their pain is a mistake but it’s entirely possible they are so filled with bravado and hubris that they think their lame rationales will be convincing. And in fairness, they probably are to quite a few of their listeners. But I doubt it’s convincing to everyone.
The Republican party understands this and they have a plan:
House Republicans are becoming weary and wary of in-person town hall meetings after a number of lawmakers have faced hometown crowds angry about the Trump administration’s push to slash government programs and staffing.
Party leaders suggest that if lawmakers feel the need to hold such events, they do tele-town halls or at least vet attendees to avoid scenes that become viral clips, according to GOP sources.
A GOP aide said House Republican leaders are urging lawmakers to stop engaging in them altogether.
The town halls, and the rash of negative headlines, have been the first bit of public blowback for members who face voters next year. And the new reluctance to hold them indicates there are bubbling concerns about the impact the cuts could have on the GOP’s chances of holding its thin majority in the House next year.
The viral nature of video clips spreading from one district to another means a bad confrontation in safe Republican territory could influence voters in battlegrounds.
Good luck with that. Pissed off people are not going to be silenced. They should know that having been the beneficiaries of the Tea Party back in 2010.
By the way, in that mid-term, the Democrats lost 53 House seats and six Senate seats. That was after Obama had won by a huge margin compared to Trump last November. I don’t know that such a landslide can be possible in these days but you never know. I certainly wouldn’t bet on them holding their majority in any case.
Trump has been fixated on snapping up minerals. He doesn’t just want Ukraine’s resources, which include lithium, titanium and uranium. He’s also interested in getting access to Russia’s geographical wealth, including so-called rare earth elements like neodymium and promethium. (He appears to mistakenly believe that Ukraine has big stores of rare earth minerals as well.)
“I’d like to buy minerals on Russian land too if we can,” Trump said on Tuesday. “They have very good rare earth.”
But is Trump overestimating the importance of these minerals? Rare earth metals have been touted as critical to producing components like magnets and batteries for high-tech applications. And geopolitical hawks worry that China is by far the world’s biggest supplier of materials like yttrium.
But Bloomberg Opinion’s Javier Blas argues that they aren’t as essential as is commonly perceived (a myth that he says was spread in part by Ukraine last year):
At best, the value of all the world’s rare-earth production rounds to $15 billion a year — emphasis on “a year.” That’s equal to the value of just two days of global oil output. Even if Ukraine had gigantic deposits, they wouldn’t be that valuable in geo-economic terms.
Say that Ukraine was able, as if by magic, to produce 20% of the world’s rare earths. That would equal to about $3 billion annually. To reach the $500 billion mooted by Trump, the US would need to secure 150-plus years of Ukrainian output.
I quoted from a piece in the Telegraph a while back comparing the Trump mineral deal to the treaty of Versailles, and it contained this, which I didn’t focus on in the piece:
Talk of Ukraine’s resource wealth has become surreal. A figure of $26 trillion is being cast around for combined mineral reserves and hydrocarbons reserves. The sums are make-believe.
Ukraine probably has the largest lithium basin in Europe. But lithium prices have crashed by 88pc since the bubble burst in 2022. Large reserves are being discovered all over the world. The McDermitt Caldera in Nevada is thought to be the biggest lithium deposit on the planet with 40m metric tonnes, alone enough to catapult the US ahead of China.
The Thacker Pass project will be operational by next year. The value of lithium is in the processing and the downstream industries. Unprocessed rock deposits sitting in Ukraine are all but useless to the US.
The lithium bubble has long since burst. Shanghai lithium carbonate price per tonne:
It is a similar story for rare earths. They are not rare. Mining companies in the US abandoned the business in the 1990s because profit margins were then too low. The US government was asleep at the wheel and let this happen, waking up to discover that China has acquired a strategic stranglehold over supplies of critical elements needed for hi-tech and advanced weapons. That problem is being resolved.
Ukraine has cobalt but most EV batteries now use lithium ferrous phosphate and no longer need cobalt. Furthermore, sodium-ion and sulphur-based batteries will limit the future demand growth for lithium. So will recycling. One could go on. The mineral scarcity story is wildly exaggerated.
Recall that Zelensky himself offered up a mineral deal last September as a way to get American buy-in to support the cause over the long term. Lindsey Graham persuaded Trump that it was an amazing deal for America. The Ukrainians wanted a security guarantee for the deal and it doesn’t appear they are going to get it. But on the other hand, they may have played the greatest dealmaker on earth about the minerals in the first place.
Trump will claim that he just made a thousand trillion dollar deal that will make America rich and end the war and bring peace on earth or whatever. But in reality, it looks like it’s much less than meets the eye.
If it guaranteed continued support for Ukraine, it would definitely be worth it. But as it stands it’s just another fluff job to make Dear Leader feel like a winner. But since Trump’s almost completely drive by a seething desire for revenge against people he believes have wronged him (and Zelensky is one of them) maybe it makes sense for Zelensky to pretend like he’s been forced to grovel and capitulate to Trumps demands in order to at least keep him from making things worse.
President Musk has let the word go forth:
Lawyers for President Trump in line to take top jobs at the Justice Department sparred with Democrats on Wednesday over whether the administration could simply ignore some court orders — an early skirmish in a larger fight over the White House’s efforts to claim more sweeping presidential powers.
The debate, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, unfolded as three nominees testified during a confirmation hearing to join the upper ranks of the Justice Department. Two of the nominees, Harmeet K. Dhillon and D. John Sauer, have long worked as personal lawyers for Mr. Trump.
The third, Aaron Reitz, selected to lead the Office of Legal Policy, was questioned about an old social media post in which he suggested that Mr. Trump follow the example set by President Andrew Jackson, who ignored a Supreme Court order in 1832.
“There is no hard and fast rule about whether, in every instance a public official is bound by a court decision,” he said Wednesday. “There are some instances in which he or she may be lawfully bound and some instances where he or she may not be lawfully bound.”
Mr. Sauer, who has represented Mr. Trump before the Supreme Court and is the solicitor general nominee, was pressed on the same point. He replied, “It’s hard to make a very blanket, sweeping statement about something without being presented with the facts and the law.”
I thought there was a chance that Trump wouldn’t go so far as to ignore the Supreme Court but since Musk is on the warpath there’s a good chance he might. Musk knows how to rev him up good.
Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect … so for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was ebola prevention." pic.twitter.com/bq4Ipp4Zvj
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 26, 2025
I know it’s not actually funny but I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Am I dreaming? Is this real?
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician with decades of experience in global public health who has worked as an epidemiologist in Africa and survived Ebola himself, outlined the harm that the mistake had actually caused. “On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak,” he wrote on X. “Normally the U.S. would’ve very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response. But this time, we didn’t. Because we couldn’t. Because this administration wouldn’t let them go right when this outbreak was declared.” He further noted that officials in Uganda had tried to call the White House for days but received no response, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which handles Ebola prevention in the U.S., is losing hundreds of “frontline experts” thanks to DOGE.
Jesus…
He’s the greatest genius the world has ever known:
Days after Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency cut hundreds of jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration — including critical safety roles — his company, SpaceX, has secured a contract with the agency to use Musk’s Starlink satellite internet to help manage U.S. airspace. Yes, it’s a massive conflict of interest.
According to Bloomberg, which first reported the deal, the billionaire approved the shipping of 4,000 Starlink terminals to the FAA last week. In a statement released Monday, the FAA wrote that one such terminal is already being tested “at its facility in Atlantic City and two terminals at non-safety critical sites in Alaska.”
It’s not a conflict of interest. It’s straight up corruption. And apparently, he just did this despite the fact the Verizon has a $2.3 billion contract already in place. But hey, the genius gets what the genius wants.
Earlier this year, the FAA ordered SpaceX to carry out an investigation of what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (read “explosion”) of its Starship rocket. Last year, the agency proposed $633,009 in civil penalties against SpaceX, citing failure “to follow its license requirements during two launches.”
The move prompted Musk to declare that “the fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”
It might be why almost immediately after being granted virtually unchecked administrative powers, Musk set his “chainsaw of bureaucracy” against the agency that regulates his own company.
As Philip Bump quipped on BlueSky, “I think I just figured out why his spaceships keep blowing up.”
French President Emmanuel Macron came to the White House this week and his old pal President Donald Trump didn’t even greet him at the door as the protocol requires for visiting world leaders. It’s not the most important norm that Trump has thrown in the garbage can in his first month in office but it’s a telling one. The president doesn’t consider it necessary to show respect to America’s traditional allies anymore. Macron might as well have been a door-to-door salesman.
They didn’t hold hands as much as they did in Trump’s first term but they did hold a couple of fairly congenial press avails in which the two leaders pretended to be friends and Macron very gently corrected Trump on a couple of his most egregious lies about Ukraine, namely that the US had spent more than Europe on military aid to the war torn country and that Ukraine had started the war. Overall, it didn’t seem to accomplish much since Trump has come to believe that he will be seen as a great peacemaker if he forces Ukraine to surrender to Russia while America’s erstwhile allies are coming to understand that he could not care less what they think about anything.
Macron is scheduled to debrief the European heads of state today and tomorrow the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be at the White House to try another round which will likely have the same result. All this urgent diplomacy came after Trump had accused France and the UK of not having done anything in three years to “end the war.” and Macron called a a crisis meeting of European leaders in Paris last week to discuss next steps. They’ll convene again this weekend after Starmer returns home to see where they stand.
I understand that they have to try, despite the writing being on the wall. After all, the alliances that were formed after WWII to ensure there would not be another catastrophic world war held together the peace, prosperity, and security of the last 80 years. Abruptly destroying them on the whim of a vengeful, 78 year old would-be strongman whose definition of an ally is one that unquestionably does his bidding with no question of reciprocation is difficult to accept. But it seems they have no choice and the consequences are monumental.
One of the main purposes of the NATO alliance and the rest of the American security guarantees of the past 80 years was to ensure that the long standing enmity between the nations involved in the two World Wars would not compel them to re-arm and do it all again. The brief alliance between the U.S. and the Soviets to beat the Nazis didn’t last and the Cold War that ensued featured proxy wars all over the world as the two nuclear powers competed for influence. But that stand-off did manage to prevent the worst case scenario and the United States and its allies ultimately prevailed with the break-up of the Soviet Union accomplished without another massive conflagration.
That happened over 35 years ago now and it was not a ridiculous notion to think that a re-evaluation of that post WWII world order was overdue. Even though Trump’s reasoning was puerile and uninformed, it wasn’t a completely outrageous request in his first term that Europe should pick up more of the tab for their national defense. America’s security umbrella was expensive and the world was changing so a pull back to allow others to take a bigger role wasn’t a totally crazy idea.
But then Russia invaded Ukraine and the logic of the NATO alliance was quite suddenly made relevant again. In fact it was so relevant that countries that had long held back from joining the alliance, Finland and Sweden, were so alarmed by the Russian aggression that they finally joined up. The alliance agreed to supply Ukraine with the military supplies and arms it would need to defend itself, not merely out of sympathy but the knowledge that this kind of aggression was exactly how things had gotten out of control twice before. As it turns out 80 years isn’t very long in the great scheme of things after all.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is oblivious to all that and wouldn’t care anyway. For reasons no one may ever fully understand he has an almost preternatural affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin and seethes with resentment toward Europe. Given that it has elected Donald Trump twice, Europe is belatedly realizing that the US is no longer a reliable ally and are speaking openly about arming up. The UK’s Starmer announced this week that they plan to substantially raise defense spending (at the expense of foreign aid) and Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz made it clear in a speech after the election last weekend that his country would no longer be dependent on the US for its security.
The Trump administration does not care about Europe and is aligning with Russia, said Merz, who is on course to become Germany’s new leader. The continent, he warned, must urgently strengthen its defenses and potentially even find a replacement for NATO — within months. […]
“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting said. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump’s statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”
You can’t blame them. But in light of the neo-fascist AfD coming in second in the election he just won, you can’t blame some of us for feeling a little nervous about where that may lead. But we have only ourselves to blame.
He’s not wrong that the US is aligning with Russia and they are right to be nervous as well. The sell-out of Ukraine began almost the moment Trump took office. He has excluded them (and the European allies) from “peace talks,” extorted natural resources as “compensation” for the money America has spent on its defense, demanded that Russia be allowed back in the G7, called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and said that Ukraine started the war. At the UN on Tuesday the US joined Russia, Belarus and North Korea, in opposing a resolution condemning Moscow’s war against Ukraine. All of this has been done without asking anything of Russia. In fact, it comes with a promise to lift sanctions and work on joint economic ventures.
The post WWII alliances are being tossed aside in favor of new ones with strongman leaders such as Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman, all of which are based upon Trump’s personal admiration for their leaders not any sort of strategic logic. The world has begun to accept that this is real and are adjusting accordingly.
The UKs Financial Times published a mournful requiem for the great post war alliance the other day which ended with these words:
After three generations of US leadership, it is always tempting to believe that Trump does not mean what he says. Perhaps this is a feint in some grand art of the deal. But allies and erstwhile friends must banish those self-soothing thoughts. With Trump, what you see is what you get. America has turned.
Salon
Friends asked last night (not in so many words) what they could do to stop the rapid unscheduled dissassembly of the United States by Musk-Trump. They feel helpless. They are not. They feel overwhelmed. That’s not surprising given the sheer volume and breadth of the attacks. But they need a place to focus. The shadow president is not the only party to the Project 2025 sabotage.
The need for action is immediate for a response to the GOP’s vote Tuesday night to gut Medicaid.
Jason Statler offers
We can still stop the GOP from destroying Medicaid
But it’s going to a national pushback that scares Republicans more than Trump.
What you need to know about this fight that truly just began last night.
Via Statler’s The Last Billionaires:
So what to do?
Call your Republican reps if you have them—House and Senate. Use this tool about the damage the GOP budget would do to shame them. Tell them (and everyone) that the Children’s Hospital Association opposes these cuts. Then, please share what you told them on social media in any way you can.
BONUS: Join or start a Musk or Us event. We’ve got to be visible and in the faces of every possible Republican.More from Rogan’s List here.
When can we stop them
If you’re like me, you may need to dig deeper. You may want to know, for instance, that Medicaid fraud primarily comes from providers, not families who rely on it.
You’ll also probably appreciate this thread from Bobby Kogan, the Senior Director of Federal Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress, which I’m posting below.
Kogan provides more detail, but the key is not to sit on your hands.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
The word has gone forth that “corrupt judges” be impeached. “Corrupt” is unofficially defined among MAGA drones as any federal magistrate who impedes Musk-Trump’s rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD) of the U.S. government.
Kase Wickman outlines for Vanity Fair the precipitating event behind Rep. Mike Lee’s outburst on Tuesday. It seems Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly believes this whole “DOGE” thing may be unconstitutional:
“Based on the limited record I have before me, I have some concerns about the constitutionality of U.S.D.S.’s structure and operations,” Kollar-Kotelly said Monday in a Washington Federal District Court hearing, invoking the initials of DOGE’s rarely-used government name, the U.S. DOGE Service and sidestepping the group’s legendarily dumbass meme-inspired acronym. Leaders of government agencies—which, given the power and access that DOGE has, it would appear to be—must be nominated by the president and confirmed by Congress. Musk, who has gotten access to a kajillion personnel files and other sensitive information between sending his never-ending stream of jackass tweets and ghosting on (some of) the mothers of his various offspring, did not go through this process.
To put it in terms that memelords like Musk might more easily understand: much overstep. fascist wow. many illegal. what boss. lol.
Confusion reigns among federal employees about whom to heed when the unelected, possibly unconstitutional Musk sends out jerkish directives contradicted by superiors, reaffirmed by the nominal president, and then not.
On top of Kollar-Kotelly, another judge put the brakes on DOGE on Monday (Associated Press):
A judge agreed Monday to temporarily bar two federal agencies from disclosing records containing sensitive personal information to representatives of billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland, ruled that the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing people’s personal information to DOGE without their consent.
Boardman issued a temporary restraining order requested by attorneys for unions and groups representing current and former federal employees.
How dare she. Musk needs access to that information to feed into the program he’s building to automate the firing of government employees! Off with her head! And Kollar-Kotelly’s too!
Then there are the mass resignations plaguing the RUD (VF again):
On Tuesday, 21 DOGE employees resigned en masse, writing in an open letter addressed to Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles that they objected to being asked to “compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the letter continued. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments at the United States DOGE Service.”
In the immortal words of the Muppets, even the vegetables don’t like him.
“Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator,” Joshua Fisher of the Trump White House told U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. But the White House has been evasive about who is.
The White House needs someone to blame for Musk’s increasing bad press and growing hostility from constituents, especially in Republican districts.
Clearly, Musk gets protected by virtue of his magnificent brain and prodigious net worth. The administration needs a fall guy. Um, make that fall gal. Ta-da!
After repeatedly refusing to identify the administrator of the new Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration on Tuesday pointed to Amy Gleason, a former U.S. Digital Service official, as the operation’s acting administrator.
A White House official granted anonymity to speak openly confirmed to POLITICO that Gleason — who, according to her LinkedIn, served as a digital services expert at U.S. Digital Service during Trump’s first term and most recently worked as chief product officer at Nashville health care firm Russell Street Ventures — is helming the operation.
The White House has avoided naming the DOGE administrator for weeks. Earlier Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dodged multiple questions on the matter, saying: “I’m not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium.”
Ms. Gleason is about to discover the truth of Rick Wilson’s maxim, Everything Trump Touches Dies.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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.
