Author: Tom Sullivan

Out-gunned and out-invested by the right

Direct your attention to a Sunday post by strategist Rachel Bitecofer, “Here’s Why Democrats Can’t Meet This Moment.”

Bitecofer’s post concerns the 2024 book by Tina Nguyen, now with The Verge. Formerly with Puck/Politico/Vanity Fair, Nguyen was also formerly and briefly “employed” by The Daily Caller (more on that in a moment). Her memoir, “The MAGA Diaries,” details her upbringing as a young libertarian and Claremonster (a student at Claremont McKenna College where John Eastman is or was on the faculty) and her eventual escape from conservative politics. Subtitle: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing & How I Got Out.

Bitecofer recounts from the book how Nguyen, an aspirng journalist, realized she’d been groomed instead as a propagandist:

Then she got what felt like a the break of a lifetime for an aspiring conservative “journalist”: a job at The Daily Caller working with a pre-Fox News Tucker Carlson.

A few months into that job, where she was hired to cover the tech beat, it began to dawn on her that things at The Daily Caller were not what they appeared to be. The moment of realization hit when a co-worker asked her to lunch and she responded she was waiting for edits from her editor, John Henke: a man her co-worker had never heard of.

That got Nguyen asking herself, if the Daily Caller isn’t paying me, who is?

Turns out her real boss was a Republican communications firm and what they wanted from her wasn’t reporting, they wanted her to write hit pieces on their political and corporate enemies.

Before she could resign, Nguyen got fired as “not a good fit.”

Those who have read closely know that the left and Democrats are in an asymmetrical political battle with a network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets supported by conservative billionaires who, unlike moneymen on the left, think like longterm investors. The biggest lefty funders get behind the latest shiny object that promises a quick win.

The left doesn’t build the kind of infrastructure the right has spent the last half century building. The right mentors promising conservative college kids like Nguyen, sends them to training camps, connect them to conservative networks, and gets them placement at media outlets until they appear, as if fully formed, on your TV screens or in your news feeds.

It wasn’t until she left that world and joined Vanity Fair that Nguyen realized that “there is no such thing as the professional left.” Bitecofer summarizes:

She was pitched a story about a program Dems launched in 2005 to supposedly build the bench (a problem, by the way, we still have today despite at least 5 groups I can think of working on it for two decades) which was pitched to her as “revolutionary, unique, and new.”

The Republicans had The Heritage Leadership Institute so the idea of an organization to build the bench did not sound “revolutionary, unique, or new” to Nguyen. Her first thought was, “I thought the Democrats had the same resources my old team did?”

SPOILER ALERT: We don’t.

The Heritage Leadership Institute’s Young Leaders program has graduates like Josh Hawley, who they basically grew in a lab.

I finished Nguyen’s audiobook in the car yesterday. Nguyen’s bigger shock was finding out years later that the Claremont mentor who helped her get The Daily Caller gig belonged to a secret network screening for young white nationalists, grooming them in mentoring networks, and working to place them at outlets where they could sublty advance white nationalist ideology. Nguyen told the Columbia Journalism Review that “in no universe” would the Caller “have ever explicitly courted white nationalists when I was there.” Yet her WTF moment was realizing that she herself had been nurtured by that system.

Bitecofer concludes that the right out-invests the left and it shows:

So, if you want to understand why Democrats seem inept right now its because we have no brain trust. We have no small room of very smart people with a shit ton of money and authority strategizing on to how fund, build, and run the infrastructure we need to compete with the propaganda machine Republicans have spent decades financing and perfecting.

Instead we have a series of barely connected party organizations, tons of 501c3s, and SuperPACs like Future Forward, who managed to waste nearly a billion dollars on positive ads on Harris that allowed 60% of swing voters to have positive memories of Trump’s first term.

And many of them duplicate each others’ work while struggling to find funding.

These are things most of us already know. But reading Nguyen’s first-hand account as a product of the conservative farm system carries more punch.

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Travel my way, take the highway that is best 

Donald Trump brought two of his friends (at least in puppet form) to an anti-DOGE rally organized by the North Carolina Democratic Party across from the North Carolina State Legislative Building on Wednesday. Perhaps 400-500 people filled Bicentennial Plaza to protest Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s chainsaw approach to (ostensibly) making government more “efficient.”

Raleigh News & Observer:

“Stop the GOP Coup.” “America Has No King.” “DOGE Musk Go.”

Hundreds wielded signs with messages like these in Raleigh’s Bicentennial Plaza on Wednesday, protesting the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

Hosted by North Carolina Democrats, the protest kicked off around noon with a speech from NC Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton. She spoke in support of federal workers and defended programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

Hampton Dellinger returned to North Carolina to speak at the rally. Dellinger, former head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, was preparing to restore fired federal workers to their jobs before Trump fired him. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld his firing on Monday.

“We need to let Republicans know how much the cuts are actually hurting North Carolina. That’s the point of what we’re doing today. And yes, it’s specifically targeted at Republicans because my legislative colleagues need to be talking to Senator Tillis, Senator Budd, their Republican colleagues in Congress and saying, Congress, do your job, take care of our people, take care of our state,” said Sen. Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents Orange, Caswell, and Person counties.

Debbie from Greenville told WRAL she worries about children not being fed, “I’m concerned about children not being covered under Medicaid if that gets canceled.” Other programs targeted by DOGE impact her life:

“Today it’s the Department of Education,” Debbie said. “Next week, it might be Social Security. It might be Medicare. I’m on Medicare … I’m concerned.”

On Tuesday, Department of Education leaders announced plans to lay off more than 1,300 of its employees as part of an effort to halve the organization’s staff — a prelude to President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the agency.

ABC11 Raleigh:

Our friend Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent brought the puppets.

As a practical matter, I-40 begins in Wilmington, runs the length of North Carolina, and extends west to Barstow, California, joining the legendary Route 66 in Oklahoma City. I’ve driven most of its 2,556.61 miles and drove 500 round-trip in North Carolina on Wednesday. One wonders how long it will be before DOGE will decide that federal highway funds that support placing rest areas about every 50 miles represent waste, fraud and abuse.

If the poors can eat cake, they can pee into empty bottles.

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Or not

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their DOGE waste, fraud, and abuse cost-cutters are Making Airlines Great Again.

Reuters:

Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab on Monday slashed its first-quarter profit estimates by half, sending its shares down 14%, and its CEO said the environment had weakened due to U.S. economic uncertainty.

The Atlanta-based airline is the first major U.S. carrier to report that mounting economic worries among consumers and businesses are hurting domestic travel.

“We saw companies start to pull back. Corporate spending started to stall,” CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC. “Consumers in a discretionary business do not like uncertainty.”

Define uncertainty.

“The National Transportation Safety Board today recommended that helicopter traffic be banned from a four-mile stretch over the Potomac River when flights are landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport,” reports CNN:

Warning signs were missed: The warning signs leading up to the disaster over the Potomac River were there, NTSB investigators said, citing data detailing thousands of near collisions at the airport over a number of years. Investigators uncovered 15,214 “near miss events” between 2021 and 2024 where aircraft were within one nautical mile of colliding, with a vertical separation of less than 400 feet. Additionally, there were also 85 cases where two aircraft were separated by less than 1,500 feet, with a vertical separation of less than 200 feet, according to the NTSB.

On the east bank of the Potomac, Elon Musk’s unofficial junior G-men are slashing the nation’s air traffic controller workforce. But that’s not all (The Atlantic):

As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

Between his rapid unscheduled disassembly of government agencies, his cosmik debris endangering air traffic, and consolidation of communications infrastructure under one man who can turn it off at the flick of a switch, Musk is a Bond-villain-level threat to national and world security as well as to air traveler safety.

The Atlantic article continues, “A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is ‘very safe’ or ‘somewhat safe,’ down from 71 percent last year.”

Emphasis mine:

Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.

“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”

Delta is not the only airline that will be reporting slashed profit projections this year.

Investor’s Business Daily:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.6% since Trump’s second inauguration, with the S&P 500 index off 6.4% and the Nasdaq composite tumbling 11%. The small-cap Russell 2000 has slumped 11.3%. 

Thank you for flying Trusk Airways. Enjoy your flight.

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Shooting someone on Fifth Avenue was small-time

As far back as he can remember, Donald Trump always wanted to be a gangster.

He fantasized about shooting people in the middle of Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. He grew up learning tax dodges from his father. He learned tough-guy bluster from mob consigliere, Roy Cohn: attack attack attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory. He bought concrete from firms run by mafiosos Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano for building Trump Plaza and Trump Tower.

City and State NY report, while “Trump’s behavior and language have also been likened to that of mobsters by several news outlets, who have noted that his speech is often peppered with terms typically used by members of the mob, like late Gambino family boss John Gotti,” the short-fingered vulgarian, like so many bullies, “has skin of gossamer” and never had the guts or the stomach to go beyond boasting.

He ran for president not to be president but to build his profile, enjoy the public attention, and enhance his family brand. Then on November 8, 2016, to his surprise, he won. His mafia stylings that worked in New York brought legal scrutiny in D.C.

Now with Elon Musk’s help he actually gets to kill people in bulk from the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and get away with it. But the man who doesn’t use email and discourages note-taking knows how to hurt people without getting his hands dirty. He learned that in New York City. Handed a Get Out of Jail card from the Roberts court, Fifth Avenue now seems like small potatoes.

The Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique. 

The cuts, which are in addition to threatened trims to National Institutes of Health grants, are related to the university’s work with the U.S. Agency for International Development. The school is preparing to shrink its Baltimore-based affiliated nonprofit, JHPIEGO, that since the 1970s has worked closely with the USAID and has already stopped work on a number of international health projects. 

Hundreds of thousands could die of treatable diseases worldwide

Trump has stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine and cut intelligence support. More people will die, says a Ukrainian MP (The London Times):

Ukraine’s key weapon systems were dramatically weakened on Wednesday after the US severed its intelligence sharing with Kyiv, leading to warnings that the move will result in more civilians dying.

Weapons systems stopped receiving data they rely upon to hit Russian ­targets, hampering Ukraine’s ability to effectively defend itself against ­incoming attacks. There were also fears that those personnel operating UK-supplied equipment, such as Storm Shadow cruise missiles, could struggle to identify military positions without intelligence from the US.

Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian MP, told Times Radio that the “brutal” decision to pull American intelligence sharing after ­denying the country military aid meant “so many people will be doomed”. While insisting that the move would not change Ukraine’s resolve to fight on, she said: “It is obviously brutal and I cannot imagine how many people will pay the ultimate price for the ­decision.”

Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services secretary, vaccine skeptic RFK Jr., recommends eating better and ingesting castor oil for avoiding the measles outbreak that’s spreading on his watch (ABC News):

The measles outbreak in western Texas is continuing to grow with 25 cases confirmed over the last five days, bringing the total to 223 cases, according to new data published Tuesday.

Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, with 80 unvaccinated and 138 of unknown status, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. At least 29 people have been hospitalized so far.

Two deaths are reported so far, one child in West Texas and an adult in New Mexico. Both were unvaccinated. More are coming.

Trump’s team of DOGE assassins led by Musk is busily performing “hits” on tens of thousands of civil servants more loyal to their country and their missions than to Mafia Don. They’re losing their jobs. They may lose their homes soon enough.

Proposed cuts to Medicare could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without health care, force rural hopitals to close, and likely cause more unnecessary deaths.

In true Mafia Don fashion, Trump hopes to bribe citizens into keeping their mouths shut about it by issuing a “DOGE Dividend” (USA Today):

The $5,000 dividend checks would come from the claimed savings that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accrues on the path to its savings goal of $2 trillion, President Donald Trump said in February.

“We’re considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt,” Trump said in a during the Saudi-sponsored FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach last month.

If it happens, people will get “a piece of the action” taken out of the hide of neighbors who’ve lost government jobs or private-sector jobs that cease to exist because Musk has cancelled contracts that paid their mortgages, fed their families, and supported local businesses.

As far back as he can remember, Donald Trump always wanted to be a gangster. But getting rich as a mobster is nowhere near as sweet as being able to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people you’ll never know. And get away with it. That’s power. Mobsters just whack individuals. Donny and Elon have an entire republic in their sights.

Meanwhile, where I live boxes of breakfast cereal now go for $5.

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#Donalds_Desaparecidos

“So we’re disappearing people now? Nice to know,” Charlie Pierce writes at Esquire. He’s responding to the Department of Homeland Security over the weekend arresting Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, over his participation in protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Donald Trump’s DHS is now creating Desaparecidos.

Zeteo:

According to the advocates, at around 8:30 PM, Khalil and his wife – who is eight months pregnant – had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents pushed inside behind them. The agents allegedly did not identify themselves at first, instead asking for Khalil’s identity before detaining him.

The agents proceeded to tell Khalil’s wife that if she did not leave her husband and go to their apartment, they would arrest her too. The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card.

“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”

DHS had already sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana before a federal judge issued an order blocking Khalil’s deportation.

Pierce continues:

Are we now allowing the rendition of legal residents to black sites in the United States? Where would he be in Louisiana? Angola? That would be fun. There are six federal prison facilities in that state. One of those facilities in Oakdale was the subject of a Department of Justice report in 2020 for refusing to follow the Covid protocols mandated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons during the pandemic. Eight prisoners died there.

The New York Times reported:

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement on Sunday night that Mr. Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said. “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

“Aligned”? So, Khalil was arrested for wrongthink. One hopes Khalil wasn’t flown to Louisiana by helicopter.

Whether or not one agrees with the Gaza protests, the action of Trump 2.0 against Khalil appears to be part of a systemic attack on the First Amendment that is now S.O.P. for the Trump administration.

Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin last week sent a letter to Georgetown University — a private university — threatening that “that his office will not consider hiring anyone affiliated with a university that utilizes DEI,” the Washington Post reported:

Martin added two questions: “First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum? Second, if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”

William M. Treanor, the dean and executive vice president of Georgetown Law, responded:

The First Amendment, Treanor wrote, “guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it,” noting that the Supreme Court “has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”

Martin, Treanor wrote, was threatening to deny students and graduates of Georgetown opportunities until Martin approved its curriculum, and he said the school looked forward to confirming that applicants for employment would receive “full and fair consideration” in the future, adding that the Constitution was clearly on Georgetown’s side.

“Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution,” Treanor wrote.

All of which has landed the United States of America under Donald Trump on a watch list of countries with “faltering civic freedoms” (The Independent):

CIVICUS, a nonprofit organization that serves as an advocate for democracy, added the U.S. to the list on Monday. It’s the first watchlist of the year.

Claiming the U.S. was “once a global champion for democracy and human rights,” CIVICUS said Trump’s attempts to remake the federal government in his vision and remove the U.S. from global participation have raised concerns that it is infringing on democratic freedoms.

The U.S. joins the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Chile, Slovakia and 37 other countries on the list of countries with “narrowed” civic freedoms.

How’s the water in that pot, froggies? Warm enough yet?

Update: Fixed photo heading. Pinochet : Chilean. (h/t SS)

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Citizens are restless

Some items from the Threads feed this morning.

View on Threads

View on Threads

View on Threads

View on Threads

Coming soon to MAGAstan.

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They ain’t gonna change

All the personality of “wet cardboard,” a friend said over the weekend of Democrats’ House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.). It wasn’t a comment on his abilities as a legislator. I’m sure Jeffries can count and whip votes with the best of them. Democrats’ problem is their insistance on making their legislative leaders their spokespersons when the skill sets are not necessarily (and frequently are not) coincident.

A raft of postings describing Democrats flailing and failing to respond to Trump 2.0’s march to dismantle the republic appeared over the last week. “Democrats Voice Regret on Scattered Responses to Trump’s Speech,” declares The New York Times. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told Fox News that Democrats’ scattered response to the president’s Tuesday address was “not a good look” and the backlash to Texas Rep. Al Green’s heckling Donald Trump “was ‘a distraction’ from Democrats’ economic messaging.”

The conservative Politico describes ‘Potty mouth’ Democrats as “cursing up a storm” and at the same time being no good at it. “If the first time you’ve used a cuss word in public is reading off a script, it’s probably not authentic and not something you should do,” says Democratic adviser Lis Smith.

The headline on Michael Tomasky’s commentary at The New Republic reads, “Humor Is Vital to Effective Protest, and the Democrats Suck at It.” Even the little signs members held up at the speech — “Lies,” “False,” “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” — were lame.

Tomasky writes:

What they should have done with those little signs is mock Trump. “Stormy Daniels Says Hi.” “E. Jean Carroll Wants Her Money.” “Convicted Felon.” “43 Counts.” “2029 = Prison.” “Orange You Ashamed?” Whatever. And, reviving the old Spy magazine classic, “Short-Fingered Vulgarian.”

That would have rattled him. He doesn’t care about lies or Medicaid. He cares about his vanity and never being wrong. It also would have completely outraged the right-wing propaganda complex. It would have dominated the news coverage for days. In fact we’d still be talking about it.

Here’s something you’ve read here before: “Democrats just can’t seem to think outside the box,” Tomasky complains. “The public language of liberalism has become so timid, so afraid to offend, that too many forms of humor are just out of bounds.” They are “over-cautious and over-earnest in how they talk about almost everything.”

Semafor reported last month that the party is scrambling for a new communications strategy. It doesn’t exactly come off as authentic, writes the Bulwark’s Laura Egan:

But those efforts have led, often, to online mockery. And Democratic officials acknowledge that a lot of the content is still giving off a “How do you do, fellow kids?” vibe.

[…]

FOR THOSE ADVISING DEMOCRATS ON HOW TO GET a better footing in the social media space, the general belief is that the only way through is to rip off the band-aid. That might mean enduring a number of cringe attempts at social media posts until someone figures it out, or until more dynamic and online officials emerge as national leaders.

Democrats’ aging leadership is “living in the past, it’s a new generation,” as Joan Jett sang 45 years ago. They haven’t kept up and they “ain’t gonna change.” Their risk-aversion not only makes their efforts feel inauthentic, but they come off as trend-followers not trend-setters. And it does not smell like leadership to voters, especially younger ones now registering as independents in droves.

“It is more dangerous to be ignored than it is to get yelled at,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century.

You get the idea. I’m of a certain age and I get it.

NEW: I just asked Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett if she had a message to Elon Musk.

What would she say to him? Here was her answer:

“Fuck off.” pic.twitter.com/LvzTmmqY1C

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) February 25, 2025

Democrats’ attempts to adapt to the new media environment and to master the attention economy fail miserably, in part, because the leadership’s politics dates from the age of 5-1/4″ floppy disks. Caucus leaders like Jeffries mistakenly resent younger caucus members like AOC and Max Frost to whom social media engagement comes naturally. And “potty mouth” Jasmine Crockett of Texas who don’t give a damn ’bout her reputation. She brings it, the newsies report it, and social media spreads it.

This party is not going to recover lost ground until it retires officials who are past their best-by dates. That’s not about age but about skill sets.

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If Trump looks like a Russian asset, walks like a Russian asset, etc.

The Donald Trump nominees before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week were U.S. Ambassador to NATO nominee Matthew Whitaker (the former Trump acting Attorney General who looks like Marvel’s Kingpin once sold manly toilets), and Deputy Secretary of State nominee Christopher Landau, former ambassador to Mexico in the first Trump administration. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D) of Oregon meant to use his time to talk about the elephant in the room. He wasted no time.

“Is President Trump a Russian asset?” Merkley asked bluntly.

Asked first, of course Landau said, “Absolutely not.”

Merkley then explained that he’d asked because others have asked him that question and, to all appearances, “they say, ‘If [Trump] was an asset, we would see exactly what he’s doing now.’ “

Closer to the Edge substack transcribes Merkley’s listing of evidence:

Senator Merkley: “For example… he proceeded to forward — or express from the Oval Office — propaganda that has been Russian propaganda… that Ukraine started the war… that, uh… Zelensky is a dictator.”

Step one: repeat Kremlin talking points like they’re gospel.

Senator Merkley: “Second of all… he gave away key things on the negotiating table before the negotiations even started, ensuring the U.S. would absolutely oppose, um… any possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine.”

That’s like showing up to a poker game and tossing your entire stack of chips across the table before the first card’s dealt.

Senator Merkley: “Uh… third… he’s cut off the arms shipments to Ukraine completely — undermining their ability against a massive neighbor next door with short supply lines and… and huge resources.”

Pause here and picture Vladimir Putin popping champagne.

Senator Merkley: “Fourth… he’s undermined the partnership with Europe, which has been essential to security over the last 80 years — a major goal of Putin’s.”

At this point, Merkley wasn’t describing bad policy — he was reading Putin’s wish list.

Senator Merkley: “And then… he’s done everything to discredit and demean Zelensky on the international stage — notably with that shameful press conference in which he teamed up with the Vice President to attack Zelensky.”

Ah yes, that infamous JD Vance press conference — the diplomatic equivalent of shoving Zelensky’s head in a toilet while Putin watched from the corner clapping like a seal.

Senator Merkley: “I can’t imagine that if he was a Russian asset, he could be doing anything more favorable than these five points.”

Landau dodged and changed the subject, so Merkley turned to Whitaker and asked him instead if he approved of Trump’s five actions.

Manly Toilet Kingpin demured because “We’re in the middle of a very, uh… important peace negotiation.”

Merkley responded:

Senator Merkley: “I agree. Thank you. Uh… I… I do hope that we have an Administration that works to get the very best deal for Ukraine.

“But what a Russian asset would do would be to work to get the very best deal for Russia — and that appears to be exactly what Donald Trump is trying to accomplish.”

Perhaps “Is President Trump a Russian asset?” is a question all of Trump’s nominees should have to (not) answer.

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Trump 2.0 might as well use bombs and arson

If citizens feel whipsawed by the contradictions and backpedaling by Trump 2.0 policy malfeasance, it is hardly surprising. It’s not just the obvious intention to privatize government services things ought to be public (and not-for-profit), it’s the threat those privatizing efforts pose to “Americans’ health, safety, and economic security,” writes Heather Cox Richardson.

Social Security is a perennial target for the right, and is once again. Trump 2.0 will sabotage it, collapse it, then argue that Republican dysfunction by design is reason to kill it:

In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.

Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.

How about some more whipsaw?

Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.

One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”

Why Maine, asked Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent. I can think of one reason.

Cruelty may be the point, and retribution may be Trump 2.0 policy, but chaos is the plan. It’s also an M.O. Streamlining government to save money isn’t the goal. Whatever else they fail at, Republicans are hell at sowing chaos. And sabotage.

You may recall how in Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin Republicans in 2011 passed a strict voter ID bill that disproportionately impacted “elderly voters, young voters, students, minorities and low-income voters.” To obtain the IDs, they would have to visit their local DMV offices with sometimes hard-to-get documents. Then Walker announced plans to close as many as 16 of them across the state before reversing after the backlash.

I wrote recently about a North Carolina bill that would make holding voter registration drives using official voter registration forms a misdemeanor. Making government user unfriendly is policy.

Musk-Trump chaos is already hurting the economy and the people who live with it, the New York Times editorial board suggested on Saturday. They need “a government that is steady and reliable“:

But in their campaign to shrink the federal government, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have defied laws passed by Congress, and they have challenged the authority of the federal courts to adjudicate the legality of their actions. Mr. Trump recently referred to himself as a king and then insisted he had been joking, but there is no ambiguity in his assertion of the power to defy other branches of government. It is a rejection of the checks and balances that have safeguarded our nation for more than 200 years. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are not trying to change laws; they are upending the rule of law.

That’s not a byproduct. That’s their program, sabotaging democracy and replacing it with something far worse except for everyone except the elite.

* * * * *

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Trump welcomes Putin, abandons liberal democracy

Donald Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (with a strong assist from J.D. Vance) was embarrassing and shocking in perhaps equal proportions. The convicted felon now occupying the White House got there with the approval of not even half of American voters (and only 64 percent of them) and with a little help from a “friend” of his and an enemy of democracy: Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump immediately set about surrendering U.S. leadership in the post-WWII order. He has in fact already dismantled it. As obsessed as Mr. America First is with winning, the real winner of the 2024 presidential elections was Putin, writes Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.

The Oval Office shouting match was a fist-pump moment for Putin signifying his “ultimate victory,” the moment when “the United States, became his most powerful ally.”

Except Foer’s conclusion is only true if one accepts (as the felon-who-would-be-king does) that Trump is the state. The other half of U.S. voters would strenuously disagree. But we do not control the levers of federal power nor speak for the United States in international fora. That is a problem we struggle to remedy. “Donald Trump does not speak for me” on a tee-shirt is little consolation to the people of war-torn Ukraine Trump has abandoned:

Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine’s depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

Trump has surrendered America’s 80 years of world leadership in less time than he took to bankrupt his Atlantic City casinos. Trump has set out a welcome mat for the world’s kleptocrats, especially Russian ones long thought to launder money through Trump properties:

His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

Trump has cut off support for Ukraine’s F-16s, including their radar jamming capabilities. France’s Mirage fighters are taking up that slack, reports Forbes.

The Guardian adds:

The US has rejected a Canadian proposal to establish a task force that would tackle Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, according to reports last night.

Canada, which has the current Group of Seven presidency, proposed the measure ahead of a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Quebec later this week.

In negotiations to agree a joint statement on maritime issues, the US is pushing to strengthen language about China while watering down wording on Russia, the reports said.

The “shadow fleet” refers to ageing oil tankers, the identities of which are hidden to help circumvent western economic sanctions imposed on Moscow since it launched its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022.

Trump’s affinity for Putin amounts to “autocrat envy,” Susan Miller, the former head of counterintelligence at the C.I.A., tells the New York Times:

“Trump likes Putin because Putin has control over his country,” she said. “And Trump wants control over his country.”

Why Are We Surprised by the Trump-Putin Alliance? reads a Foreign Policy headline. “Trump’s MAGA ideology aligns more closely with Putin’s vision of state, society, and global order than with Western liberal democracy.”

As Trump prepares for his summit with Putin, we should all be worried. Trump is well on his way to making the U.S. a pariah state.

(h/t DJ)

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions