Says the man who has withheld military aid and intelligence to Ukraine just in the last week, resulting in dozens of lost innocent lives. (Also, Israel has just cut off electricity to Gaza. No doubt Trump is cheering them on.)
I think this is the clearest sign of his dementia. He’s convinced himself that he can make this happen. It’s ridiculous.
Josh Marshall had some thoughts on this on BlueSky today that I thought were insightful:
The word “trade war” gets thrown around casually. They’re usually more tits for tats, escalating diplomatic eye-poking. But what Trump is doing now with Canada, just upgraded with new tariffs this morning, is more and more like waging a war against our neighbor albeit it economic means.
The tariffs now are far, far beyond anything with an economic or trade logic behind them, even in the sense of creating pressure for an agreement. These are more like trying to wreck Canada’s economy and immiserate its people. Combine that with endless demands for an anschluss and you see the true nature of what’s happening here.
Those of in the US who are ashamed of Trump’s shambling moral degeneracy and predation can’t help but see the 51st state horseshit as fundamentally stupid. But in its totality, I’m sure it seems like more than stupid to our friends and neighbors in Canada because at the end of the day the US probably could starve the Canadian economy.
And of course, we have nuclear weapons, the most powerful military in the world. Of course, that’s craziness to even talk of such things. But do you know you where Trump’s limit really is? I didn’t think so.
Seriously, you have to think about it. He’s decompensating every day and he’s getting more and more irrational and aggressive. There is nobody in his inner circle to stop him.
Yes, that’s the worst case scenario and maybe it’s hyperbolic to even bring it up. But even if he doesn’t go that far, look how far they are willing to let him go:
Here’s quote from Mike Johnson who is allegedly a smart guy. Does this make any sense at all to you?
We knew that the U.S. pardon attorney was fired by the Trump Justice Department on Friday in a new purge of senior attorneys. Now we know why.
In a interview with the NYT, Elizabeth G. Oyer says she was terminated hours after she refused to go along with a rushed, last-minute attempt to put actor Mel Gibson on a list of people who would have their gun rights restored.
Gibson cannot legally carry a firearm after a 2011 domestic violence misdemeanor conviction.
Oyer describes a careful deliberative process to come up with a list of people whose gun rights could be safely restored then her growing dismay as that process was circumvented to try to add Gibson, who had not been vetted.
Oyer said she came under increasing pressure to sign off on Gibson, culminating in a call from a senior official in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche: “He then essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation,” she said.
They’re actually saying this stuff out loud now, not even trying to make up some kind of story to cover their corruption. Blanche, who was a US Attorney for many years and definitely knows better, just told her flat out to do it for the boss. The corruption is complete.
Can someone please tell me why that drunken lunatic Mel Gibson should be able to own a gun? He’s rich enough to hire security 24/7 and probably does. He’s nuts and he’s dangerous and can only need one to threaten or shoot someone when he’s drunk or angry.
Musk: “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s the half trillion, maybe 600 or 700 billion a year. That’s also the mechanism by which Democrats attract & retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here & then turning them into voters.”
Put it in an ad and get it on the air. Play it until he’s gone or until November 2026.
As Francis Collins, longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, took to the steps below the Lincoln Memorial on Friday for a sound check before speaking at the Stand Up for Science rally, he was confronted by an agitated protester who warned, “You’re going to prison.”
The incident was witnessed by a reporter from STAT, and the man afterward identified himself only as “Jeff” and said he was there to protest Collins’ oversight of NIH, and specifically the agency’s funding of gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where some believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated. “He’s an indicted felon, he lied before Congress,’’ Jeff, baselessly, told the reporter.
The confrontation was the latest public manifestation of the dramatically altered public image of Collins, from a near-legendary geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and was beloved by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — and was asked to stay on by President Trump in his first term — to a target demonized by Trump’s Make America Great Again followers.
Collins told STAT he is so concerned for his personal safety that he has hired security at his home.
“If I become more outspoken now, as I was on Friday, about the harms that are being done, it probably increases my visibility and the chances that such threats or maybe even real actions will become more likely,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t go hide under my desk.”
“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.
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.
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.
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?
All the silicon valley tech bros worship Ayn Rand and see Elon Musk as our own John Galt. Actually, not so much. Paul Crider at the Bulwark:
MANY AMONG THE SILICON VALLEY ULTRA-RICH dominating the news think of themselves as heroes out of an Ayn Rand novel. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen prate on about how we are living in Atlas Shrugged now. Peter Thiel has spoken at the annual gala of the Randian Atlas Society. These figures and their peers are discussed in the popularpress with frequentreference to Rand. Meanwhile, many (though by no meansall) devotees of Rand’s writings idolizeMusk…
But a deeper examination reveals these oligarchs resemble Rand’s heroes far less than her villains. Elon Musk in particular is a grab-bag of Randian vices. […]
A central virtue in Rand’s ethics is self-esteem. Musk’s arrogance, his apparent conviction that he is the main character of history on a quest to take humanity to Mars, may seem like an overabundance of self-esteem… Musk’s compulsive attention-seeking is a sign not of self-esteem but of a desperate need for external validation. This is a man who cheats at video games to look impressive.
No doubt about it. He’s as much of a cheating narcissist as Trump and that’s saying something.
Musk is unquestionably a looter in Rand’s schema. Musk’s companies rake in billions of government subsidies, and Tesla has only been able to stay solvent with government assistance. One might forgive this in the interest of ramping up electric vehicle production in order to replace internal-combustion vehicles. But Musk uses his coziness with the state as an economic weapon. Musk himself has said, “Take away the subsidies, it will only help Tesla,” a clear admission that he would use state power to cripple his competitors. […]
Both Musk (through SpaceX) and Thiel (through Palantir) are major defense contractors, which means their financial interests are in the hands of the politicians they fund. Rand in Atlas Shrugged calls this the “aristocracy of pull” to describe how power in Washington operated by crooked deals and favors between connected insiders—business leaders and politicians.
Many of the villains in the book thrive in this environment.
Then there’s the sick quest for domination:
As the article points out his current Twitter feed is filled with that sort of talk. Here’s today’s gem:
Isolated, this could just be shitposting, itself a venerable enough craft. But Musk’s blitzkrieg through the federal agencies, shuttering offices and firing career employees with jocular contempt, lays bare the truth: He enjoys the feeling of hurting those he considers his enemies, along with bystanders, in the knowledge that everyone is powerless to stop him. Whether it’s his Twitter takeover or dismantling government agencies, Musk takes an arsonist’s delight in destroying things that people value, and have reason to value.
This author describes Rand’s heroes this way and it’s not that:
The heroes of Atlas Shrugged take no such pleasure in destruction or in the subjugation of others, even when it is necessary. Led by Rand’s fictional mouthpiece, John Galt, each of the heroes gives this oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (emphasis added). To dominate others is to sacrifice their rational interests and happiness for the sake of your own.
Frankly, that may have been the idea but I’ve never seen a Randian who wasn’t a domineering asshole. Still, the point stands. By Rand’s own telling Musk is no John Galt.
Paul Krugman did a great job of running down the backlash that’s rapidly developing among the public that says it all in this piece called “The Paranoid Style in Maga Policy”. This was the most interesting observation, however:
As the economy stumbles and the stock market tanks, consumer confidence lags, and even some Trump voters are losing faith, what I find particularly revealing is how the Trump cabal are responding. They aren’t rethinking their policies; they aren’t even making major efforts to justify their policies to an increasingly skeptical public. Instead, they’ve instantly descended into a pit of insane conspiracy theories.
Thus, according to Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, those rowdy audiences at town halls aren’t citizens sincerely concerned about government layoffs and looming cuts to Medicaid; they’re “paid protestors” hired by “George Soros-funded groups”.
Gotta say, those Soros people are pretty impressive if they’ve managed to secretly hire fake protestors for town halls all across America.
What about those Tesla protests? According to Musk, they aren’t a response to his Nazi salutes and the chainsaw DOGE has been taking to crucial public services. In his mind they’re a conspiracy organized by five people, three of whom happen to be Jewish and two of whom happen to be dead:
And that big decline in the stock market? According to Trump, it’s not a response to concerns about his zigzagging tariff policies. “I think it is globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don’t like it.” Yep, globalist Trump-haters have tanked a $48 trillion market.
If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. What we’re hearing from the Musk-Trump Administration sounds, if I can use the term, distinctly un-American. It’s the kind of rhetoric you expect from an authoritarian regime that attributes every setback to sabotage by rootless cosmopolitan enemies of the state.
Then again, why should we be surprised? An excellent recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, using data from the World Values Survey, shows that at this point the U.S. Right’s values are in fact very similar to those of authoritarian regimes like Russia and Turkey, and not at all like those of Western democracies, or for that matter its own values a generation ago:
While rule by crazy conspiracy theorists is an unquestionably bad state of affairs, let me lay out two specific reasons it’s bad.
First, it means that the people in charge won’t learn from failure. When things go wrong — when planes crash, or forests burn, or children die of preventable diseases, or the economy enters stagflation — it won’t be because policies should be reconsidered. It will be because sinister globalists are plotting against America. And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Second, there will be a search for scapegoats. Much of the federal government is already in the midst of a de facto political purge, with professional civil servants replaced by apparatchiks and job cuts falling most heavily on agencies perceived as liberal. These purges will intensify and broaden, increasingly extending to the private sector, as the administration proves itself incapable of governing effectively.
They’re already saying this as you can see with Trump’s daft bullshit about the “globalists” tanking the stock market. He’s clearly spooked but he’s in so deep that he can’t get out. Apparently, none of them can.
I’m so old I remember when a president’s son trading on his father’s name to make money for the family was a scandal of such epic proportions that it led to congressional and DOJ investigations for years and calls for impeachment. But that was a different time. You know, a year ago.
The names lining up behind Elon Musk read like a who’s who of big money: BlackRock, Fidelity, venture-capital giant Sequoia.
And then there’s 1789 Capital.
The upstart investment firm scored a hot ticket recently with Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer: a rare chance to invest directly in his AI venture, xAI, and his roughly $350 billion startup, SpaceX.
Turns out, 1789 has a big attraction: Donald Trump Jr. — son of the US president, crown prince of MAGA and now frontman for what fans hail as a “parallel” US economy aimed at the Trump faithful.
Trump Jr. is clear: At 1789, his role is not to crunch the numbers or kick the tires the way most investors do. Instead, he’s looking to make the firm money by tapping into the MAGA ecosystem and its network of profit-minded believers like Musk.
Few have arrived at this moment with a better sense for President Trump — and where his second administration might take the nation and the world — than his eldest son. Only now, Trump Jr. is trading Washington to focus on a new mission: monetizing his father’s vision for America.
At a time when businesses big and small are trying to navigate all things Trump, Trump Jr.’s stamp of approval can mean the difference between access to lucrative opportunities – such as an in at Musk’s xAI and SpaceX — or a cold shoulder. Like his father and brother Eric, who runs the Trump real estate business, Trump Jr. has brushed aside concerns about the seemingly unprecedented number of conflicts the first family is facing.
They are building what they like to call “the parallel economy” which is essentially a right-wing only commerce venture under the assumption that they can make billions catering to “the movement.” The article points out that this isn’t the first time right wingers have attempted to monetize their “movement” and they have often crashed and burned in the past.
But barely two months into the second Trump administration, 1789 Capital is in a position like few others. Based in Palm Beach, two miles from Mar-a-Lago, the firm today sits near the epicenter of Trumpworld with ties both broad and deep.
They’re practically doing it out of the White House.
Trump Jr., 47, formally signed on in November, less than a week after his father won the White House again. The move took many in Washington by surprise: Beltway insiders had expected him to stay close to the administration given his role in championing Vance for vice president. He says he hasn’t been to the White House since the inauguration…
Trump Jr.’s role at 1789 will be a sort of MAGA magnet, sourcing deals as well as investors into the firm.
Gee, I can’t imagine how he would do that, can you? It’s not as if he has a line to Trump and Musk. After all, he hasn’t been to the White House since the inauguration.
They liken the potential of MAGA-style investing “to the late boom in the environmental, social and governance space, which conservatives deride as part of a “woke” liberal agenda that threatens American capitalism.”
For instance, they’ve “poured more than $50 million directly across Musk’s xAI and SpaceX, opportunities.” I sure hope they’re doing better than his flagship Tesla stock. It’s lost 15% just today.
It’s down over 37% over the last month. Also, his rockets are blowing up.
Other recent investments include a stake in Happy Dad hard seltzer, founded by right-wing YouTubers the Nelk Boys (they packaged their drink to look like a beer because “we are tired of the skinny can bullsh*t”) and the Enhanced Games, a startup looking to host an Olympics-style competition where athletes are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs; and Polymarket, the crypto-based prediction site that gained widespread attention during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Winners all, no doubt about it.
Trump Jr., for his part, has plenty of balls in the air. In addition to his role at 1789, he’s an adviser to Kalshi, another prediction market, and to Unusual Machines, a manufacturer of drones and related components. He and his brother Eric are also personal investors in biotech-startup-turned fintech Dominari Holdings Inc. (news in February that the Trumps were joining the company’s advisory board sent the stock soaring). On top of that, he maintains his title of executive vice president at the Trump Organization.
He isn’t on the board of an obscure foreign energy company so there’s no reason to suspect corruption. The Trumps are as honest as the day is long.
Think about how much more the federal government is tasked with doing since 1960.
When I hear virtually every reporter and Democratic politician issue a disclaimer in every discussion of the DOGE cuts that “of course the government is too bloated and needs to be cut, we just need to do it more thoughtfully” I want to scream. It is NOT bloated. Considering what it is tasked with doing for the American people it is actually too lean and we should be hiring more people not firing them.
Yes, there are the proverbial $1000 toilet seat examples in the defense department and I’m sure there is some “waste fraud and abuse” elsewhere as there is in any large organization. But the idea that there are too many workers is ridiculous. And I’m afraid we’re about to find out just how ridiculous that is.
