Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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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Come on down to the White House Tesla Auto Mall! pic.twitter.com/DjVZY0R8wL

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) March 12, 2025

Coincidentally:

Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

It is unheard-of for a White House staffer, even one with part-time status, to make such large political contributions to support the agenda of the boss. But there has never been someone in the direct employ of an administration like Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who is leading Mr. Trump’s aggressive effort to shrink the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.

In case you forgot:

Elon Musk says he’ll recuse himself if there’s a conflict of interest—because nothing says accountability like self-policing, especially when his financial disclosures won’t even be available to the public. pic.twitter.com/uVE7ajIEyM

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) February 19, 2025

In fairness, Musk doesn’t really have conflicts of interest. It’s just outright corruption. He and Trump never promised they wouldn’t steal the country blind.

Musk is Trump’s albatross:

Trump has spent his first months back in office seeking to sharply cut spending and reduce the federal workforce. The public’s views of that effort and Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given a prominent role, are largely negative.

Just 35% of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53% rating him negatively and 11% offering no opinion – making him both better known and more substantially unpopular than Vice President JD Vance (whom 33% of Americans rate favorably and 44% unfavorably, with 23% having no opinion.) Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say that Musk has neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make changes to the way the government works. There is uneasiness about Musk even among some of the president’s supporters: 28% of those who see Trump’s changes to the government as necessary doubt the tech billionaire has the judgment to carry them out.

A 55% majority of Americans say that the Trump administration’s changes to the federal government are being made largely to advance his agenda, with 45% calling the changes necessary to ensure the government functions properly.

Asked to weigh whether they’re more concerned about the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal government going too far or not far enough, 62% of Americans say they’re more worried about the former and fear important programs being shut down. The other 37% say they’re more worried about the cuts not going far enough in eliminating fraud and waste in the federal government. Nine in 10 Democrats and 69% of independents say they’re more concerned about losing important federal programs, while 73% of Republicans say they’re more concerned that fraud and waste will remain an issue in the government.

We’re currently watching the saga of the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open until September unfold in the Senate. The Democrats can filibuster this one but it’s unclear if they are going to be willing to do it. (I know….)

I believe they should filibuster with one demand: Trump must get rid of Musk and DOGE. Nothing less. If he does that they will vote for the CR. I don’t expect he will do it but after a period of him defending his “right”to have a billionaire slashing the government and angering the people even more, the Democrats could finally agree to break the filibuster making it clear that Trump is willing to put his billionaire boyfriend ahead of the American people.

There is such a thing as “losing well” and I think those numbers above show that the public is not happy with Trump’s buddy destroying the federal government. They should use the meager leverage they have to highlight that to the whole country and push Trump’s approval ratings even lower.

They aren’t in a good mood:

President Donald Trump’s tariff salvos have deeply rattled a stock market previously bullish about his supposedly pro-growth agenda. With recession fears mounting, a widely respected economist at Goldman Sachs has decided to downgrade the entire U.S. economy. 

No longer looking toward share prices for signs of success and approval, the president and his economic officials have signaled they will look past short-term pain in their bid to reshape America’s finances. On Tuesday, Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius revealed the storied investment bank forecasts U.S. GDP growth to come in below Wall Street’s consensus for the first time in 2½ years. 

Goldman’s GDP projection for 2025 now sits at 1.7%, down from 2.4% at the start of the year. That’s because the firm now sees the average U.S. tariff rate rising by 10 basis points this year, twice Goldman’s previous forecast and about five times as high as the increase during Trump’s first term.

Disappointing economic data over the past few weeks did not prompt the new projection, said Hatzius, who gained renown for his bearish forecasts prior to the onset of the great financial crisis in 2007. 

“Instead, the reason for the downgrade is that our trade policy assumptions have become considerably more adverse, and the administration is managing expectations towards tariff-induced near-term economic weakness,” he wrote Tuesday in a note to clients. 

Members of the starry eyed “Trump is awesome” set have awakened as well:

President Trump’s stop-and-start trade policy and uneven economic messaging have rattled some of his own allies, triggering a flood of calls from business executives, concerns from Republican lawmakers and tension in the White House.

Senior officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have received panicked calls from chief executives and lobbyists, who have urged the administration to calm jittery markets by outlining a more predictable tariff agenda, according to people familiar with the discussions. Many in the business community have abandoned efforts to get the president to reverse course on trade, instead pleading with the White House for clarity on his approach, the people said. 

In a meeting Monday in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, the president and his top advisers huddled with the chief executive officers of International Business Machines, Qualcomm, HP and other tech companies. Some of the CEOs voiced their concerns about Trump’s tariffs, warning that they could hurt their industry, according to a person who attended the meeting. Trump told reporters that attendees at the meeting talked about investing in the U.S.

I just love this:

The mixed messages from the president and his advisers have raised concerns among some Republicans that Trump lacks a cohesive economic plan.

Ya think?

I guess these people, mostly men, were so excited about being allowed to say pussy at the office again that they couldn’t hear anything else he said, or didn’t say, during the campaign. Well, at least they’re getting some tax cuts. At some point. Right?

Who needs it?

Following up on my piece this morning about the COVID amnesia and America’s new quest to destroy all the scientific institutions that keep us safe, here’s another bit of fodder for our nightmares:

In December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Why? Does anyone really know the answer to that question because I honestly don’t. Project 2025 wants to remake the United States into a Christian nationalist theocracy so they need to destroy all government and science which interferes with their need for patriarchal authoritarianism. But that’s not Musk’s goal. He thinks the techno nerds should run everything but he’s clueless about what “everything” is just assuming that he and his nerds will figure it all out later. Ok. And we know that Trump is just bent on destroying everything in his quest for vengeance and the delusions that it will somehow make him into the Emperor of the world.

The rest of the elected Republicans are just cowardly people of low character who are willing to help them all destroy the world and I’m afraid that the MAGA voters are simply too brainwashed and addled by Trump’s demagoguery and conspiracy theories to even grasp what’s actually happening.

So is it just that these people all have different goals that just happen to be served by a leader who is so imbecilic and psychologically damaged that he will let them use the United States of America as their tool? I think so. And what it adds up to is chaos and catastrophe.

"I will do that. I'm gonna stop them." — Trump on declaring that Tesla protesters are domestic terrorists pic.twitter.com/34xu3i5QxP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2025

It was a preview of what’s to come

Five years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 was officially a pandemic and the whole world embarked on a shared experience like nothing before in any of our lives. Although the quick roll out of vaccines and accumulated knowledge about how to treat the illness saved millions, the pandemic lasted for over two years and took 1.2 million lives in the U.S. and over 7 million worldwide. Many people were left with serious lingering effects of the virus the reasons for which are still being studied.

Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed and the world economy was brought to an abrupt halt in March of 2020 which quickly brought mass unemployment and a shortage of goods as the global supply chain was disrupted. We learned very quickly that the federal government under Donald Trump was so lacking in logistical and crisis management ability that America had one of the worst responses of any developed country in the world. The U.S. experienced 16% of the world’s deaths with just 4% of the population.

We should have seen it coming. As Judd Legum at Public Notice presciently posted on Twitter:

Months before that a prominent Democrats had warned the country about the possibility of a pandemic and the country’s lack of preparedness:

The President of the United States downplayed the threat and insisted that he wanted to “keep his numbers down” — he was beginning to understand that this was going to interrupt his plans for a triumphant return for a second term. On March 9th, Trump made one of his most famous public appearances of the COVID era when he went to the Centers For Disease Control in Georgia and declared himself a genius:

🚨FLASHBACK

Trump at the CDC in 2020:

“You know my Uncle was a great — he was at MIT. He taught at MIT for a record number of years. He was a great super genius, Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it…Maybe I have a… pic.twitter.com/1b85AlHtzI

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 24, 2024

He said:

Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.

Over the next few months he proved that he had definitely not missed his calling as a medical expert or a president. In fact, it became more obvious than ever that his talents, such as they are, are completely useless in a crisis.

Two days after that memorable visit, when the W.H.O made its announcement (an act which Donald Trump has never forgiven and so petulantly withdrew the U.S from the organization) the world stopped. Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced that they had contracted the virus and the NBA suspended its schedule. The highly respected virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before Congress that the pandemic could result in “many, many millions” of deaths.

That night Trump made the only semi-dignified announcement of the crisis from the oval office shutting down travel from Europe but the order was typically poorly drafted and had to be repeatedly walked back over the following days. It was the beginning of the Trump COVID response and it was a horror show.

Those of us who were not essential workers sat cloistered in our homes watching the unfolding horror on television as the news kept a countdown clock of cases, hospitalizations and deaths that grew exponentially over the weeks that followed. And unfortunately, it became clear that we were led by a man who was completely in over his head.

Before long Trump was blaming Democrats, his go-to, for the pandemic because they suffered the greatest death toll in the big blue cities in the first wave. He demanded that they lick his boots before they could get vital medical supplies and forced them to bid against each other for them. If they failed to adequately grovel and praise him, he punished their states by delaying the needed supplies and publicly derided them as incompetent.

He denigrated the use of masks, frequently mocking those who did and ignored the social distancing measures recommended by the experts because his “business friends” told him it hurt the economy. Within just a couple of weeks he was already exhorting people to stop worrying and learn to love the virus saying that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease“, (meaning that the crisis could not be allowed to disrupt his campaign. )

His main concern at this juncture was the effect it was having on the economy which he needed to be booming before the fall campaign. Unemployment was still very high and businesses were shuttered and he wanted them open now, whether people would die or not. He had signed the first relief bill called the CARES Act but did not want to extend any more government help and basically told the country he wanted them to get back to normal now.

Unfortunately, the vaccines were still months away and new variants were springing up so he resorted to his usual tactics of pitting people against each other. He encouraged anti-mask and anti-shutdown MAGA people to rebel against all mitigation efforts. He trained his followers to distrust the science and the scientists by pushing snake oil cures on television (now linked to at least 17,000 deaths) and encouraging them to believe crackpot conspiracy theories. By the time the vaccines came online, his MAGA voters had such contempt for scientists that they rejected them, ironically denying Trump the great moment of victory he had craved.

All that and much, much more happened with a federal government that still had a working CDC, NIH, HHS and friendly, cooperative relationships with the world’s leading scientific research institutions and their countries’ leaders. Now imagine what will happen if another pandemic comes along.

Here’s a little preview of the kind of scientific expertise we’ll be relying on going forward:

RFK Jr on the measles vaccine: "There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause." pic.twitter.com/Y0IVybltDa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2025

RFK Jr: "It used to be that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn't do that … it used to be that very young kids were protected by breast milk. Women who get vaccinated do not provide that level of… pic.twitter.com/C3ALSwbmwz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2025

Meanwhile, HHS is “reevaluating” existing contracts for MrNA vaccine development for a potential avian flu epidemic. Their plan is apparently this gobbledygook:

Kevin Hassett on Trump's avian flu plan: "What we need to do is have better ways with bio-security and medication and so on to make sure that the perimeter doesn't have to kill the chickens. To have a better, smarter, perimeter… they're killing chickens to stop the spread, but… pic.twitter.com/a3s8WvMWFg

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 16, 2025

It has struck me as very odd these last couple of years that the pandemic has gone so far down the memory hole that it’s like it never happened. But it did, millions died and our society was scarred by the experience even if we don’t want to admit it. Our political culture was divided even worse than before largely because the man in charge at the time didn’t know how to deal with an emergency and was more concerned with his re-election than saving lives.

Sadly, our national amnesia allowed that same man to be restored to the White House where he is furiously tearing up the federal government including the world class scientific research centers and public health institutions that were all that stood between him and millions more dead the last time he was confronted with a crisis. It will be a hundred times worse if it happens again on his watch.

Salon

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.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

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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