Trump: You know, you have that artificial line because it is straight artificial and look like it was drawn by a ruler. I don't mean a ruler like a king but a ruler like a ruler this way. It is just an artificial line that was drawn in the sand. In the ice. You add that to this… pic.twitter.com/zvi4Vwu3PZ
“You know, you have that artificial line because it is straight artificial and look like it was drawn by a ruler. I don’t mean a ruler like a king but a ruler like a ruler this way. It is just an artificial line that was drawn in the sand. In the ice. You add that to this country and what a beautiful landmass anywhere in the world. It was cut off for whatever reason. It would be great.”
When I say Canada should be a state I really mean that.
I believe he does. And he’s doubling down every day. He wants the big “land mass” because it will look great on a map. And now he says they don’t “have the cards.”
Trump: "We don't need anything from Canada, and yet it costs up $200b in subsidy to keep Canada afloat. So when I say they should be a state, I mean that. I really mean that … some people don't have the cards." pic.twitter.com/wGKcEdcRoT
Considering what he’s doing right now I don’t think it’s wise to chalk up this talk to “Trump just being Trump” unless you recognize that Trump being Trump means that he’s just batshit enough to do something truly crazy.
Trump: We'll sell our allies toned down military planes, because someday, maybe they're not our allies pic.twitter.com/AnmsahRorf
The insanity grew stronger: after the telephone talks with putin, which @realDonaldTrump tried to sell as a historic breakthrough, a drone show was staged in the skies of Florida. The drones performed the "Trump dance", wrote laudatory slogans in the sky like: "the best president… pic.twitter.com/MtH94cXOY7
Whatever happened to to Critical Race Theory, also known by its three letter acronym, CRT? If you’ll recall it was the cause celebre of the 2021 Virginia Governor’s race which had all the DC tongues wagging about the resurgence of the right wing culture war. “Moms for Liberty” which grew out of the anti-mask, anti vax crusades of the pandemic quickly adopted it as their crusade and was given credit for Glenn Youngkin’s win that year. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made it one of the primary targets of his “anti-woke” campaign for re-election in 2022 and rode it hard during his presidential run the next year.
The whole movement against CRT was the brainchild of a right wing activist by the name of Christopher Rufo who single-handedly pushed the idea into the mainstream in 2020, during the pandemic. He had been making some waves about it for a while and caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, then Fox News’ top talent. He appeared on his show and made a big splash with this comment:
“Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And I’d like to make it explicit: The President and the White House—it’s within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.”
Most people had no idea what it was but the Republican base was very excited at the chance to attack anything that sounded like a discussion of racism. Some school districts banned the teaching of CRT which was a very easy thing to do since schools weren’t teaching it in the first place. (It was a graduate school topic that never had any application to elementary and high school curriculum.) There was a spate of book banning and cancellations of African American history classes, particularly in Florida where Desantis was making his bones as a MAGA-style warrior and brought Rufo in as an adviser. But after the GOP defeat of 2022 and DeSantis’s spectacular flameout in the presidential race, CRT faded as a right wing boogeyman.
It had been replaced by a new three letter enemy, DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It too was the brainchild of Rufo and thanks to the disastrous restoration of Donald Trump to the White House, we are watching it being turned into policy on a national scale.
DEI is basically a concept that’s been around since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which made discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin illegal in employment. Over the decades as people began to fully recognize that the historic marginalization of those groups required greater effort to address that discrimination, the various institutions in society from corporations to academia to government put policies in place to ensure they had a fair shot. It eventually included ethnic, religious and LGBTQ+ communities and became part of the American workplace.
It was in 2020 when the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement galvanized the whole planet and precipitated efforts to ramp up DEI programs across society that the backlash began in earnest. I’m sure right wingers had hated it forever, for obvious reasons, and there were plenty of other people who felt that some of it was overkill, fuelling the larger “anti-woke” fervor that had the MAGA base up in arms over everything from kitty litter in the schools to Mr. Potatohead to rainbow onesies at Target.
Trump explicitly ran on ending DEI throughout his campaign much as he had run against “common core” in his first campaign but he had no real idea what it was. It got an applause line from the MAGA faithful and that’s always good enough for him. But there are many people around him who do know what it is, namely the Project 2025 authors who explicitly called for a variety of terms to be deleted from “from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” as well as the dismantling of every DEI program that exists in the government.
He’s doing it exactly as they instructed. All the DEI programs have been cancelled and the people running them have been fired. Scientific research is being strangled by orders to the NIH and CDC as well as all University grantees to eliminate any research focused on diverse populations (which includes “women.”) Trump even blamed DEI for the fatal plane crash in Washington DC in February suggesting that the FAA had hired unqualified air traffic controllers. The EEOC and the Department of Justice are going after law firms, universities and private companies demanding they account for their DEI programs, suggesting they are guilty of discriminatory hiring practices. It is a full court press across all of society.
If you want to know the real motivation for all this you need to look no further than what’s been going on at the Pentagon over the last couple of weeks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made it quite clear before he was nominated that he believes racial minorities, women and LGBTQ members of the military are inferior. His first step upon taking the job was to have Trump fire the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whom he had called “DEI” earlier) replacing him with a white man and the two top women officers leaving the military without a single woman in a four-star general or admiral leadership position.
The Pentagon web sites recognizing the contributions of racial minorities such as the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo Code talkers, as well as all the women pilots going all the way back to WWII, were taken down with urls that distinctly said “DEI.” They removed all the references to the same at the website of Arlington National Cemetery.
The Pentagon restored some of the web sites as they’ve caused public outcry but many that aren’t famous will probably go unnoticed. But even if they put them all back, we can see the intention. The Pentagon spokesman said “we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex.”
In other words, they do not believe that the stories of these particular patriots having overcome the discrimination and adversity that led to them to being the “firsts” and the “few” are important. In fact, they want to erase all traces of that discrimination and adversity altogether and pretend it never happened. They want to pretend that the world is a meritocracy where white men just happen to be the best. DEI says that’s not true and they are not going to stand for it.
The State Department Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie said it most plainly in a post on twitter a while back: “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
That’s what the fight against DEI is all about. And in just two months, Trump and his henchmen have gotten a vast swathe of American society scrambling to ensure that no one will ever say otherwise again.
NC Democrats are still fighting attacks on their win
I’ve got somewhere to be in a few minutes, so please excuse me. The NC Appeals Court hearing on the Griffin challenge is this morning at 9:45 a.m.:
Three judges on the state Court of Appeals will hear arguments on Friday in Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin’s effort to throw out votes so he can win a seat on the Supreme Court.
Griffin, himself an appeals court judge, is suing the state Board of Elections in his attempt to toss out more than 60,000 votes he claims were illegally cast. Griffin is seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. Riggs is ahead by 734 votes, a lead that has been affirmed in two recounts.
Slate reports that details are now emerging about the “evidence” the Trump administration used to round up and incarcerate 250 Venezuelans in a notorious Salvadoran supermax prison.
Trump 2.0’s PR strategy behind this roundup is to claim — without providing evidence or even deportees names — that each and every one is a violent terrorist present on U.S. soil illegally, trust us. And then dare human rights activists to defend not deporting the supposed threats to Americans’ safety. Except it’s the extrajudicial deportation of #Donalds_Desaparecidos that’s at issue.
Trump 2.0 has taken an illegal page from the Bush II administration’s “extraordinary rendition” campaign 20 years ago. As a result of a “a paper-thin evidential chain,” Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, endured 10 months of beatings in Syria after being detained while changing planes at JFK airport. He was later released without charge. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after enduring two years of torture in Syria over allegations of al-Qaida connections. According to the Guardian newspaper, El Maati eventually “reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal,” including Arar. (I wrote an op-ed on this at the time.)
Trump 2.0 claims that the Venezuelans it rendered to El Salvador “are terrorists by virtue of their alleged membership in the Tren de Aragua gang,” but as with the kidnapping the U.S. did during Bush’s “global war on terror” (GWOT), “evidence of this affiliation is weak to the point of nonexistence.”
Consider Jerce Reyes Barrios, one victim of the deportations: a professional soccer player who had fled Venezuela after protesting against dictator Nicolás Maduro and was living peacefully in the U.S. until the government snatched him up and deported him to El Salvador. Linette Tobin, Barrios’ attorney, submitted a declaration in federal court that detailed the disturbing reasons why her client was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After entering the U.S. last year, Barrios was scheduled to have an asylum hearing in April. But on Saturday, he was arrested and held at a San Diego detention facility after ICE agents accused him of being a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that President Donald Trump has been fixated on to fulfill his mass-deportation plan.
ICE’s accusations were based on two things. First, Barrios has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball that, federal immigration authorities allege, “is proof of gang membership.” In reality, Tobin wrote, the tattoo was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer team, which is also circular in shape and features a crown. Second, Barrios posted a photo of himself on social media in which he’s gesturing with both hands, with his middle fingers down. This, federal agents claimed, was also proof of gang membership—except that Barrios’ hand gesture actually means “I love you” in sign language and is also commonly used as a symbol of rock ’n’ roll.
In the second episode of Netflix’s “Adolescence,” the son of an English detective investigating a girl’s murder pulls him aside to warn him that his embarrassing misreading of emojis in social media posts has him completely misunderstanding the case he’s building. Dad simply has no clue how online youth code works. Neither do ICE’s flunkies regarding tattoos. Nor are they inclined to care. Not when the boss’ mandate is deport ’em all, let El Salvador sort ’em out.
Trump 2.0 has adopted strategies for avoiding judicial review of its disappearing any non-citizens it deems undesirable. They will get to you soon enough.
Slate ponders what’s changed:
It’s an open question whether ICE targeted these men because of their tattoos or whether agents detained them first, then fabricated a pretext later. Those details will hopefully be sorted out when lawyers for the victims can interrogate those who perpetrated this scheme. What matters most now is that judges have an opportunity to review the alleged evidence, in conjunction with the relevant law, and end this persecution before its test run is expanded into a full-blown suspension of all immigrants’ constitutional rights.
[I]n a private discussion at the start of a meeting of the center’s board on Monday, Mr. Trump offered something he usually steers away from in bigger settings: a personal anecdote about his childhood.
He told the assembled board members that in his youth he had shown special abilities in music after taking aptitude tests ordered by his parents, according to three participants in the meeting.
He could pick out notes on the piano, he told the board members, some of whom he’s known for years and others who are relatively new to him. But the president said that his father, Fred Trump, was not pleased by his musical abilities, according to the participants, and that he had never developed his talent. One person in the room said Mr. Trump appeared to be joking about his father.
“I have a high aptitude for music,” he said at one point, according to people at the meeting. “Can you believe that?”
“That’s why I love music,” he added.
He has a great aptitude for epidemiology too. Everyone said so. Because his Uncle taught at MIT, dontcha know.
I’ve been struggling with where I’ve heard this piano thing before and I finally remembered. It’s from “Pride and Prejudice” the scene in Lady Catherine De Bourgh’s drawing room:
“Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”
Here’s the movie version:
Here’s the countrified Mr. Collins, Lee Greenwood:
“He’s absolutely very creative and very artistic,” Mr. Greenwood said. “I do not doubt that he has a great ear for music.”
The following goes way beyond Catherine De Bourgh. It’s full Kim Jong Un:
Asked about the anecdote, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, did not directly address it but said that the president “is a virtuoso and his musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.” Mr. Cheung said that, given Mr. Trump’s roles as president and Kennedy Center chair, “there is nobody more uniquely qualified to bring this country, and its rich history of the arts, back to prominence.”
Yeah, he’s a musical genius. And a simply fabulous dancer:
The Federal Reserve’s first set of projections since Donald Trump’s inauguration underscored—in the central bank’s understated and technocratic fashion—just how much the president’s plans to press ahead with widespread tariffs have turned the economic outlook on its head.
Months ago, policymakers presumed they would spend 2025 gradually cutting rates to keep inflation heading down without a big rise in joblessness to achieve the so-called soft landing. The latest projections point to the prospect that tariffs covering a swath of goods and materials will send up prices while sapping investment, sentiment and growth, at least in the short run.
“We now have inflation coming in from an exogenous source, but the underlying inflationary picture before that was basically 2½% inflation, 2% growth and 4% unemployment,” said Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday.
Officials projected weaker growth, higher unemployment and higher inflation than they had anticipated in December. Moreover, nearly all officials judged that if their forecasts were to be proven wrong, it would be in the direction of even softer growth, more joblessness and firmer price growth.
Everyone on Wall St and all the CEOs know that these tariff threats are ridiculous , that the DOGE cuts are chaotic and destructive, not to mention that foreign relations are as unstable as they’ve been in modern memory. But most of them are going along with it and I’m starting to believe they’ve bought into the “Magical Trump” theory: he beat all the odds despite being a criminal moron slathered in orange make-up with the personality of a used car salesman which means he must be doing something right. So they’ve discarded reality to join the MAGA delusion.
The Fed doesn’t seem to have bought into that. Maybe they will eventually. More likely Trump is going to fire Powell or, at the very least, replace him with a flunky when his term is up next year. But in the meantime, reality still exists in one corner of our official society.
It looks like they’re the only white demographic in which a large majority knows what time it is.
I confess I’m surprised to see so many college educated white men embracing wanton law-breaking and bigotry. Thank goodness I’m not seeing that in my real life. I feel sorry for the women who are. It must be excruciating — like living with a Vichy sympathizer in WWII.
And while the wheels of justice turn slowly, less than two months later a procession of judges have already ruled the administration has done exactly that.
In more than a dozen cases — and in three major rulings this week alone — a federal judge has ruled that the administration either has violated the law or has probably done so.
The total works out to one such finding about every four days.
And the pace is speeding up.
The most interesting thing about this is, as I posted yesterday, this is coming from liberal, centrist and conservative judges, across the board. Just as it was in the post 2020 election period he’s not finding any joy in court. Yet, anyway. I suppose that’s why the threats against judges are picking up:
Elon Musk has made the maximum allowable donation to Republican members of Congress who support impeaching federal judges who are impeding actions taken by President Trump, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.
Mr. Musk has given what had been until recently the legal maximum hard-dollar donation — $6,600 — to the campaigns of seven Republicans who have either endorsed judicial impeachments or called for some form of “action” in response to recent rulings against the Trump administration, including a weekend decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington.
On Saturday, Judge Boasberg ordered the administration to turn around planes carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador and return them to the United States. The administration did not comply with that order, prompting concerns about a constitutional showdown.
Mr. Trump subsequently said on social media that Judge Boasberg should be impeached.Mr. Musk contributed on Wednesday to Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin and Brandon Gill of Texas. He also donated to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.
He’s playing the refs (or nobody told him how impeachment works) but it is stupid. Judges know as well as we do that they don’t have the votes to convict. But I think Elon’s in his feelings right now and just wants to thank his friends.
