Mike Walz looked like he was about to cry in both of his public appearances yesterday, first at the ambassadors meeting where Trump threw the ball to him to explain himself and later on Laura Ingraham. He was dancing as fast as he could to both cover up his massive error and suck up to the boss at the same time. I’m not sure he succeeded.
According to Politico, Trump was not as ok with all this as he pretended. And it’s not because of the classified information. neither was it is unsecured phones. He’s done even worse himself and is probably doing it as we speak. No, he was mad that his nemesis Jeffrey Goldberg was on the chat. And we know who invited him:
Trump was mad — and suspicious — that Waltz had Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number saved in his phone in the first place, according to three people familiar with the situation, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. A fourth person said the president was also particularly perturbed by the embarrassing nature of the episode.
People in know said that just because they smoothed it over it doesn’t mean it’s the end of it:
A second person familiar with the matter said Trump spoke with Waltz multiple times about the Atlantic story on Monday, while a third person said the White House counsel had been looking into it at one point.
…[S]ome people close to the White House argued the incident is likely to leave a lasting mark. Pushing Waltz out now could disturb the relative harmony this administration has seen. “If you let scalps fall off right now — that could set a bad precedent,” another person familiar with the incident said.
That leaves Waltz in a precarious position with the “America First” contingent of the administration and outside allies who would be all too happy to see him removed from office, suspicious of his neoconservative underpinnings.
“The president trusts his team a lot more than he did during his first term. But he is still someone who doesn’t easily forget about mistakes, so just because he’s not getting rid of Waltz or one of the others today, doesn’t mean a day won’t come when a person will sort of run out of rope,” a person close to the White House said.
You know Trump is still wondering how this happened. Goldberg is his most hated enemy journalist because of the “suckers and losers” report (which was true…) The only thing saving Walz is that Trump doesn’t seem to have a grasp of how Signal works. If he did he would know that it is preposterous that someone else put this reporter on the chat.
According to this, the long knives are out for Walz anyway for ideological reasons. Let the back-stabbing begin.
Trump seems to think he’s still on the campaign trail today. He’s actually at a White House event celebrating Women’s History Month and all the ladies he’s surrounded by that he thinks are just great, from Noem to Leavitt to Habba and Bondi.
Sounds kinda DEI to me but then these are all “good ones” who deserve to be celebrated. They look nice and they love Trump unconditionally not like all the other undeserving women who should be erased from history.
Anyway, here are a few highlights:
Trump: "We're gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we're talking about, it's gonna be great. Fertilization. I'm still very proud of it, I don't care. I'll be known as the fertilization president and… pic.twitter.com/TjLuL8lb19
Trump: "I kept hearing, 'woman don't like him.' I said, I think they do. You know who don't like me? Fake polls don't like me. But we're settings records in so many of these cases. I was for the suburban house wife where I stopped low income housing projects from being built at a… pic.twitter.com/SATd5x1nSV
Are we really living through this? Am I hallucinating?
Never mind. I just have to blurt out that question at least once a day. I simply can’t get over it.
He did have a couple of lucid moments.
Trump: "You see what we're doing with the colleges and they're all bending and saying, 'Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.' And nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible. Law firms that nobody would believe and they're saying, 'Where do I… pic.twitter.com/V210kApTe8
“… where do I sign, where do I sign and there’s more coming” I’m sure there is.
He’s not wrong about this and it’s absolutely mind boggling. Everytime some institution buckled under it empowers him to go further. And at some point he’s going to come for them anyway. That’s how it always goes. You’d think universities would at least understand that.
Unfortunately, he’s probably right about the Democrats too:
Trump: "I believe the Democrats are going to forced to help vote for this bill. And then we have the very important continuation of debt. I don't call it a debt increase because we're not looking to increase. We wanna just continue that line. We should just call it I think from… pic.twitter.com/NsyD8x3tQl
I don’t know how you can see this any other way. He’s not using it as leverage for something else. There’s no “ask” to avoid it. He just wants it and says he’s going to have it.
I think he’s calculated that Europe isn’t going to fight for it so the best case for this is that we will blow up our alliances over it including NATO, Australia, Japan, South Korea — all of them — but he’s more than fine with that. They may stay superficially cordial, perhaps even hoping that when the lunatic is finally gone something can be put back together. But there will be no trust going forward if he does this.
The worst case scenario is war. I don’t think it will actually happen. But imagine what will go through the minds of Canadians if it does.
This is the America First I always believed it was. He is a domineering sociopath and always wanted to find a way to demonstrate that America is number one. He got stuck with the isolationist, peacenik role because he ran against Bush and Obama and the Iraq war in 2016. Sure he believes that the U.S. shouldn’t be paying for anything that benefits the rest of the world. But that’s because he believes the rest of the world should be paying America for “protecting” them … from America. He is essentially a cowardly bully so he respects Russia and China for their “strength” and accepts the love from any other country whose leaders lick his boots.
The territorial expansion he’s talking about these days is a new wrinkle which I suspect is borne of his encroaching dementia. This is about his fantasy legacy as a conqueror. And I would guess that most of the people around him don’t think he’s serious. But there are obviously a few who do, both on the economic and the military side. Since they are all sworn loyalists, in the end I think they’ll go along as, sadly, will the GOP Congress. And this is one thing where the courts really do have no jurisdiction.
I just put those up to remind ourselves how many of our fellow citizens will be affected by Elon’s crusade to cut the program by whatever means necessary.
Right now, it appears he just wants to kill old and disabled people by making it too difficult for them to access benefits they are entitled to. By making the department malfunction they believe they can make people lose faith in the system and turn on it. That’s stupid of course but consider who’s idea this is. Fundamentally they don’t really care what people think or how much they will suffer. Trump is addled and doesn’t have to run again, Republicans are more afraid of Trump and Musk than their own voters and Musk is trying to create some sort of ketamine fueled cyber-utopia.
This is a disaster in the making and I honestly don’t know if anyone or anything is going to be able to stop it.
The most famous of all of Trump’s DOGE-boys is known as “Big Balls” to his friends. It’s easy to see how he got that name and it has nothing to do with his anatomy:
Past reporting had focused on his youth – he is 19 – and his chosen nickname of “bigballs,” which became a pop culture punchline. Musk has championed the teen on his social media site X, telling his followers last month that “Big Balls is awesome.”
Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates. Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly,” according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.
The details of Coristine’s connection to EGodly have not been previously reported.
On Feb. 15, 2023, EGodly thanked Coristine’s company for its assistance in a post on the Telegram messaging app. “We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” the message said.
The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “Security check.”
This is one of the people digging around in your personal information all across the U.S. Government.
He is listed as a “senior adviser” at the State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to one official at each agency who told Reuters they had seen his name in their respective agencies’ staff directory.
On LinkedIn, Coristine describes himself as a “Volunteer (Intern) Plumber” with the U.S. government.
The entire Trump administration is a criminal enterprise.
It took two months but we finally have our first “gate” of the second Trump administration: “Signalgate” and it’s a doozy. You are no doubt aware by now that The Atlantic has published an article reporting that the top national security officials known as the “Principles Committee” were gathered together in a Signal group chat to discuss the impending bombing campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen and accidentally included their Editor in Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the chat without realizing it.
In the chat they discussed policy concerns about the campaign, slagged the European allies, shared what experts say are by definition classified battle plans which included “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” and even mentioned the name of a covert CIA officer. Goldberg published an article about it on Monday, complete with screenshots of the chat, although he did not publish the classified information or the name of the CIA officer.
That these high level national security officials were all using a commercial ap on personal phones that could easily be breached by state level actors is bad enough. (One of the members on the call, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was actually in Moscow at the time.) But considering their previous outrage at Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server you would have thought that it would have crossed the mind of at least one of them that this was dangerous. There is no other way to interpret any of that except to assume that they commonly use Signal for such discussions in contravention of every security protocol in the U.S. Government.
When you think about it, though, why wouldn’t they? Their leader stubbornly refused to give up his own personal phone and made a fetish of blabbing national security secrets since his first term. Recall that right after he fired FBI Director James Comey, he had the Russian foreign minister and ambassador over to the oval office for a chat where he shared some very closely held classified information (which later turned out to be about Israel.) After he was out of office, he stole boxes full of classified documents, stored them in his toilet and refused to give them back. He was indicted for that but the Justice Department dropped the charges when he won the election.
And when it comes to war plans he certainly has no problem sharing them with reporters. After all, he was also indicted for showing stolen Pentagon plans for war with Iran with two reporters down at Mar-a-lago. That’s not just hearsay. It’s on tape. He also blabbed highly confidential information about nuclear submarines to a member of his club, an Australian billionaire who, according to ABC news “then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists…”
So really, it’s pretty much policy for the Trump administration to just blurt out classified information whenever you feel like it. He’s probably still doing it every day on his unsecured phone between Truth Social posts.
The substance of the chat is very interesting, however, and provides an interesting insight into the workings of the Trump inner circle. From what I understand, it’s odd that the discussion that takes place would happen among this group once the order had been given. Normally this sort of thing would be hashed out at the staff level.
There had clearly been a previous meeting among the principles that left them wondering whether it was a good idea and if President Trump had a clue about what he was doing. The Vice President says he thinks the president doesn’t really get the full picture and thinks the whole thing is a waste because it benefits the Europeans more than America. He believes they should delay at the very least. (He apparently doesn’t understand the concept of global supply chains, even after the pandemic.) He agrees to be a team player, however, and not bring it up if they all agree but it’s clear that he doesn’t see any value in using the military to protect shipping lanes for the direct benefit of anyone but the U.S. He’s the MAGA America First isolationist purist.
Hegseth, who sounds more like an eager beaver staffer (or the weekend Fox News host he was just a couple of months ago ) than the SecDef agrees that the Europeans are “PATHETIC” but explains that only the U.S. has the capability of securing its core national interest in “Freedom of Navigation.” He’s of the Trump 2.0 MAGA school that wants to show dominance, seize territory and take over the world.
Both of these concepts are true to their Dear Leader who has always held both those ideas in his head at the same time, but now that he’s getting on in years he is no longer able to finesse it in the same way. He’s always wanted a war so he could demonstrate his manly power to the world as a military leader but he is also a coward who would rather buy his way out of any jam. Now he’s so filled with resentment and bile about people seeing through his lies and attempting to hold him accountable that he’s lost the thread. His people, loyal as they are, can’t really tell what he wants anymore.
In this chat it took the devil on Trump’s shoulder to make sense of it for the group. Presidential adviser Stephen Miller, who everyone obviously assumed spoke for the president, stepped in for the first time and shut down the discussion with this comment:
As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.
In other words, the Trump foreign policy is to run the world as a protection racket. But with this crew at the top, it’s even less professional and disciplined than the Sopranos.
As for the President, his reaction has been one of befuddlement and confusion. When first confronted with the news when the story broke on Monday he said he hadn’t heard about it, which was odd. The story had been out for several hours at that point and Goldberg had earlier called the White House for comment. I believed him. You can tell when he’s lying. And on Tuesday when he talked about it he was clearly uncomfortable, trying to defend his people and downplaying the problem as usual. But his energy was off, he seemed almost feeble at times. I suspect it’s because he didn’t really understand what had happened or how it all worked. He seemed to think it was something like a conference call:
Trump: "What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission, somebody that worked with Mike Waltz at a lower level, had Goldberg's number or call through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call."
From what we could see on those text messages his people don’t know what he’s talking about either, not even when he’s ordering military strikes. The most chilling revelation to come out of all this may be that Stephen Miller is the person everyone turns to to explain what it is he really wants.
There’s nothing official, but Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow (D) is eyeing a run for Senate in 2026 to fill the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D).
Politico: Michigan Democrat Mallory McMorrow says it’s time for a new generation to take on Trump.
“I think it is” time for Schumer to step back, McMorrow said. “There’s still this idea that Democrats and Republicans are still abiding by the same rules and still believe in the same norms and systems and structure. There seems to be a lack of recognition that this is no longer the Republican Party. This is a MAGA party. And the same approach is not going to work.” (A Schumer spokesperson declined to comment.)
Amen. Time to pass the torch to a new generation, as someone famous once said. It’s time again.
McMorrow has some advice for those of you experiencing burnout.
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Take your wins where you can. For example:
When we say Lancaster County is ultra-ancestrally GOP, we're not kidding. It's voted GOP for president since it narrowly voted for LBJ in 1964; the last Democrat to win it before that was Lancaster County resident James Buchanan in *1856.*
AOC: I want to live in an America that guarantees healthcare to every person.
I want to live in an America that has a living wage for every person
I want to live in an America where you have free speech to express yourself and not be afraid of being put on a list or deported. pic.twitter.com/B9EG6Jw3ug
Multiple reports tick through the order’s elements. The Associated Press noted sections aimed at “requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day.”
Non-U.S. citizens are already not allowed to vote in federal elections. But under the order, federal voter registration forms will require that applicants provide either a U.S. passport, a REAL ID driver’s license or state-issued card compliant with REAL standards, or a “valid Federal or State government-issued photo identification.”
Note that (as I read it) this only applies to federal voter registration forms often used by national voter registration groups like HeadCount, not to your state’s forms.
And in gangster fashion, Trump calls for the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission to withhold election-support funds to states that refuse to implement his directives. It’s not clear he has that authority.
The Constitution (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1) confers on state legislatures control over “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections.” So can Trump even implement his EO?
“This is not a statute. This is an edict by fiat from the executive branch, and so every piece of it can be challenged through the regular judicial process,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) told Democracy Docket.
Wendy Weiser, the Brennan Center’s vice president, posted to Bluesky:
Trump just signed an exec order purporting to require a passport (or a few other docs) to register to vote. The president doesn't have the power to override a law passed by Congress. This is the SAVE Act but much worse. It is an illegal power grab that would block tens of millions from voting.
“The short answer is that this executive order, like all too many that we’ve seen before, is lawless and asserts all sorts of executive authority that he most assuredly does not have,” Danielle Lang, an attorney at the non-profit Campaign Legal Center, told The Guardian.
But it is what Trump can do with executive authority that worries me. I hear echoes of what’s happening in North Carolina.
Readers are familiar with N.C. Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin’s voter registration challenges in the state Supreme Court election he lost in November. It remains the only uncertified race left in the country. Among other things, Griffin alleges that if voters’ Social Security number or driver’s license number (required under HAVA), do not appear in the digital voter registration file, then their registrations — 60,000 of them in this case— are invalid. Griffin trails sitting Justice Allison Riggs (D) by 734 votes. He wants those votes (and others) thrown out in his race, including those of voters who have voted for decades and registered before HAVA became law in 2002.
Except Griffin has yet to prove that any of those voters’ physical registrations did not supply that information. Twenty-three North Carolina students on Griffin’s challenge list who retained or obtained copies of their registration forms had in fact supplied that data. It simply never made it into the voter file. Twenty-two provided the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. The last provided her driver’s license number.
This section from today’s EO echoes our Cleta Mitchell-inspired Griffin challenge effort. And I suspect it’s an effort that Trump might implement without congressional action:
Sec. 2 (b)(iii) the Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with the DOGE Administrator, shall review each State’s publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities as required by 52 U.S.C. 20507, alongside Federal immigration databases and State records requested, including through subpoena where necessary and authorized by law, for consistency with Federal requirements.
Appearing on MSNBC with Chris Hayes Tuesday night, election attorney Marc Elias declared the EO “wildly unconstitutional and illegal.” Then he laughed off Trump’s handing DOGE subpoena power as giving “Mr. Musk something to do.” That is, to “review each State’s publicly available voter registration list…for consistency with Federal requirements.” This is exactly the basis for Jefferson Griffin’s election challenge now before North Carolina courts. I’m not laughing.
Assuming DOGE coders are no more skilled at reading voter files than they are at reading Social Security’s COBOL code, Musk-DOGE could turn up and loudly advertise thousands of alleged “bad” registrations in every state the way Griffin has here. Republicans could use that data to throw into doubt the eligibility of votes cast in any close state election Republicans lose — just what’s happening right now in N.C. Republicans could even use it to challenge close presidential elections in states they lose.
Sec. 3 (d) The Secretary of Defense shall update the Federal Post Card Application, pursuant to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, 52 U.S.C. 20301, to require:
(i) documentary proof of United States citizenship, as defined by section 2(a)(ii) of this order; and
(ii) proof of eligibility to vote in elections in the State in which the voter is attempting to vote.
I predicted months ago that, win or lose, Republicans would replicate Griffin’s challenge model in other states. I just never expected to see its implementation attempted from the Oval Office.
Parents in the region have increasingly turned to unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus. Local doctors say they have now treated a handful of children who were given so much vitamin A — which Kennedy has promoted as a near-miraculous cure for measles — that they showed signs of liver damage.
Most of the article is all about how Kennedy’s attack on the food supply and condemnation of certain industries is gaining converts among more liberal members of the public who have long criticized the food “industrial complex” for its contribution to the poor health of Americans. Maybe they’ll succeed in getting the unhealthy processed food out of Americans’ diets and persuading them to stop eating sugar and industrial farming products. I’m sure everyone would benefit. But I’m not going to hold my breath on that.
What these people are actually going to succeed in doing is providing validation to someone who is an anti-science, conspiracy theorist crank who wants people to reject medical science in favor of woo-woo bullshit even he doesn’t follow. (The man is a walking steroid bomb.) And a lot of people are going to get a whole lot sicker in the long run.
This is a feature not a bug. Musk believes that Social security is a big Ponzi scheme and the Commerce Secretary thinks that anyone who complains about it is committing fraud.
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. Amid all this, the agency no longer has a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.
And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining the already struggling organization’s ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.
According to Angelo Carusone of Media Matters on MSNBC, what’s happening at the SSA goes beyond even Project 2025. They just wanted to raise the retirement age and slowly roll out some benefit cuts. Musk wants to destroy it altogether. Now they’re working in tandem to just let ‘er rip.
The SS Administrator nominee Frank Bisignano had his confirmation hearing this morning. I don’t think he’s going to make many improvements:
“It’s bedlam out there in Social Security,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the ranking member of the Finance Committee.
“The urgency for today’s hearing couldn’t be greater. Since Donald Trump took office, Social Security has experienced the most chaos in its history,” he said. “Mass personnel layoffs, eliminating phone service for basic help, sending seniors to overcrowded and understaffed field offices that have also been put on the chopping block for closure, political appointees poking around your most sensitive private information.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., asked Bisignano whether he agrees with Musk’s claim that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.” The nominee didn’t directly answer, saying twice that it’s “a promise to pay.”
Bisignano told Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., that his objective is to continue and improve Social Security. When asked if it should be privatized, he said, “I don’t believe anybody’s thinking about that.”
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., said Trump “has Elon Musk … running rampant through Social Security, and he’s laying off staff and making it much more difficult for people to get benefits.” She asked if he’d stand up to Musk and DOGE if they come for benefits.
Bisignano promised to “lead the agency in the manner that this Senate Finance Committee wants me to do” and said he has no thought about slashing benefits. He made clear he reports to Trump amid questions about Musk.
Well ok then.
The Republicans, by the way, said these complaints are all a pack of lies and nothing but scare tactics. There’s no need to worry your pretty little heads about anything. Daddy’s home.
