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.
A lesson in what happens when you elect a criminal:
From the start of his second term, President Donald Trump and his administration signaled a willingness — even a desire — to flout the law in their quest to overhaul the federal government.
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.
WELCOME TO THE OVAL OFFICE🇺🇸
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) March 20, 2025
Donald Trump Truth Social Post 3/19/25 08:46 PM pic.twitter.com/MscbxOxvRa
Just look at that gaudy shithole. My God.
Talking Points Memo has been following the story of DOGE thugs breaking into the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C. TPM has coverage here, and here after a court hearing
But first, this blurb from The Independent on Wednesday’s hearing:
In a hearing in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, District Judge Beryl Howell asked Justice Department attorneys whether Donald Trump’s administration could enforce his executive order seeking to shutter the agency “without using the force of guns and threats by DOGE against American citizens.”
“I mean, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigations, using arms of law enforcement … probably terrorizing employees and staff at the institute, when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals … why?” she said. “Just because DOGE is in a rush?”
What’s changed (escalated) in the last week is that DOGE now has now forced its way into an independent, nonprofit, national institute separate from the Executive Branch, and did it by coopting D.C. Metro Police and Inter-Con, an armed, private security force with government contracts.
Josh Marshall is concerned. You should be too:
I want to draw out a critical element of what happened on Monday and which we learned today. DOGE went to the private security contractor working for USIP and essentially said, you don’t have a clear legal or ethical ability to do this. But if you don’t want to lose all your federal contracts, you have to. And they did.
This cuts to the core of DOGE’s role as a rogue operation inside the federal government and critically one that very much by design engineered its ability to work across the entire federal government. One department or another … none of that matters. DOGE is operating everywhere.
The critical point is this: There are a lot of very large federal security contractors who wield violence and force on behalf of the US government. In theory, they do it under the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and under law. But those contractors are also extremely vulnerable to DOGE because DOGE can make contracts disappear, absent any kind of review process, beyond the reach of the clout of stakeholders within any one agency, anywhere in the government. So the basic transition that occurred here has many potential applications. Maybe DOGE says to a policing contractor. Look, it’s not pretty. But if you don’t want to lose your contracts you’re going to have to break up that protest. Or maybe you need to take the mayor into custody. Simple point: lot of capacity of state violence and a lot of cash. And DOGE operates front to back across the transaction.
“Four out of every ten people who work for the U.S. government are private contractors,” according to the Project on Government Oversight (2017). U.S. government agencies employ thousands of contractors around the world, many of them provide private security services. They’d like to keep their lucrative contracts. So long as DOGE and its operatives inside the Trump administration exist, “Nice contract ya got there…” will provide leverage most won’t be able to resist when called on to do Trump’s pardon-powered bidding, even if the military under Pete Hegseth doesn’t. And we know what Trump wants done with protesters.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Americans may not give a damn about foreigners, but they’ll damn sure take their money. And do each year:
Travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s services exports and 7 percent of all exports in 2023. The travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2022 (2.97 percent of the country’s GDP), supporting 9.5 million jobs.
And the industry supports many more indirect jobs, as it does in my tourist town. Western North Carolina tourism got hit by Hurricane Helene and then by Donald Trump.
Before Donald Trump took office again in January, the U.S. Travel Association reported that according to the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), “there were 66.5 million international visits the U.S. in 2023, reflecting 31% annual growth, but still at just 84% of pre-pandemic inbound visitation levels.” International travel to the U.S. was booming:
International visitors are vital to the U.S. economy. Visitors from many countries spend an average of over $4,000 per visit, and collectively contribute $155 billion in U.S. travel spending every year. International visits also help balance the U.S. trade deficit, as travel spending is one of the biggest export services for the United States.
And after a few weeks of Trump’s trade wars and harrowing stories of foreigners being detained and abused at U.S. airports and other points of entry? Well, Charlie Pierce reports at Esquire that Trump 2.0 has “done everything except hang a sign at every port of entry reading, CLOSED: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”
The Washington Post reported over the weekend:
Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead. International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
All the 51st state talk from Trump is souring Canadians on visiting their southern cousins. A friend reports that Trump’s crackdown on foreigners who set foot inside our borders has scuttled plans for a Canadian friend’s 10th wedding anniversary party in Las Vegas. Months of planning, dozens of guests, a hotel block and entertainment reserved, etc. Canadian guests are bailing out. Tempers are flaring.
With insane stories like this from Jasmine Mooney back in Vancouver, a Canadian just trying to renew her U.S. work visa in San Diego, who wants to come here now?
There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.
Mooney had no idea why this was happening, and it just got worse. They gave her a space blanket and plunked her down in a frigid holding cell with no phone call for three days. Then they sent her to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, gave her a prison uniform and fingerprinted her.
“How long will I be here?”
“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now – you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”
Months.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
Then they sent Mooney in a prison bus to the San Luis Regional Detention Center in Arizona. It made the last jail feel like the Four Seasons. It took Mooney two weeks to get released. She felt lucky. Many of the women she met with fewer resources had been there longer.
If the system seemed rigged against that happening, Mooney thinks it is: “These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.”
And the prison business is booming. On Monday, DHS detained Badar Khan Suri at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Suri is an Indian “teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa,” NBC News reports. DHS and the State Department did not comment on his detention or why his visa had been revoked:
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said on X in response to the Politico story that Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”
So they say. Suri has been sent to the Alexandria Staging Facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, the same as Mahmoud Khalil.
NBC News reports, “Last week, ICE arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who took part in protests at Columbia and who overstayed her student visa, officials said.” Zero tolerance. Overstay your visa by one day and it’s the gulag.
According to a report from Tourism Economics, “Canada accounts for the sharpest projected decline in travelers to the U.S., with the firm forecasting a 15% drop in the number of visits from the U.S.’ northern neighbor in 2025.” But that’s not all (CBS News):
Overall, international travel from all foreign countries to the U.S. is expected to drop by just over 5%, according to the report. Factoring in diminished spending by Americans traveling domestically this year, overall travel spending in the U.S. could drop up to $64 billion in 2025, according to Tourism Economics, a unit of investment advisory firm Oxford Economics.
“The negative effects of an expanded trade war scenario will reach U.S. hotel room demand in 2025,” Tourism Economics said in the report. “Domestic travel will be negatively affected by slower income growth and higher prices while international travel to the U.S. will be hit by a trifecta of slower economies, a stronger dollar and antipathy towards the U.S.”
Charlie Pierce adds:
People don’t want to come here any more. Come April, here in Boston, the administration may have a worse effect on international participation in the Boston Marathon than the pandemic did. In three years, Los Angeles is due to host the Olympics and the Paralympics, and it’s hard to imagine we’ll have regained the trust of the world by then.
And then there are all the other reasons people have to come to this country that, in its previous generosity, it shared with the world. No more Japanese people on the Freedom Trail up here. No more Brits visiting Independence Hall in Philadelphia to show they don’t hold any grudges. No more Brazilians, or Costa Ricans, or, God help us, Venezuelans staring awestruck into the Grand Canyon. And, what the hell, the government doesn’t care about national parks anymore anyway.
How about a nice, relaxing vacation in a U.S. private prison instead?
Donald Trump is a business genius, dontcha know.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
The New York Times published this a few years back explaining that ad from 1987:
Like so many Americans of his generation, Trump’s world view was shaped by the trauma of the hostage crisis and the sense of US decline in the late 1970s and 1980s. He also shared the widespread sense that America’s allies were not pulling their weight, in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and that these “friends” were taking unfair advantage of the United States with respect to trade. In September 1987, Trump paid almost $95,000 to take out a full-page newspaper advertisement that ran in the New York Times and several other outlets to air his grievances with America’s leaders and its allies. .
He sounded like a simpleminded fool then and he sounds even dumber now after everything that’s happened in the nearly 40 years since he saw something on Larry King that gave him the idea. In case you can’t read it above, here it is:
There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.
An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.
To The American People:
For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.
The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent. Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? Saudi Arabia, a country whose very existence is in the hands of the United States, last week refused to allow us to use their mine sweepers (which are, sadly, far more advanced than ours) to police the Gulf. The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.
Over the years, the Japanese, unimpeded by the huge costs of defending themselves (as long as the United States will do it for free), have built a strong and vibrant economy with unprecedented surpluses. They have brilliantly managed to maintain a weak yen against a strong dollar. This, coupled with out monumental spending for their, and others, defense, has moved Japan to the forefront of world economies.
Now that the tides are turning and the yen is becoming strong against the dollar, the Japanese are openly complaining and, in typical fashion, our politicians are reacting to these unjustified complaints.
It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.
Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies. Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from some of the greatest profit machines ever created — machines created and nurtured by us. “Tax” these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Trump
He simply does not understand how trade works. In fact, his thinking has actually evolved in one small way. He now believes that we don’t need to trade with other countries at all and America can build, grow and manufacture everything people could want or need at home and will sell overseas but only as long as there are no taxes or tariffs on American goods. He believes we can do this without immigration somehow (prison labor?) In other words he has actually become even dumber as time went on about how the world works.
Sure, there are useful tariffs at times and the US needs to manufacture more of its necessary goods if only for reasons of national security. But this is just nuts. Trade is inherent in capitalism and his fundamental lack of understanding about how it works is leading us to a trade war, a recession and a rapid, chaotic,devolution of the world economic order — and not in a good way.
JV Last the Bulwark makes an important point that has been driving me nuts too:
Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.
Again.
Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.
I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.
Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.
Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.
He goes on to list one disease and health condition after another that has been eradicated or massively reduced in just the last half century. Cancer alone has changed from an automatic death sentence to commonly treatable and it’s getting better every day. (Or was … until now.)
Yes, diabetes is a major new problem mostly due to obesity. But there are some extremely effective new drugs that Bobby Jr and his crew want to take off the market. He says people just need to “eat right.” (No word on whether they should take steroids like he does.) There was a time when that kind of thing was said to be nanny state authoritarianism but now all those people at the Trump rallies are apparently going to switch to arugula and beet juice because Bobby says they should. Sure.
It’s all fatuous nonsense. Yes, people should eat healthier food. I’m all for it. It would be nice if it was more available and people had the time to cook their own food at home and didn’t eat processed junk. Unfortunately, just as Trump and his flunkies keep insisting that Trump gets to do whatever he wants because America voted for him, America has also voted for fast food and sugar and processed junk and they think they get to do what they want as well.
It’s fine to proselytize about healthy eating (although I remember Michelle Obama being excoriated for doing that) but it won’t cure all the diseases that make us sick and die, no matter how much Bobby and his goo-goo cohort thinks it will. It’s medical science that has given us the extra, healthier decades that we enjoy today and ruining it will take them away again. Make America Healthy Again — like it was in the 1890s.
Watch Timothy Snyder school poor Marge Greene:
Well, this is embarrassing.
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) March 17, 2025
Marjorie Taylor Greene tries to push Russian propaganda about Ukrainian nazis, and is completely shut down by Holocaust Historian and the Leading Scholar on Ukrainian Nationalism in America, Dr. Snyder. pic.twitter.com/ZPjjt9XznY
There have always been stupid people in Congress so Marge isn’t unique in that sense. But she is one of the most arrogantly stupid I’ve ever seen. This is a person who just a few years ago was all in on QAnon and just keeps “doing her own research.” I wish I thought she learned something yesterday but I don’t.
Even Laura Ingraham knows his dementia is getting worse.
The Air Force Times has more evidence of the “DEI” purge going on at the Pentagon:
Some Air Force webpages on pioneering female pilots — from World War II to the modern era — have been taken offline, as the Trump administration continues its drive to eliminate diversity-related materials from government sites.
Air Force Times identified at least a dozen pages on the WWII-era Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, and retired Maj. Gen. Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot, including biographies, photos, museum exhibits, a video and a commentary, were no longer online as of Tuesday.
The URLs for three of those pages were modified with the acronym “dei” — short for diversity, equity and inclusion — a term the Trump administration has used as a pejorative.
The removals come as the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have assailed diversity-related initiatives of previous administrations, calling them divisive and a distraction from efforts to make the military more “lethal.” President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office ending those initiatives and later directed the military and other government agencies to swiftly pull such materials from public view.
I guess that figures. It’s quite clear that Hegseth doesn’t think women belong in the military. He’s been forced to sort of accept it for now because they are necessary. But this DEI purge of all recognition of non-white men, LGBT and women pretty much says where he’d like to take it if given the chance. Those white supremacist tattoos and his history of sexual assault should have been the first clue.