Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Trump is dead serious about annexing Canada.

As Chris Hayes noted on his show last night, six weeks ago people would have told you you were hallucinating if you’d said that Trump would make Canada enemy number one and that the U.S. would be engaged in a vicious battle over an alleged fentanyl and illegal immigration problem on our northern border.

But it’s happening. The New York Times ran down the evolution of this insane idea that has brought the leadership of Canada to the conclusion that he isn’t bluffing. It’s so ridiculous I can hardly wrap my mind around it:

Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau spoke twice on Feb. 3, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as part of discussions to stave off tariffs on Canadian exports.

But those early February calls were not just about tariffs.

The details of the conversations between the two leaders, and subsequent discussions among top U.S. and Canadian officials, have not been previously fully reported, and were shared with The New York Times on condition of anonymity by four people with firsthand knowledge of their content. They did not want to be publicly identified discussing a sensitive topic.

On those calls, President Trump laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Mr. Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.

He also brought up something much more fundamental. He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.

Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.

You think he hasn’t thought through his annexation plan? Think again.

The Toronto Star, a Canadian newspaper, has reported that Mr. Trump mentioned the 1908 border treaty in the early February call and other details from the conversation. And the Financial Times has reported that there are discussions in the White House about removing Canada from a crucial intelligence alliance among five nations, attributing those to a senior Trump adviser.

But it wasn’t just the president talking about the border and waters with Mr. Trudeau that disturbed the Canadian side. The persistent social media references to Canada as the 51st state and Mr. Trudeau as its governor had begun to grate both inside the Canadian government and more broadly.

While Mr. Trump’s remarks could all be bluster or a negotiating tactic to pressure Canada into concessions on trade or border security, the Canadian side no longer believes that to be so. And the realization that the Trump administration was taking a closer and more aggressive look at the relationship, one that tracked with those threats of annexation, sank in during subsequent calls between top Trump officials and Canadian counterparts.

One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.

Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.

Lutnick laid out Trump’s plans: remove Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group, tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions, and a review of the military cooperation, specifically the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

In subsequent communications between senior Canadian officials and Trump advisers, this list of topics has come up again and again, making it hard for the Canadian government to dismiss them.

He’s serious. And he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of loons who see him as some kind of genius who can defy all political gravity and always win no matter what. So they’re on board.

I have to assume that informed Republicans everywhere, including the business community, have also bought into the idea that Trump has supernatural talents that make him some kind of a demi-god because otherwise they would all be freaking out that we have a certifiable nutcase running the country.

pic.twitter.com/AMrSYRuyen Is there ANYTHING more douchey than an FBI Excecutive?

This is James Dennehy who said he was going to "DIG IN" in order to resist a simple and lawful request from DOJ to hand over case information.

He was also leaking info as a "whistleblower" to Corey…

— Kyle Seraphin (@KyleSeraphin) March 7, 2025

His letter to the staff:

All,

Late Friday, I was informed that I needed to put my retirement papers in today, which I just did. I was not given a reason for this decision.

Regardless, I apologize to all of you for not being able to fulfill my commitment to you to serve as ADIC NY for at least two years. But as I leave today, I have an immense feeling of pride – to have represented an office of professionals who will always do the right thing for the right reasons; who will always seek the truth while upholding the rule of law; who will always follow the facts no matter where they lead and be unapologetic about it; who will never bend, break, falter, or quit on your integrity; who will always handle cases and evidence with an overabundance of caution and care for the innocent, the victims, and the process first; and who will always remain independent.

So with that, here is my final Top 10 list:

Top 10 Things I’ll Miss about the FBI

10. The commute to work. NOT.

9. The investigations. Doesn’t matter what squad you are on – the work is the best in the world.

8. The intensity. You have to be in it to realize what I mean. But we all know how significant what we do is.

7. The FBI brand. Do not fret. Those three letters still mean something – and there is only a select group of folks in this world, past and present, who can say they’re with the FBI. Be proud of that.

6. The camaraderie – within our own Bureau family, and with all law enforcement – local, state, federal, and international. There is no better fraternity in the world.

5. The opportunity to put on a suit and tie to conduct interviews in the morning, throw on some street clothes to conduct surveillance in the afternoon, debrief a sensitive source in a safehouse overnight, and then get up early for a SWAT arrest the next morning. Then rinse and repeat.

4. The badge. What it took to earn it and what it means to carry it.

3. The independence. We will not bend. We will not falter. We will not sacrifice what is right for anything or anyone.

2. The impact. Our work helps shape foreign policy, community awareness, international relations, wartime decisions, and public safety. Every. Single. Day.

1. All of you – every single one of you who has earned your position within this phenomenal organization.

I’ve been told many times in my life, “When you find yourself in a hole, sometimes it’s best to quit digging.” Screw that. I will never stop defending this joint. I’ll just do it willingly and proudly from outside the wire.

Semper Fidelis,

JD

I would assume that this guy is a Republican (most of the mare) but if so, maybe he’s been wised up. He should run for office in one of those shitty NY purple districts and take down one of those jerks like Mike Lawlor.

He looks like Dick Tracy. Or Sgt. Rock. In these shallow, reality show times we live in that’s not nothin’.

The Guardian reported on his departure:

Dennehy’s ouster comes a month after the removal of eight veteran FBI officials, including the head of the Washington field office, involved in criminal investigations into Trump, which were launched after he lost the 2020 election. Department of Justice officials also demanded the names of all FBI agents who investigated Trump supporters who participated in the January 6 2021 attack that led to at least seven deaths.

“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own as good people are being walked out of the FBI,” Dennehy wrote to staff last month. “And others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and FBI policy.”

Dennehy compared the situation to his experience as a marine in the early 1990s. He recalled digging a small 5ft-deep foxhole where he hunkered down for safety.

“Time for me to dig in,” Dennehy said.

The resistance by Dennehy – along with the acting director, Brian Driscoll, and the acting deputy director, Rob Kissane – prevented the retaliatory firing of thousands of FBI officials, NBC News reported. Dennehy’s removal is likely to reignite fears of mass layoffs of career officers who were simply following the law and FBI policies.

Trump has promised to fire “some” FBI agents who he said were “corrupt” – without providing any evidence.

Dennehy spent six years in the Marine Corps before joining the FBI after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was appointed to lead the New York office in September 2024, and played a key role in the corruption investigation of the New York city mayor, Eric Adams.

The Dean of Georgetown Law School responds to that MAGA freak show of a DC US Attorney Ed Martin’s threat to not hire any Georgetown lawyers unless the school ends all “DEI” programs:

Elon Musk’s dream of going to Mars failed when the second Starship rocket in 2 months blew up over the Caribbean diverting airplanes throughout the area and offering some spectacular fireworks and lots of detritus falling in the ocean. You have to wonder if Musk was minding the store instead of blowing up the federal government, he’d have better luck.

Musk’s philosophy behind building these starships, which he has on an accelerated schedule in order to meet his deadline of sending a manned mission to Mars by 2030, is something he calls “rapid iterative development” the goal being to build prototypes quickly and put them on the launchpad with a willingness to blow them up. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately for us, a willingness to blow up government doesn’t just destroy a hunk of metal, it destroys tens of thousands of lives. Not that he cares about that. As he told podcaster Joe Rogan last week, “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

As it happens Musk had already had what one would usually describe as a bit of a humiliation when President Trump called him in before the cabinet and issued an edict that the agency heads were to do the “cutting” not Musk and his DOGE team. This almost certainly came at the best of lawyers who are dealing with several lawsuits that argue Musk has no legal authority to be ordering mass firings and directives as he has clearly been doing.

I suspect they took this action on Thursday due to Trump’s loose lips in his speech on Tuesday when he introduced Musk as the “head of DOGE” on national television and this was an attempt at a clean up. Unfortunately, Trump just did it again, telling the cabinet that he expects them to cut and if they don’t “Elon’s going to do it for them so they’re right back where they started.

Trump on his cabinet members: "We're gonna be watching them. And Elon and the group are gonna be watching them. And if they can cut, it's better. And if they don't cut, then Elon will do the cutting." pic.twitter.com/9Q24xxxEAU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2025

It’s unlikely many of his cabinet stooges will buck the DOGE “advice” but there will probably be a slowdown now since Trump has clearly gotten the word that this project’s gone completely off the rails. Whether anyone can stop this speeding train, however, is anyone’s guess.

But what if Musk has already gotten what he wanted out of all this? Yes, it’s likely true that he’s been radicalized by the online right into thinking that “the left” and immigrants are destroying the world. I don’t doubt that he truly believes all that. But it’s of pretty recent vintage and his long term interests are of a completely different character.

According to this very intriguing NY Times article by a whole passel of top reporters, Musk’s political philosophy, such as it is, was gelling in the fall of 2023 when he attended a $50,000 a head dinner party in Silicon Valley for entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy who was running for president. He “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..” They write:

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?

According to the article he subsequently became obsessed with this idea, and after helping Trump win with a massive $288 million campaign contribution, he immediately looked around the government and discovered the “little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov” which would give them “direct, insider access to government systems.”

They got it. As we know, Musk’s crew has infiltrated all the government computer systems from Treasury to Social Security to the Pentagon. He has obtained access to vast reams of data about every American, business competitors, foreign intelligence, all of it. And all we know is that his DOGE kids have been harassing and laying off people willy nilly and making so many mistakes they would have been fired immediately in any other job.

But maybe that isn’t really their primary job. Tech reporter Kara Swisher appeared on The Focus Group podcast a week or so ago and had a very interesting theory about what’s actually going on. We all know that AI is where all the action has been for the last few years with the “Magnificent 7” Big Tech companies leading the impressive growth in the stock market. Swisher claimed that Musk has been behind on the AI boom, having had his partnership with Sam Altman of Open AI blow up over his desire to monetize the free service, and was almost certainly on a hunt for data to use for his own AI purposes. She said:

What Elon is after, from what I can guess, if I had to guess, is… He is behind. One of the big debates going on right now in AI is we’re running out of data. All the LLMs have sucked in all the data. Now they need more to have an advantage.

And so that means that all the LLMs have become a commodity because they’re all parsing the same information, right? That they’ve scraped everything they can. Government is the biggest trove of information on the planet. U.S. government is at this point, would be my guess, or China would be.

The only other country that has it all consolidated is China, because it’s a surveillance economy and it’s a communist country, and so they want great control over their citizens. Our government data is siloed all over the place. What if someone could bring it all together and then load it into an LLM? What if…

Swisher isn’t the only one asking these questions. According to Politico, even some Republicans who are savvy about the technology are wondering. The White House press secretary Karoline Levitt assured them that Musk isn’t using government data to train its AI models and I’m sure she would know. Interestingly, when the Politico reporters put the question to Musk’s Grok AI, it didn’t exactly deny it:

Asked whether it was trained on data from the federal government obtained by DOGE, Grok 3 responded that “it’s plausible that data DOGE accessed could have flowed to xAI projects like Grok 3.” Its “best guess” is that “Grok 3 probably wasn’t primarily trained on DOGE-obtained federal data.” (It’s worth noting AI is capable of deception.)

I have no idea if this is one of the ideas that was percolating in Musk’s mind that night back in 2023 when he was smoking cigars and shooting the breeze with his fellow tech billionaires but it would hardly be surprising. As Swisher said, “why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you rob government agencies? Because that’s where the data is.” In the DOGE eat DOGE world of AI, anything is possible.

Salon

You’re losing

Congressional Democrats’ “protest” during Donald Trump’s marathon speech had all the impact of a Demotivational poster. That’s leadership from Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

Punchbowl News:

Earlier on Thursday, Jeffries and party leaders brought in some of the most vocal rank-and-file Democrats – including Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) – to berate them for their recent behavior. The members-only meeting was called by Jeffries, we’re told.

Tuesday’s debacle, as well as the ongoing clashes between progressives and moderates inside the House Democratic Caucus, isn’t Jeffries’ fault, of course. But it is his problem. And it shows little sign of cooling off right now.

That may be because Frost and Crockett didn’t come to D.C. to be punching bags. They came to fight, just what the Democratic base demands. Jeffries and Schumer came to get along. Their idea of defending constituents is holding a press conference. Holding up signs on sticks and wearing pink shirts isn’t much better.

But the exciting Jeffries is doing “Good Morning America” and podcasts!

Meantime, Chuck Schumer has plans:

“We have our strategy. It’s not just a message. It’s things that really appeal to the American people,” Schumer said. “It unifies our caucus completely. Bernie Sanders is happy with it. [John] Fetterman is happy with it. So we’re all united on that. And it’s very good for our activists.”

Activists will be the judge of that.

@rebmasel

??????????????

♬ original sound – reb for the rebrand

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Four months and counting

Among Republicans’ antidemocratic weaponry are such diverse elements as [your Spanish Inquisition riff here]. Also, a variety of moving-the-goalposts tactics like obstacles to registering voters. They’ve tried to restrict third-party voter registration drives across the country. North Carolina now proposes making it a misdemeanor for voter registration groups to use actual voter registration forms.

Sometimes the gambit moves the goalposts farther. Sometimes it moves the goalposts closer. But as we’ve seen, the operative principle behind them all is: Heads, I win, tails, you lose. Recall Republican demands that voting happen only on Election Day and that ballots be counted and the election settled on Election Day? But that principle is flexible. So when necessity arises, Republicans behind in the vote count will keep postponing the day of reconning the way Donald Trump delays, delays, delays his reconning in court.

David Graham of The Atlantic examines how a losing Republican state supreme court candidate in North Carolina (familiar to readers here) has pushed back his day of reconning for four months now:

The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.

Preposterous

We’ve covered the details before. All Griffin wants to do is this: he just wants to find 735 votes, which is one more than he needs because he won the state. Sound familiar?

But as I’ve said, you should care how this North Carolina drama plays out. Donald Trump has taught his children well (emphasis mine):

All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”

North Carolina has historically been an early indicator for future national voting battles. It has long seen some of the more preposterous congressional maps in the United States. When the Supreme Court struck part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina Republicans moved within hours to change laws. An effort by Republican Governor Pat McCrory to challenge his 2016 election loss presaged Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” push. North Carolina also sent important cases about partisan gerrymandering and the controversial “independent state legislature” theory to the Supreme Court. If Griffin prevails, his playbook could go national as well.

Trump’s delaying tactics, enabled by a MAGA federal judges, left a man convicted of 34 felonies and with no regard for the rule of law eligible to run for the presidency again and win. He now enjoys criminal immunity granted him for which Trump personally thanked Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday. (The real headline is Trump thanking anyone for anything.) Within weeks, the downstream effects are being felt across the country, across the planet, and perhaps inside your homes.

Graham concludes:

A world in which losing candidates can indefinitely delay the certification of elections with ex post facto challenges is one that could paralyze democratic government. Given the contempt for voters on display here, maybe that’s the point.

Just like cruelty that way.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Let’s party like it’s 2009!

What great news:

Layoffs announced by U.S.-employers jumped to levels not seen since the last two recessions amid mass federal government job cuts, canceled contracts and fears of trade wars, offering the clearest sign yet of the toll taken on the labor market by the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said on Thursday that planned job cuts vaulted 245% to 172,017 last month, the highest level since July 2020, when the economy was in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the highest February total since the Great Recession 16 years ago.

These numbers won’t show up in the jobs numbers for a couple of weeks but they’re going to show up. I’m sure the Trump henchmen will be seeking some way to fudge those numbers but it won’t change the fact that it’s happening, first because of the massive federal layoffs and then when private employers, seeing the recession on the wall, start doing it too.

The Wall St. Journal reported earlier this week:

Stagflation has entered the chat. President Trump’s decision to dramatically raise tariffs on imports threatens the U.S. with an uncomfortable combination of weaker or even stagnant growth and higher prices—sometimes called “stagflation.”

The U.S. has imposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and another 10% hike on China following last month’s 10% increase. They “will be wildly disruptive to business investment plans,” said Ray Farris, chief economist at Prudential PLC. “They will be inflationary, so they will be a shock to real household income just as household income growth is slowing because of slower employment and wage gains,” he said.

Trump announced today that he has rolled back the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for another month. The markets were not impressed. This incoherence is making them crazy.

I’m sure most of you remember 2008/2009 and 2020/2021. It would be foolish not to see this unpredictable moron’s wild incoherence as a serious danger to our economic well-being.

Meanwhile, here’s the Treasury Secretary today:

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Bessent said during a speech to the Economic Club of New York.

That’s going to come as a surprise to your buddy Jeff Bezos, fella:

And this:

Canada immediately imposed 25% tariffs on C$30 billion of U.S. imports and Trudeau said those measures would remain in place until the Trump administration ended its trade action.

Bessent made clear the administration’s unhappiness, telling an event in New York that “If you want to be a numbskull like Justin Trudeau and say ‘Oh we’re going to do this’, then tariffs are going to go up”.

He seems nice. He’s also stupid. He seems to think that being an erratic, unstable thug toward our friends and allies is a successful economic strategy and it is not. Trump is nuts, true, and everyone knows it including him. He just thinks they can get through this, tell Trump he’s a genius and give him a parade and everything will be ok.

Krugman wrote this yesterday:

Just two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some crazy things about trade wars, appointing strange people to top policy positions and threatening our allies, but no need to take that stuff seriously.

Are they still feeling smug? Or are they starting to realize that Trump’s ignorance, irresponsibility and whiny belligerence weren’t an act?

[…]

One thing that really struck me from Rattner’s piece — something I’ve heard from other sources — is that big businessmen think Elon Musk is doing a good job. I guess this is one of those cases where power and privilege make you blind to things that are obvious to everyone else.

What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important. These firings have been followed in several cases by desperate attempts to rehire the lost workers, who turn out to have been doing things like, um, securing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Now, Musk’s DOGE claims that it has already saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, but it has provided no evidence to back those claims. Instead, last month it released what it called a “wall of receipts,” purportedly documenting some of the claimed savings. That document, however, turned out to be riddled with huge errors, including misreading an $8 million contract as $8 billion and counting the same canceled contract three times. Last week it released a revised, much smaller “wall” — but that version also turns out to be full of major errors, and DOGE has already retracted 5 of its 7 biggest claims about cost savings.

Krugman points out that if someone did this in the private sector they would be fired immediately. But not, of course, by Donald Trump who is too stupid to understand what he doesn’t understand and only listens to people who are slurping on his golf shoes.

I don’t know what will make these Big Money Boyz see that Trump is not a supernatural genius who can act like a petty tyrant on the world stage and empower a drug-addled weirdo like Musk to dismantle the government and come out a winner. Maybe when the stock market really crashes and burns?

They’re all in and they’re going to take us over the cliff. And frankly, I think that may be the only way they can be stopped. The question is how much people have to suffer in the meantime. And once it’s done, I’m afraid we’ll look around at the wreckage and have to accept that we will never be the same.

If you think that they aren’t going after Social Security, think again:

he newly installed caretaker at the Social Security Administration acknowledged this week that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is calling the shots as the agency races to slash thousands of jobs and shrink its budget, telling a group of advocates, “Things are currently operating in a way I have never seen in government before.”

In a meeting Tuesday with his senior staff and about 50 legal-aid attorneys and other advocates for the disabled and elderly, acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek referred to the tech billionaire’s cost-cutting team as “outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs,” according to a meeting participant’s detailed notes that were obtained by The Washington Post.

“DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,” Dudek told the group, according to the notes. “I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions.”

His remarks to skeptical advocates came on Dudek’s 12th day in a role that the White House rewarded him with after he secretly shared information with DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. His short tenure — while President Donald Trump’s nominee to permanently run the agency waits in the wings — has been consumed by a whirlwind downsizing of the staff in charge of the safety-net program used by 73 million retired and disabled Americans.

Dudek is the data guy who replaced the former commissioner after she was fired for reprimanding him for helping DOGE. It doesn’t look like he’s long for the job either.

If you think this isn’t a plan to destroy the system you aren’t paying attention. Musk says it’s a Ponzi scheme and that empathy is a weakness. He wants to end it. Period. And the GOP trained seals are just standing there letting it happen.

By the way:

The Social Security Administration wrote in a Thursday morning email that employees can no longer read news websites on work devices.

If they don’t read the news they won’t know that Trump and Musk are destroying the country. I guess that’s good.

Trump is going to make Ukrainians pay and pay hard for failing to immediately surrender to his “brilliant”, “savvy” friend Vladimir Putin three years ago:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation.

The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration.

He’ll be deporting everyone under temporary immigration statuses including Afghans, Cubans, Haitians, etc. But I think the deportation of Ukrainians in the middle of the war is a Trump bully tactic to try to force Zelensky to lick his boots. It’s just cruel.

The Trump administration last month paused processing immigration-related applications for people who entered the U.S. under certain Biden parole programs – placing Ukrainian Liana Avetisian, her husband and her 14-year-old daughter, in limbo. Avetisian, who worked in real estate in Ukraine, now assembles windows while her husband works construction.

The family fled Kyiv in May 2023, eventually buying a house in the small city of DeWitt, Iowa. Their parole and work permits expire in May. They say they spent about $4,000 in filing fees to renew their parole and to try to apply for another program known as Temporary Protected Status.

Avetisian has started getting headaches as she worries about their situation, she said.

“We don’t know what to do,” she said.

This comes on the heels of Trump ordering the suspension of all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine. He’s hanging them out to dry.

Here’s a fascinating look at the DOGE actions by Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Sam Fuller. I urge you to read the whole post which but here’s the essence of their findings and it should give us some heart:

Trump’s actions, matters of complex questions relating to civic and constitutional norms, are incredibly unpopular: they are not supported by an overwhelming majority of Democrats (unsurprising), a significant majority of Independents (more surprising), and nearly half(!) of Republicans (extremely surprising). And, particularly among Republicans, if you cut through the partisan blinders and remind people these actions are illegal and unconstitutional, people are even more likely to disapprove of his actions.

We see this in data that comes from questions we asked about Trump’s actions on the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.1 In particular, we asked people how much they support the following authoritarian actions (full questions can be seen at the end of the post):

1. Working with Elon Musk to purge the government of disloyal civil servants.
   
2. The closing of USAID without Congressional approval.
   
3. The firing of FBI agents and DOJ attorneys who had investigated the January 6^th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
   
4. The proposal to close the Department of Education by executive order.
   
5. The firing of 18 Inspectors General without cause.

Responses were on a five-point scale from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose”. For ease, we’ll bin those into “support” and “no support” where we put the people in “neither support nor oppose” in the “no support” category. Thus we are isolating levels of support (full response distributions are at the end of this post). For each of these questions, we also included an experiment where about half of our respondents were asked the question with additional text reminding them that these actions are illegal and/or unconstitutional. For example, the question: “President Trump’s [unlawful] firing of FBI agents and Department of Justice Attorneys who had investigated and tried cases involving the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol” for some respondents included the treatment of “unlawful” and for some it did not.

Let’s start with overall support:

This finding is not driven by Democrats alone, look at Independents:

Republicans:

Yes, a majority of Republicans love to see people suffer, we know that. But it’s not a huge majority. That shows some serious weakness.

I would hope that Democrats could do something with this in the next election but that’s a long way away. (They need to get started now, however, to build a narrative that could compete with the Trump triumphalist lies.)

But what this tells us is that there is power on the ground for the people to get vocal and be aggressive about what’s going on. I am finding that people in my personal life don’t want to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable and maybe even boring. But I think that those of us who are following this closely need to be willing to risk being uncomfortable bores in order to get the word out about what’s going on. People don’t like it but they need to know that it’s a national emergency as threatening as the pandemic or 9/11.

I don’t want to be that person and I assume most of us don’t. But we have to. It’s going to take everything we have in us to compete with this Trump noise over the next couple of years and we know those trained seals in the US Congress aren’t going to do anything about it. It’s on us.