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18F: Sabotage And Showboating

Musk is a dangerous phony

I created this graphic when Ramaswamy was still a part of Doge.

White House tech veteran, Waldo Jaquith, posted a Bluesky thread about what Elon Musk’s DOGE saboteurs did on Friday to a federal technology group where Jaquith once worked. We know by now (and as you read on Saturday) that Musk’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” pitch for the cameras and is as phony as Trump University.

Musk possesses “scant interest in constitutional law” and considers oversight of his operations the “dictatorship of the bureaucracy.” His goal is not to improve government or even to shrink it (the Goldilocks question) but to hobble it. So under the pretext of cutting “waste,” he is in fact destroying the government’s ability prevent his becoming … emperor, or something more like Eldon Tyrell or Peter Weyland. Musk would enjoy the comparison.

Pay attention:

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was demolished by Musk’s team shortly after midnight. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 billion.

18F is *precisely* what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can’t have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn’t bend the knee.

Trump and Musk are eliminating any part of government that works well, because that undermines their thesis that government doesn’t work. GSA (which houses 18F) turns a profit as an agency. Naturally it has to be destroyed. 18F’s healthy revenue stream also means it must go.

To anybody in leadership at the state or municipal level: 18F’s destruction makes this *the perfect time* to hire experienced technologists, which you all need very badly. Most 18Fers would love to stay in public service. They are spread throughout the country. Go go go!

For any devs wondering what 18F does (did), here’s its GitHub org page, with 1,210 repos. A few were mine! All the work they did for all their agency partners was open source. Public money should produce public software, for public inspection. Those days are over, starting today.

18F

github.com

18F did two things, both for agencies that hired them to help with projects: it built software and it taught agencies how to hire & oversee vendors to build software. The former raised the bar by showing agencies what “good” looks like, the latter allowed those practices to expand sustainably.

The work that I led at 18F I naturally feel was really important (I hope all 18Fers felt the same way about their work): codifying the procurement principals that we’d all identified there over the years. I thought this would have a tiny audience. Instead it became a foundational text.

Introduction | 18F De-risking Guide

guides.18f.gov

The work I do today at @usdigitalresponse.org is simply what I did at 18F (software procurement, budgeting, and oversight), except I’m a team of one, dependent on grant funding. I have sent many an agency to 18F when they need large-scale support. But no more—I have nowhere to send them now.

Republican myth-making

I wish we could hire a bunch of 18Fers at U.S. Digital Response, but we’re a small organization, reliant on grants for funding. Heck, my position is only 3/4-time. Instead we’ll work with our state and local partners to create positions appropriation for these folks, and help to make those matches.

18F faced a lot of threats over the years. In the beginning it was mostly from within, frankly. It’s the way of digital services that they break a bunch of rules to get started. Then the threats were external. But I never thought a threat was being too effective for Republican myth-making.

I see folks asking about forking all the 18F GitHub repos so there are copies. Don’t worry, that was done at scale by multiple organizations, weeks ago, anticipating this.

“It’s chaotic, and it feels like it’s chaotic on purpose,” says a former 18F worker describing the demolition of 18F to The Atlantic (gift link). “Move fast and break things” comes to Washington like January 6 without the riot.

Matteo Wong writes:

DOGE’s actions have been widely compared to the playbook that Musk used to decimate and remake Twitter into X: The inefficiency is the point. Asking workers to resign and justify their work through scrambled, aggressive messages almost inevitably prompts exodus and collapse, voluntary or not. But another useful comparison might be to the playbook Musk follows from space programs for his company, SpaceX. Government teams, their staff, and the citizens they serve are like test launches of rocket prototypes: try a new ship design uncrewed, knowing it could well explode, and repeat. But in this case, there are people aboard.

And like everything in Trump’s career, there is a lot of myth-making involved. The gaming community seems ahead of the press in spotting the bullshit behind Musk, suggests one Bluesky poster.

So far the gaming community is really the first to comprehensively debunk the central musk myth that “what’s incredibly difficult and time-consuming for normal people is trivially easy for me” and I assume that’s partly because the consequences for that imploding elsewhere are too high

Btw even when musk talks about working around the clock it’s part of this myth, he’s just saying “oh it’s hard for you to do, but for me it’s second nature.” But like, he doesn’t work. He never learns any new skills or has breakthroughs, he just stays up all night dming rw influencers & doing drugs

Like oh you’re such a “hardcore” worker and singular genius that every tech problem is trivial? And these legacy govt computer systems are giving you fits? Why not simply become a COBOL expert faster than anyone ever has? Oh what’s that, you can’t, because you’re a charlatan & a moron

Musk had been paying someone else to play Path of Exile for him to achieve the alleged high scores he bragged about. It was a lie.

“The man has more money and power than you could ever want,” says Karl Jobst in the video above, “yet he still felt compelled to lie about something so trivial.”

No wonder he gets along so well with Donald Trump. He’s an uber-rich super villain out of a Bond film.

Where’s 007 when you really need him?

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power

Pre-Oscar Marathon: Top 10 Movies About the Movies

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I felt it apropos on this Oscar Eve to honor Hollywood’s annual declaration of its deep and abiding love for itself with my picks for the top 10 movies about…the movies. Action!

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Cinema Paradiso Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 love letter to the cinema may be too sappy for some, but for those of us who (to quote Pauline Kael) “lost it at the movies” it’s chicken soup for the soul. A film director (Jacques Perrin) returns to his home town in Sicily for a funeral, triggering flashbacks from his youth. He reassesses the relationships with two key people in his life: his first love, and the person who instilled his life-long love of the movies. Beautifully acted and directed; keep the Kleenex handy.

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Day for Night– French film scholar and director Francois Truffaut was, first and foremost, a movie fan. And while one could argue that many of his own movies are rife with homage to the filmmakers who inspired him, this 1973 entry is his most heartfelt declaration of love for the medium (as well as his most-imitated work). Truffaut casts himself as (wait for it) a director in the midst of a production called Meet Pamela.

“Pamela” is a beautiful but unstable British actress (Jacqueline Bisset) who is gingerly stepping back into the spotlight after a highly publicized breakdown. The petulant, emotionally immature leading man (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a fool for love, which constantly distracts him from his work. Truffaut also has to coddle an aging Italian movie queen (Valentia Cortese) who is showing up on set three sheets to the wind and flubbing scenes.

Truffaut cleverly mirrors the backstage travails of his cast and crew with those of the characters in the “film-within-the-film”. Somehow, it all manages to fall together…but getting there is half the fun. Truffaut parlays a sense of what a director “does” (in case you were wondering) and how a good one can coax magic from seemingly inextricable chaos.

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Ed Wood– Director Tim Burton and leading man Johnny Depp have worked together on so many films over the last 30 years that they must be joined at the hip. For my money, this affectionate 1994 biopic about the man who directed “the worst film of all time” remains their best collaboration. It’s also unique in Burton’s canon in that it is somewhat grounded in reality (while I wish his legion of loyal fans all the best, Burton’s predilection for overly-precious phantasmagorical and macabre fare is an acquired taste that I’ve yet to acquire).

Depp gives a brilliant performance as Edward D. Wood, Jr., who unleashed the infamously inept yet 100% certified camp classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space on an unsuspecting movie-going public back in the late 1950s. While there are lots of belly laughs, none of them are at the expense of the off-beat characters. There’s no mean-spiritedness here; that’s what makes the film so endearing. Martin Landau delivers a droll Oscar-winning turn as Bela Lugosi. Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette and Jeffrey Jones also shine.

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8 1/2– Where does creative inspiration come from? A simple question, difficult to answer. Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 1963 classic probably comes closest to “showing” us…in his inimitable fashion. Marcello Mastroianni is fabulous as a successful director who wrestles with a creative block and existential crisis whilst being hounded by the press and various hangers-on. Like many Fellini films (all Fellini films?), the deeper you go, the less you comprehend. Yet (almost perversely), you can’t take your eyes off the screen; with Fellini, there is an implied contract between the director and the viewer that, no matter what ensues, if you’ve bought the ticket, you have to take the ride.

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Hearts of the West– In Howard Zeiff’s 1975 dramedy, Jeff Bridges stars as a Depression-era wannabe pulp western writer (a scene where he asks the barber to cut his hair to make him look “just like Zane Grey” is priceless.) He gets fleeced by a mail-order scam promising enrollment in what turns out to be a bogus university “out West”. Serendipity lands him a job as a Hollywood stuntman. Bridges gets able support from Blythe Danner, Andy Griffith (one of his best performances), Donald Pleasence, Richard B. Shull, and veteran scene-stealer Alan Arkin (he’s a riot as a perpetually apoplectic director). Rob Thompson’s witty script gives the wonderful cast plenty to chew on.

The Kid Stays in the Picture– Look up “raconteur” in the dictionary and you might see a picture of the subject of this winning 2002 documentary, directed by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen. While essentially a 90-minute monologue by legendary producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, Chinatown, etc.) recounting his life and career, it’s an intimate and fascinating “insider” purview of the Hollywood machine. Evans spins quite the tale of a mogul’s rise and fall; by turns heartbreaking and hilarious. He’s so charming and entertaining that you won’t stop to ponder whether he’s making half this shit up. Inventive, engaging, and required viewing for movie buffs.

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Living in Oblivion– This under-appreciated 1995 sleeper from writer-director Tom DiCillo is the Day for Night of indie cinema. A NYC-based filmmaker (Steve Buscemi) is directing a no-budget feature. Much to his chagrin, the harried director seems to be stuck in a hellish loop as he chases an ever-elusive “perfect take” for a couple of crucial scenes.

DiCillo’s cleverly constructed screenplay is quite funny. Fabulous performances abound from a “Who’s Who” of indie film: Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Kevin Corrigan, James Le Gros and Peter Dinklage (in his first billed film role). Dinklage delivers a hilarious rant about the stereotypical casting of dwarves in dream sequences. It has been rumored that Le Gros’ character (an arrogant Hollywood hotshot who has deigned to grace the production with his presence) was based on the director’s experience working with Brad Pitt (who starred in DeCillo’s 1991 debut , Johnny Suede). If true, all I can say is…ouch!

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is one long-ass movie. Consider the title. It literally is the story of film, from the 1890s through last Tuesday. At 15 hours, it is nearly as epic an undertaking for the viewer as it must have been for director-writer-narrator Mark Cousins. Originally aired as a TV series in the UK, it played on the festival circuit as a five-part presentation. While the usual suspects are well-represented, Cousins’ choices for in-depth analysis are atypical (e.g. African and Middle-Eastern cinema).

That quirkiness is what I found most appealing about this idiosyncratic opus; world cinema (rightfully) gets equal time with Hollywood. The film is not without tics. Cousins’ oddly cadenced Irish brogue takes acclimation, and he tends to over-use the word “masterpiece”. Of course, he “left out” many directors and films I would have included. Nits aside, this is obviously a labor of love by someone who is sincerely passionate about film.

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The Stunt Man– “How tall was King Kong?” That’s the question posed by Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), the larger-than-life director of the film-within-the-film in Richard Rush’s 1980 drama. Once you discover King Kong was but “3 foot, six inches tall”, it becomes clear that the fictional director’s query is actually code for a much bigger question: “What is reality?”

Ponder that as you take this wild ride through the Dream Factory. Because from the moment the protagonist, a fugitive on the run from the cops (Steve Railsback) tumbles ass over teakettle onto Mr. Cross’s set, where he is filming an arty WW I drama, his (and the audience’s) concept of what is real and what isn’t becomes hazy, to say the least.

O’Toole chews major scenery, ably supported by a cast that includes Barbara Hershey and Allen Garfield. Despite lukewarm reviews from critics upon original release, it has since gained status as a cult classic. This is a movie for people who love the movies.

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Sunset Boulevard– Leave it to that great ironist Billy Wilder to direct a film that garnered a Best Picture nomination from the very Hollywood studio system it so mercilessly skewers (however, you’ll note that they didn’t let him win…did they?). Gloria Swanson’s turn as a fading, high-maintenance movie queen mesmerizes, William Holden embodies the quintessential noir sap, and veteran scene-stealer Erich von Stroheim redefines the meaning of “droll” in this tragicomic journey down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Previous posts with related themes:

Pre-Oscar marathon: Top 10 “Best Picture” winners

Beautiful losers: The Top 10 Oscar snubs

Brats

Hey, Viktor!

Scala!!!

Only in Theaters

I Like Movies

The Last Film Show

Hitchcock’s Pro-Nazi Film?

Mank

Trumbo

Kubrick By Kubrick

Fassbinder: Love Without Demands

Douglas Sirk: Hope as in Despair

Dolemite is My Name

Life Itself

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Hail, Caesar!

Millennium Actress

The Day of the Locust

Mulholland Drive

Inland Empire

Dirty Movies: A Top X List

Guild 45th: The Last Picture Show (essay)

More reviews at Den of Cinema

Dennis Hartley

Elon’s Plot

Here is a gift link to a major new NY Times article about how Elon Musk took over the federal government. It is a doozy and I highly urge that you read it.

An excerpt:

On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.

[…]

As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.

Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.

Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?

Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.

Think about that. It was September of 2023.

Read the whole thing. I’ll have more to say about this later. Let’s just say that I’m not sure that making the government fit and trim was Elon’s real motive.

We Had A Deal!!!

He didn’t clip the best moment which starts at 4:05:

Just off the very top, nobody seems to remember this but at the the close of the Cold War, Ukraine was in possession of 1,900 nuclear warheads. They had one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear arms in the entire in the entire world. They did not directly control them because they were Soviet controlled warheads that were stationed there during the the last days of the Soviet Union.

But the Ukrainian people are pretty resourceful and holding on to 1,900 nuclear warheads is a pretty fucking valuable card to have if we’re talking about cards. They chose to give them up.

Why did Ukraine choose to give up these Warheads? Because in 1994 the United States of America signed a guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty and security against aggression.

We had a deal, we had a fucking deal with these people already!

And we we convinced them to give up their nuclear warheads and they did and and now all of a sudden that’s just gone !

It was called the Budapest Memorandum:

The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with U.S. Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance prohibited Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, “except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.

At the time Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. They were the only country with such an arsenal to ever give them up. And they will be the last. Trump has made sure of that. Certainly no one will ever believe that the United States will have their backs again.

Update —

JD Skis In Jeans

From Jason Kottke at a local Vermont website:

JD Vance, fresh off of helping his boss ambush & insult a foreign leader in the White House yesterday afternoon, is on vacation in Vermont with his family this weekend and will be skiing at Sugarbush Resort in Warren, VT, a 15-minute drive from where I live.

This morning, Sugarbush snow reporter Lucy Welch took the opportunity to make some good trouble by sending out a message of resistance against Vance and the administration he represents. The message went out via email to all Sugarbush daily report subscribers and appeared on the website for a brief time before it was removed. Here is the text of her message:

Mar 1st, 2025, 6:49 AM: Today of all days, I would like to reflect on what Sugarbush means to me. This mountain has brought me endless days of joy, adventure, challenges, new experiences, beauty, community, and peace. I’ve found that nothing cures a racing mind quite like skiing through the trees and stopping to take a deep breath of that fresh forest air. The world around us might be a scary place, but these little moments of tranquility, moments I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy as a direct result of my employment here, give me, and I’d guess you, too, a sense of strength and stability.

This fresh forest air, is, more specifically fresh National Forest air. Sugarbush operates on 1745 acres of the Green Mountain National Forest. Right now, National Forest lands and National Parks are under direct attack by the current Administration, who is swiftly terminating the positions of dedicated employees who devote their lives to protecting the land we love, and to protecting us while we are enjoying that land.

This Administration also neglects to address the danger, or even the existence of, climate change, the biggest threat to the future of our industry, and the skiing we all so much enjoy here. Burlington, VT is one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, and Vermont is the 9th fastest-warming state. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), a resource I use every day for snow reporting, is crucial in monitoring extreme weather events and informing public safety measures, and is also experiencing widespread layoffs and defunding at the hands of the Administration.

Sugarbush would not be Sugarbush without our wonderful community. Employees and patrons alike, we are made up of some of the most kind hearted, hardworking people I have ever met. Our community is rich with folks of all different orientations, ethnicities, and walks of life, who all contribute to make this place what it is. They all love Sugarbush because it is a place where they can come to move their bodies, to connect with the land, to challenge themselves, to build character, to nourish their souls with the gift of skiing.

Many of these people are part of the LGBTQI+ community. Many (well, that’s a stretch, we all know this is an incredibly white-washed industry) are people of color. Half are women. Many are veterans or adaptive skiers who, through Vermont Adaptive, are able to access snow sports in part thanks to federal grants through the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is also facing devastating cuts. Many of our beloved employees moved across the world through an exchange program on the J1 visa to help this resort run, and they are not US citizens. ALL of these groups are being targeted, undervalued, and disrespected by the current Administration.

The beauty of National Forest land, is that anyone and everyone is welcome to enjoy it. Anyone and everyone can buy a lift ticket. I also imagine it is incredibly difficult, and likely impossible, to say “No” to the Secret Service. I hope that, instead of faulting Sugarbush management or employees for “allowing this to happen”, you can direct your anger to the source — the Administration that, in my oh-so-humble opinion, is threatening our democracy, our livelihoods, our land.

I want to reiterate how much I admire and respect my fellow employees and managers — they work so hard to make this place operate, to keep you coming back and enjoying it and making lifelong memories. Many of them may feel the same way that I do, but their hands are tied, and for good reason. They have families to support, they have benefits and health insurance to receive, they face far greater and more binding pressure from Corporate. I am in a privileged position here, in that I work only seasonally, I do not rely on this job for health insurance or benefits, and hey, waking up at 4:30 AM isn’t exactly sustainable. Therefore, I am using my relative “platform” as snow reporter, to be disruptive — I don’t have a whole lot to lose. We are living in a really scary and really serious time. What we do or don’t do, matters. This whole shpiel probably won’t change a whole lot, and I can only assume that I will be fired, but at least this will do even just a smidge more than just shutting up and being a sheep.

I am really scared for our future. Acting like nothing is happening here feels way scarier than losing my job. I want to have kids one day, and I want to teach them to ski. The policies and ideals of the current Administration, however, are not conducive to either of these things, because, at least how things look now, I’d never be able to afford a good life for a child anyway, and snow will be a thing of Vermont history. So please, for the sake of our future shredders: Be Better Here. It has truly been a pleasure writing your morning snow reports — I hope this one sticks with you. With love, peace, and hope, Lucy Welch …

I guess she’s not allowed to have opinions on the job. But that doesn’t mean she and her neighbors don’t have them:

This kind of thing needs to happen whenever these assholes go out in public. They need to be reminded that they did NOT win a landslide and that the only people who are backing them right now are hardcore conspiracy theorists, hacks and morons. I think they forget that inside their DC MAGA bubble.

Update — this stuff is happening all over the country.

He Just Loves Vlad

Since Trump took office he has:

  1. told Ukraine that it cannot expect to regain any territory or ever join NATO
  2. he ends the isolation that western leadership have had Putin in since the invasion saying he’s going to meet him and invites him back in the G7
  3. Trump had the US vote against a resolution in the UN calling for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine because it contained the true statement that Russia had invaded Ukraine. He voted with North Korea, Russia, Iran and Belarus.
  4. He called Zelensky a dictator
  5. has ordered the cyber command to stop any planning toward Russia

Putin is just sitting back letting Trump make concession after concession without giving anything in return. It’s a huge win.

Trump’s very upset that Zelensky isn’t on board with the sell-out, particularly because he’s refusing to kiss Putin’s ass the way Republicans kiss his. On the tarmac yesterday he said:

“He’s gotta say, ‘I want to make peace.’ He doesn’t have to stand there and say ‘Putin this, Putin that.’ All negative things. His people are dying.”

Putin invaded his country and has lost tens of thousands of soldiers. One might expect that Trump would be saying instead:

Putin’s gotta say “I want to make peace.” He doesn’t have to keep bombarding Ukrainian cities, even Chernobyl, all negative things if he wants to make a peace deal. Tens of thousands of Russians have died in this war.

Why is he not doing that? I think we know, don’t we?

Jonathan Chait writes today about Trump’s affinity for Putin. When asked if he thought Putin would keep his word:

“They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.

In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.

[…]

Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But … in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.

[…]

Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

I could add another little nugget: when Trump and Kim Jong Un were making love, Trump was on the horn with Putin who told him it would be smart to pull American troops out of South Korea and Trump canceled the annual military maneuvers on his advice. I’d imagine there are plenty of other examples. We know what we saw in Helsinki.

Chait doesn’t have an explanation as to why Trump loves Putin so much. It’s obviously not that they were both persecuted by the Democrats since he held these ideas long before the Russia investigation. Maybe he’s literally a Russian asset as has long been suspected. Maybe he just particularly likes the thoroughly unlikeable cold fish for some reason. It would be weird since he usually only likes people who suck his toes and Putin certainly does not do that. In fact, Putin treats him like one of his lackeys and he seems to eat it up.

I obviously don’t know if there’s more than meets the eye about this. But one thought that has entered my mind is that because he is stuck in the 1950s, he still sees Russia as a great power and saw Putin is some kind of strongman like Kruschev and wanted to be like him. (Recall that he used to lie and say he knew him when he’d never met him — “we were stablemates.”) But once he started getting blowback for the sloppy campaign engagement with Russia in 2016 his oppositional defiant disorder kicked in and he doubled down.

Since Trump is the leader of the most powerful nation on earth and not a child, I don’t know if any of those responses will work with him. But I do know that whenever someone says he shouldn’t do something he decides that’s exactly what he’s going to do. And in this case, that means siding with the dictator. (I’m sorry to say that it might also mean that he’s double down on Musk as well.)

If he thinks siding with Putin makes him strong,he’s wrong. Putin thinks he’s a fool and a dupe and is laughing at his idiocy. But if he and that psychopath JD Vance did what they did yesterday just to make the rest of the world recoil in horror, he got what he wanted. He enjoyed himself very much.

Zelensky’s Allies

Those are all statements of support from world leaders and politician, left and right.

Trump’s allies:

Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s deputy on the security council and former president, called the exchange “a brutal dressing-down in the Oval Office”.

He wrote: “Trump told the … clown [Zelenskyy] the truth to his face: the Kyiv regime is playing with the third world war … This is useful. But it’s not enough – we need to stop military support [to Ukraine].”

“How Trump and Vance held back from hitting that scumbag is a miracle of restraint,” wrote Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, on Telegram.

There has been no comment so far from Putin, who has instead taken a backseat, likely watching the fallout unfold with satisfaction. “Putin doesn’t have to say much right now,” said a source familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking.

“It’s clear that he enjoyed the show and now believes he can push for even greater demands in Ukraine. That meeting was a bigger victory for Putin than any of his military battles since the start of the war.”

The source predicted that Putin is likely to call Trump in the coming days to argue that Zelenskyy is not someone who can be reasoned with and must be replaced – a sentiment already echoed by some in Moscow as well as Washington.

“The White House will now start looking more closely at other candidates for Ukraine’s presidency,” wrote Alexey Pushkov, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, on Telegram.

Awesome.

Adaptation Is Hard

And inevitable

A Bulwark column by Will Selber (“retired spook”) takes on the Trump administration’s frenzied effort to purge the military of the miniscule number of transgender persons in the services. A casual observer might think it the greatest problem facing the Pentagon.

As a commander, Selber had to deal with a lot of personnel issues from vaccine refusal to sexual assault charges. But his training provided little guidance for how to counsel an airman who wanted to transition. Still, his primary responsibility was to ensure his unit “was in tip-top shape at all times.”

I asked, “You sure you want to do this?” The answer was yes. I must admit, I had some reservations. For old men like me, transgenderism is a foreign concept. So I read up on it. However, what really convinced me to approve the airman’s request was the airman. Imagine how much courage it took to come into a commander’s office and request such a procedure. That’s courage. And we need more of that in the military.

If these team members were otherwise met standards for service, so what if they identify as transgender? Sure their presence was awkward at first for some other unit members, Selber explains. “However, at the end of the day, despite a few quips, they were integrated into the team.”

It’s not as if Americans are lining up to serve their country in the military these days. Patriotism for many consists of waving flags and collecting guns. Why would the Air Force drum out members and their families over their transgender identities? Selber believes “they deserved better than being summarily separated after being promised steady employment if they swore to uphold and defend the Constitution.”

Hell, the “draft-dodging felon” giving the orders doesn’t do that.

Selber admits he never fully grasped “all the ins and outs of LGBTQ culture.” But then as a man could he (or I) understand what it is to be a woman? What mattered most was that LGBTQ airmen were proud to serve their country.

Adaptation to change takes time. It’s awkward. It was awkward for some to integrate schools or to integrate women into combat roles. But it’s done. Mostly.

I’m reminded of a retort by comedian John Fugelsang to people’s squeamishness about others’ sexual preference and identity. Roughly: In America, your right not to feel icky does not cancel others’ right to love who they love or be who they are.

I reflect regularly on a Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction novel I read in high school. For those unfamiliar with The Left Hand of Darkness:

The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a human native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai’s mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by a lack of understanding of their culture. Individuals on Gethen are ambisexual, with no fixed sex; this has a strong influence on the culture of the planet, and creates a barrier of understanding for Ai.

Do Genthians make a Terran feel somewhat icky? Get over it. Or at least try.

This passage from the novel’s opening is the one that has stuck with me all these years:

“The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ….there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/ protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethnian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards ‘him’ a corresponding role dependant on your expectations of the interactions between persons of the same or oppositve sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

So feel icky, if you must. Then adapt.

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Yes, I’m Horrified

“The United States has changed teams”

Russian dissident Gary Kasparov spoke at the Principles First conference in Washington last weekend, writes Michael Tomasky. Kasparov “uttered a very simple line that chilled the thousand or so people in the room: ‘The United States has changed teams.’ ”

The hell it has. I resent being told the United States of America switched sides because the White House is in the grip of a band of lawless sociopaths.

Donald Trump’s country-wreckers have changed teams, certainly. Most of the Republican upper echelons has. Many MAGA foot soldiers have as well. How many have aligned with Vladimir Putin’s “might makes right” geopolitics simply because Trump has is unclear. How many would snap out of it after he’s gone is even less clear.

The lean toward Russia on the Christian right comes from the ludicrous proposition that there people live under biblical law because the nation is heavily white and Putin is hostile to LGBT people. One conservative Christian couple from Canada moved to Russia to be free from “LGBT ideology” and quickly found themselves free from being free.

What is clear after yesterday’s world-shaking, Oval Office shouting match is that Trump and J.D. Vance are all in on Vladimir Putin’s brand of autocracy. “[W]elcome to the Putinization of America, comrade!” Kasparov wrote in The Atlantic Friday morning before the fireworks:

Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Yesterday’s “appalling spectacle” [timestamp 9:03] did not arrive out of thin air.

Tomasky writes:

If anyone doubted that before this horrifying exchange Friday, it surely can’t be doubted now. You had the president of Ukraine who, whatever his flaws, was representing a democracy—a struggling and imperfect democracy, for sure, but one that was invaded by a gangster regime; a country of 38 million people ravaged by a country of 144 million. He came to Washington willing to meet with a president whom he knows to be hostile but ready to sign a totally one-sided deal giving that president control over his country’s mineral rights. That he decided not to sit there in silence as lies were being told about him and the nature of Putin’s invasion was renamed impertinence. And in that moment, about three minutes and change into the tape linked to above, the United States of America symbolically and visibly switched from being the leader of the free world to being a partner of the global authoritarian axis.

The New York Times’ reliably wrong Peter Baker described the “verbal brawl in the Oval Office” as Trump coming to Putin’s defense over Zelensky’s lack of diplomatic finesse:

But what was particularly striking in their exchange was how much Mr. Trump seemed insulted on Mr. Putin’s behalf. He has long been an open admirer of Mr. Putin and has rarely offered any criticism of his own. Just this week, he called Mr. Putin “smart” and “cunning,” and declined to call him a dictator even after calling Mr. Zelensky that.

“You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi, Vladimir, how are we doing on the deal?’” Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky on Friday. “It doesn’t work that way.”

He did not explain why it was OK to say terrible things to Mr. Zelensky while pursuing a deal. Instead, he portrayed the Ukrainian leader as unreasonably distrustful of Mr. Putin, who has broken multiple agreements guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty and calling for cease-fires and now faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes.

Asked by a reporter what he would do if Putin breaks a ceasefire, Trump haughtily replied that it had happened in the past because Putin didn’t respect the U.S. president. Then came this weird ramble:

They broke it with Biden because Biden, they didn’t respect him, they didn’t respect Obama. They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia—Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? That was a phony—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it and we didn’t end up in a war. He went through it, he was accused of all that stuff—he had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said, ‘Oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia.’ The 51 agents, the whole thing was a scam, and he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff.

Trump taking offense on Putin’s behalf, as Baker sees it, appear more pathological from where I sit. Trump identifies with Putin. He looks up to Putin. The coward fantasizes about being like Putin: a strongman. He wants to be accepted in the exclusive club of world autocrats who wouldn’t have an easily manipulated whiner like him as a member.

The wrongs Trump rattled off as done to Putin were done to Trump himself. Trump was not taking offense on Putin’s behalf. Trump saw Zelensky’s listing of Putin’s crimes as an attack on himself. Because in Trump’s fractured mind, he and his BFF are one in the same. Inseparable.

We are in the grip of a madman. Madmen, to be accurate. Sociopaths, megalomaniacs, career grifters, and anti-democracy tech oligarchs. How we purge ourselves of them and heal our alliances, I don’t know.

But I cannot believe real Real Americans™ have gone autocrat or worse. There are more of us than there are of them. We’d best start acting like it. In numbers.

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