The tariff fiasco continued this week. After swearing that he’d never back down from last week’s tariffs, Trump did indeed back down — and then claimed he’d meant to do that all along.
This week’s featured post focuses on not getting trapped in whatever position is the opposite of Trump’s. In this case, that means being careful in how you oppose Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy. These particular tariffs are crazy, but that shouldn’t push us to critique them from a neo-liberal free-trade stance. Globalization has had its victims, particularly among the non-college White men who make up the core of Trump’s coalition. They’re not wrong to want change.
So tariffs and industrial policy have a role to play in the Democratic worldview. But not this role. It’s a more nuanced and harder-to-communicate position than free trade, but otherwise we’ll get trapped into defending the very flawed pre-Trump status quo.
That post should go out around 10 EST. The weekly summary will cover the approaching clash between Trump and the Supreme Court, some very wrong-headed executive orders concerning the environment, abuse of the Social Security database, and one more thing I may spin off into its own featured post: As we approach the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, anti-Trump and anti-King-George rhetoric is starting to merge.
Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis
Saturday’s protests at 1400 locations around the country had been planned for some time. But they got a huge boost from a week of bad news for the Trump administration, which I summarize in the other featured post.
Good estimates of how many people participated are hard to come by. Organizers tend to inflate numbers, while news organizations and public-safety departments usually underestimate. Then there’s the problem of combining over a thousand individual estimates into a collective estimate.
The organizers of these protests claim “millions” of participants. And that total sounds reasonable when you see police estimates like 25-30 thousand in Boston alone, or NYT reporting of a march 20 blocks long in New York.
Hands Off march in New York City Saturday
and Cory Booker’s speech
The political impact of Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech to the Senate surprised me. It was a stunt, of course. The speech itself produced no direct change in law or policy. And yet it drew massive amounts of public attention and made an important symbolic statement: Yes, Democrats in Congress do realize that American democracy is at a crisis point, and they are looking for ways to do something about it.
The point of a stunt is to draw attention, and Booker certainly did. An estimated 300K viewers livestreamed at least part his speech, and the Tik-Tok stream got 350 million likes.
Like many stunts, Booker’s speech was a feat of physical endurance. He had to remain standing for the full 25 hours, and didn’t take any bathroom breaks. He didn’t have to speak the entire time, because allies in the Senate took up some time by asking him occasional questions. I had thought he would wear Depends or have some kind of catheter strapped to his leg, but apparently not.
I think I stopped eating on Friday, and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday, and that had its benefits and it had its really downsides.
I believe I would faint dead away or start hallucinating if I tried that. But Booker mainly reported muscle cramps from dehydration.
A side benefit of Booker’s speech was to take arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond out of the record books. Thurmond’s previous record-holder was a 24-hour speech against a civil rights bill in 1957. Unlike Thurmond, who resorted to reading the phone book at one point, Booker remained on-topic and empassioned right up to the end.
That’s due largely to the changing times, I think. Thurmond was filibustering, so the time he took up was an end in itself. While Booker did interrupt the business of the Senate for 25 hours, there was no particular action he intended to delay. He was trying to build and hang onto a worldwide audience, an impossibility in 1957.
and Wisconsin voters’ rejection of Elon
A number of election were held Tuesday. The most significant was for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Liberals achieved a 4-3 majority on the court two years ago, and had begun to undo a gerrymander that had put the Republican leadership of the legislature virtually beyond the reach of voters. Wisconsin’s congressional districts are similarly gerrymandered, so that the evenly divided state sends 6 Republicans and only 2 Democrats to the U. S. House. If the conservative had won, flipping the court to a 4-3 conservative majority, that gerrymander would likely have remained.
Elon Musk made himself a major issue in the election by contributing quantities of money variously reported in the $20-25 million range. His contributions were controversial and possibly illegal: He gave voters $100 each to sign a petition denouncing “activist judges”, and offered two million-dollar checks to voters who came to a rally he headlined in Green Bay. Musk claimed “the future of civilization” hung on the outcome of this election.
But apparently Wisconsin voters don’t want the richest many in the world choosing their judges: the Trump/Musk candidate lost 55%-45%.
Tuesday’s other elections are harder to interpret. Two special elections for Florida congressional seats went to the Republicans, but only by about half the 30-point margin Trump had in those districts in November. Democrats may take encouragement from those elections — and Republicans whose districts were only +15 in November may get anxious — but a loss is still a loss.
and you also might be interested in …
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, so the government has been specifically barred from sending him back to El Salvador, where he says he would be in danger. The government has claimed that he is in the infamous MS-13 gang, but has never presented evidence supporting that claim.
Nonetheless, Garcia got pulled over while driving on March 12 (his 5-year-old in the back seat) and was sent to the gulag in El Salvador where the administration has been dumping immigrants it doesn’t like. The government has acknowledged the mistake in court (and the lawyer who acknowledged this obvious fact has been put on leave).
[Judge Paula] Xinis on Sunday wrote in a legal opinion that allegations against Abrego were “vague” and “uncorroborated” –– and that in any case, he was under protected status.
“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she wrote.
She ordered him returned to the US by today, which the Trump administration is refusing to do while it appeals her order. Absurdly, they claim that Garcia is now out of their control, since they do not run El Salvador. If this claim is allowed, it puts a loophole in everyone‘s rights. Trump could arrest me or you, send us to El Salvador, and then claim it made a “mistake” that can’t be rectified.
In one featured post I covered how Fox News has played down the stock-market collapse. Here’s how Fox handled this story: Numerous Fox hosts have argued that Garcia is just one guy, and he’s an immigrant anyway, and Trump’s people claim (without evidence) he’s part of a criminal gang, so it doesn’t matter.
It turns out there’s an internal reason why the Trump administration keeps running afoul of judges, and it has nothing to do with judicial bias.
In previous administrations (even Trump’s first administration), the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has been powerful. Essentially, it’s been the executive branch’s internal Supreme Court, the ultimate within-the-administration authority on what the law says or allows. OLC reports are technical and sometimes secret, so they usually slide under most voters’ radar. But occasionally some have drawn attention, like during the Bush-43 administration when OLC came up with creative readings of the law to justify torture.
The head of OLC is a political appointee, so it’s not like OLC has ever been completely independent of the White House. For the most part, it’s going to give the president the most favorable opinion it can justify. Nonetheless, OLC is made up of lawyers who have certain professional standards. They don’t like being pushed to frame opinions so far out of line that judges will sanction administration lawyers who make those arguments in court.
That’s why it’s significant that the Trump administration has downgraded the OLC. Trump still has not named the OLC’s head, and the office has not vetted Trump’s executive orders for legality. It’s part of the larger pattern: No one should tell Trump that he can’t do what he wants to do, even if it’s illegal.
The Pentagon has sent at least six B-2 bombers – 30% of the US Air Force’s stealth bomber fleet – to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in what analysts have called a message to Iran as tensions once again flare in the Middle East. … Images taken by private satellite imaging company Planet Labs on Tuesday show the six US bombers on the tarmac on the island, as well as shelters that could possibly conceal others.
Maybe this is a ramping up of the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which the US attacked in mid-March. But it might be something else:
Trump has also been pushing Iran to make a deal over its nuclear capabilities, saying on March 19 that he would give Tehran two months to come to an agreement or face the consequences. There “are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal.”
the B-2 isn’t just any bomber. It’s the only US aircraft certified to carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting message written in steel and fire. That’s tailor-made for Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites in places like Natanz and Fordow.
and let’s close with something useless
In addition to all the news-relevant topics I have to research to write this blog, you probably have no idea how much totally useless knowledge I accumulate along the way. This week I learned that the word ritzy derives from a man’s name: César Ritz was a Swiss businessman who founded the Ritz hotels, which became synonymous with luxury.
He opened The Ritz in Paris in 1898, and shortly afterward the upscale Carlton Hotel in London. The North American rights to the Ritz-Carlton brand was franchised to Albert Keller, who opened New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 1911.
The Ritz cracker appears to have no direct connection to either the hotels or César Ritz. In 1919, Nabisco bought Jackson Cracker company of Jackson, Michigan, which made a precursor of the Ritz. That cracker got rebranded as Ritz during the Depression, as part of a marketing plan to make it seem luxurious. (Apparently, in that less litigious age, the Ritz hotels didn’t sue.) The Ritz cracker also appears to be the first beneficiary of a movie marketing tie-in: Walt Disney included a box of Ritz crackers in Mickey’s Surprise Party in 1939. The Wikipedia article does not mention whether Walt got paid to do this.
He pitched the tariffs as “reciprocal”, i.e., matching our tariffs on imports to the tariffs other nations have put on our exports. However, no one can find nations whose tariffs are anything like the ones Trump is imposing in return. In his announcement, Trump also referred to “non-tariff barriers” to American exports. He framed any trade deficit as the result of some form of unfairness to American exports, which the new tariffs attempt to equalize.
As a result, when people finally figured out how the tariffs were being calculated, the tariff rate was simply half of the trade deficit with that country as a percentage of that country’s total exports to the US. So it’s a function of that country’s trade surplus/deficit with the US, not any specific unfairness in its tariffs or laws.
That’s how the highest tariff rate wound up falling on Lesotho, a tiny poor country surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho makes denim for jeans and also exports diamonds and a few other commodities. Few Lesothans can afford imported goods from the US.
The administration has made three cases for its tariffs, which The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out contradict each other. The tariffs are supposed to
Raise $6 trillion in revenue (if you believe Trump aide Peter Navarro).
Restore free trade by incentivizing other nations to negotiate away their trade barriers against us (if you believe Palmer Luckey).
Bring manufacturing jobs back to the US (if you believe Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers).
In order to raise revenue and increase US manufacturing, the tariffs have to last for many years, which they can’t do if they are a negotiating ploy to lower other country’s tariffs and trade barriers. Similarly, no tariff is going to restore coffee production to the US, because our climate doesn’t lend itself to coffee production.
Global stock markets reacted to the tariffs by collapsing. If you’re an investor yourself, you may not realize how unusual this is. A market truism is “Buy on rumor, sell on news.” In other words, you make your moves in anticipation of events, not in reaction to them. Once a thing is announced, you close the position you based on it and look for the next thing you think is going to happen.
So the widespread expectation, as the world awaited the tariff announcement, was that the stock market would get a small bounce out of it. Rumors of tariffs had been depressing stock prices for months, but once the news was out, investor attention would shift to something else. But the actual tariffs turned out to be far worse than anything investors had anticipated, so the reaction was down instead of up.
So if the market isn’t anticipating tariffs any more, what is it anticipating? The recession these tariffs are expected to cause. J. P. Morgan is one of many forecasters now predicting a recession. Morgan economists anticipate the unemployment rate rising to 5.3%.
But no one knows how far the predicted downturn will go, because recession fears can be self-validating. People afraid of losing their jobs tend not to spend as much, which in turn causes other people to lose their jobs. Businesses expecting a downturn will cancel expansion plans and emphasize cost-cutting.
The administration’s response to these fears has been a no-pain/no-gain message that was totally absent from Trump’s 2024 campaign. On the campaign trail, Trump kept talking about positive change that would happen “very quickly” or “on Day One“.
But now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is talking about a “detox period” where the economy breaks its addiction to government spending.
The right-wing news bubble is doing its best to help push the administration’s story, or just to distract its viewers from the bad news. When the market started crashing Thursday morning, I channel-scanned and observed the same thing The Daily Show saw:
CNN: Stock market plummets MSNBC: Stock market craters Highlights for Children: Stock market down big FOX News: New info about alleged cover-up of Biden’s decline
So the 30% or so of the country that is die-hard Trump is likely to keep drinking the kool-aid. But the additional 20% that won the election for him is experiencing considerable cognitive dissonance and even buyers’ remorse. To them, Trump was a great businessman who would handle the economy better than Biden did. That image is hard to sustain as you worry about your job, watch prices of foreign-produced goods rise, and see your 401(k) investments sink.
The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.
Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:
Monday, Cory Booker began his record-setting 25-hour speech in the Senate, making the case that “the country is in crisis”. At its peak, the livestream of this speech was being watched to 300,000 viewers.
Thursday and Friday, investors around the world reacted to Trump’s tariffs by selling their stocks. The S&P 500 lost 10% of its value in just two days. By Friday evening it was 17% below its February high. The panic is continuing this morning.
Saturday, “Hands Off” protest rallies happened in 1400 locations across the country. 800K people had signed up for the protests, making credible the organizers’ claim that millions participated.
It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.
But.
Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.
So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.
What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.
It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.
I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:
Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.
I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.
However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.
There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.
The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.
The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.
Donald Trump had a bad week. The tariffs he announced Wednesday were met with almost universal derision, and they sparked a massive stock-market sell-off that is still continuing. His chosen candidate for the swing-seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court got soundly defeated, despite Elon putting more than $20 million in to the race. The protests planned for Saturday turned out to be massive, with millions of Americans turning out to express their opposition to his unconstitutional seizures of power. Courts continued to rule against his administration, and there were even glimmers of opposition from Republican members of Congress.
In short, if you have opposed Trump all along, you probably feel more energized and emboldened than you did a week ago. Conversely, if you have been going along with Trump out of fear or a desire to join the winning team, you are more likely to be having doubts and wondering if you should moderate your support.
None of that means Trump is about to fall or even become ineffectual. But the optimistic scenario I laid out six weeks ago is still intact. It is by no means inevitable and may not even be the most likely path into the future. But the first steps are being taken.
The specifics of each of this week’s major developments will be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST. But the featured post “Is this a turning point?” will be a short piece putting events into the larger frame of a democracy-survives scenario. It should be out shortly.
This week everybody was talking about the Signal leak
Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been accidentally included on a Signal group chat where Defense Secretary Hegseth narrated an imminent and then ongoing attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t devote a featured post to an event that had been getting so much coverage all week long, figuring that I’d just be repeating stuff you’ve already heard. But much of the coverage has been more confusing than enlightening, and Trump administration officials have taken advantage of the complexity of their blundering to deflect responsibility for any wrongdoing at all. Also, having once had a Top Secret clearance myself, I have some background many commentators don’t.
So the featured post tries to sort this fiasco out, beginning with the observation that a whole lot had gone wrong before Goldberg ever got there, and ending with another blogger’s fascinating theory about how Goldberg’s invitation might not have been accidental at all.
And I forgot to mention that Hegseth has brought his wife to high-level meeting with foreign military leaders where sensitive information was discussed. He is not a serious person. My late wife had clearances I lacked, and never told me what went on in meetings where I wouldn’t have been welcome. Couples all over the government operate in this way, respecting the commitments they have made to their country.
I have heard a snide comment about what Jennifer Hegseth was doing at these meetings: She was Pete’s designated driver.
While I’m entertaining snide comments, here’s David Roberts:
The most obvious lesson to draw from the leaked Signal chat is that these people really are morons. It’s not a public act, it’s not a schtick, there’s not some secret back room where they drop the facade. They are genuinely stupid, incompetent people.
and special elections
We don’t usually think of odd-numbered years as election years, but some important votes are happening tomorrow: two special elections in Florida to replace congresspeople nominated for Trump’s cabinet, and a state supreme court election in Wisconsin that Elon Musk has been spending millions to buy.
When Trump nominated Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz attorney general and Mike Waltz national security adviser, it didn’t seem like a big risk. (Gaetz eventually withdrew in response to scandal.) Both come from bright-red districts, so the special elections to replace them should have given Republicans no trouble. And that appears to be true for Gaetz’ district (FL-1), which Gaetz won 66%-34% in 2024. But Waltz’ district (FL-6), which Waltz won by almost exactly the same margin, is unexpectedly close in recent polls.
Polling always predicts more upsets than actually materialize, so I’ll be surprised if the GOP doesn’t hold on to both seats. But even a close election will send a shot across the bow of Republicans who so far have been slavishly loyal to Trump. If a +33 district suddenly produces a +5 result, any Republican in a +20-or-less district should be alarmed.
With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.
Stefanik won in 2024 by 24%. So Trump’s caution reflects his knowledge that the tide has shifted against him.
If Republicans in Congress are reading the tea leaves similarly, they may be less inclined to support the GOP’s budget proposal for FY 2026, which calls for massive cuts in Medicaid and food stamps to pay for massive tax cuts for billionaires — and still includes a huge deficit. Many Republicans are from rural districts where large numbers of Republican voters rely on Medicaid and food stamps. MAGA supporters who believed claims that Trump and Musk were only targeting “waste and fraud” are going to be surprised to discover that their own benefits are in danger.
Another important election is for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Court only swung to a liberal majority two years ago, when Janet Protasiewicz won a surprisingly resounding victory. Subsequently, the Court ordered legislative maps redrawn, undoing an extreme Republican gerrymander that had locked in a Republican majority in what is ordinarily a swing state. As a result, Democrats picked up 14 seats in the 2024 elections. In 2026 they might have a legitimate shot at gaining control of the legislature.
That’s why Elon Musk has poured at least $17 million into the election, including some spending that appears illegal.
Speaking at a rally Sunday night, Musk said “we just want judges to be judges”, before handing out two $1m (£750,000) cheques to voters who had signed a petition to stop “activist” judges.
[Wisconsin Attorney General Josh] Kaul had tried to argue the giveaway was an illegal attempt buy votes. Musk’s lawyers, in response, argued that Kaul is “restraining Mr Musk’s political speech and curtailing his First Amendment rights”.
If that’s not illegal, it ought to be.
However, Musk himself has become so unpopular that his attempt to buy the supreme court seat for the conservative may work in favor of the liberal candidate. After all, what does the world’s richest man hope to gain from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that makes it worth this kind of investment?
We’ll see tomorrow how it all plays out.
Last week, a Democrat won a Pennsylvania state senate seat that Republicans had held for nearly a century. Trump had gotten 57% of the vote there last November. James Malone seems to have tried to nationalize his election, running against Trump as much as against his opponent.
Everyday voters are not liking what they’re seeing at the federal level, they don’t like the chaos. We want to be sure that we, as Pennsylvania, are standing up for our neighbors and are standing up for our state.
I’m following the challenge to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which is the justification he has used for taking non-citizens off the streets and flying them to a gulag in El Salvador with no due process. As I explained last week: Once they create a hole in habeas corpus rights, anybody can vanish down that hole. If there is some circumstance where they don’t have to explain why they’ve arrested somebody, nothing stops them from falsely claiming you’re in that circumstance. You may have proof that they’re lying about you, but who cares? You won’t get a hearing where you could show your proof to somebody with the power to set you free.
A district judge has issued a temporary restraining order against using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people. That order has been upheld by an appellate court.
The argument in a nutshell: The AEA is a wartime law, and we’re not at war against Venezuela. Saying we are at war requires taking literally Trump’s rhetorical characterization of undocumented immigration as an “invasion”. Trump argues back: It’s up to the president, not the courts, to decide whether we’re being invaded.
How I hope it turns out: If “invasion” is a close call, the president gets to decide. But if the president’s claim is purely a pretext for claiming the emergency powers in the AEA, a court can overrule him. Trump’s claim is a pretext, so I hope his executive order gets struck down.
The appeal goes first to Chief Justice Roberts. Tomorrow, he will receive a response to the government’s filing from lawyers for five migrants facing removal. From there he’ll decide whether to make a ruling, hold some hearings, or involve the whole court.
and RFK Jr.’s war on vaccination
Dr. Peter Marks, who has been the top NIH official regulating vaccines under presidents from both parties, and oversaw the Operation Warp Speed push to get a Covid vaccine during Trump’s first term, has been forced out. He wrote a damning resignation letter.
It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary [i.e. HHS Secretary RFK Jr.], but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
NPR comments:
The abrupt departure comes as concern has been mounting among many public health experts about moves involving vaccines under Kennedy, who has questioned vaccine safety and effectiveness. Independent federal vaccine advisory committees have been postponed and cancelled, the National Institutes of Health has terminated research on vaccines and a vaccine critic has been picked to conduct a controversial study about vaccines and autism – a link that has long been debunked.
Marks cited special worry about the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas, which has now grown to at least 400 cases. Measles can cause a long list of potentially serious complications and the vaccines provide strong, safe protection, Marks said. Kennedy has promoted alternative treatments during the Texas outbreak.
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety. and security,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter to Sara Brenner, acting commissioner of food and drugs.
About that “vaccine critic” who has been “picked to conduct a controversial study about vaccines and autism”? That line understates the issue.
“It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds autism research. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That’s not how science is done.”
Maybe you didn’t care when bird flu just affected birds. Maybe you still didn’t care when you realized that chickens are birds, so egg prices would go up. Well, now it’s infecting cats. Care yet?
One of this week’s sorriest stories was J.D. Vance’s trip to Greenland. Originally, he and his wife were going to do a photo-op tour of the island and promote the idea that Greenland should want to be taken over by the United States. But things didn’t work out.
U.S. officials went door to door in Greenland’s capital of Nuuk looking for residents who wanted to greet the second lady, Jesper Steinmetz from Denmark’s TV 2 reported. But everywhere they went, they were rejected. The unwelcoming response forced the second lady to change her plans, Steinmetz said, ahead of her arrival with Vice President JD Vance on Friday.
So instead, the Vances along with national security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife made a quick trip to the American military base in Greenland. They stayed for three hours, saw nothing of the island, met none of the locals, and then gave them this advice:
I think that you’d be a lot better … coming under the United States’ security umbrella than you have been under the Denmark security umbrella
Tyranny expert Timothy Snyder unpacks all this. First, if you take the NATO treaty seriously, Greenland is ALREADY under the US security umbrella by virtue of its relationship with our on-paper ally Denmark. We used to have more bases on the island and more troops manning them, but Denmark did not kick them out; we chose to reduce our force. From there, things just get dumber.
The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous. The United States has nothing to gain from it, and much to lose. There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last eighty years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations.
and let’s close with an advertisement for myself
Friends at a local retirement home asked me to speak at their forum, which I did Tuesday, on the topic “Nurturing a Healthier Relationship to the News”. Here’s the video. If you watch it, you may recognize a bunch of the ideas from last week’s featured post. The camera doesn’t capture most of the slides, but you can see them here.
By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the basics: Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported that for several days (March 11-15) he had a connection with Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz over the private messaging service Signal.
On March 11 Goldberg received a Signal connection request from Waltz. He was puzzled and doubted its authenticity, but he accepted.
On March 13 he was invited to join the “Houthi PC small group”, a chat that eventually included Vice President Vance, several members of the Trump cabinet, and a variety of other high-ranking members of the administration. Waltz described the group as a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours”. (Goldberg explains: “The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA.”)
On March 14, members of the group (who had apparently received a classified communication Goldberg did not get) began discussing whether to attack the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea. Vance wanted to delay the attack for a month, Defense Secretary Hegseth was for launching it immediately, and some others ambivalent. Vance yields, texting to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go”. (Strangely, President Trump was not on the chat and apparently did not make the final decision to launch the attack.)
On March 15, Hegseth began giving the group a play-by-play of the attack as it was carried out, beginning two hours before the bombs fell. Goldberg summarizes: “the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
Up until he received news reports of explosions in Yemen, Goldberg had not completely believed the chat group was genuine. The previous day,
I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.
After becoming convinced that he had been overhearing an actual Principals meeting discussing highly classified information, Goldberg left the group.
So much is wrong with this series of events that the subsequent public discussion has often gotten confused, starting off talking about one issue before veering off onto another one. So let’s start by listing the various wrongnesses I’ve heard about or noticed.
The chat group shouldn’t exist at all. The Signal message chain in question was set up to be deleted after four weeks. This violates the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, which require that require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business.
Signal is not an approved channel for discussing classified information. By law and policy, classified information can only be sent over very specific government systems.
Signal exchanges can be hacked. The security rules being broken here exist for good reasons, and are not just cumbersome or outdated regulations. The encryption feature in Signal is believed to be crackable by intelligence services of hostile foreign governments like Russia and possibly others. And even if an adversary has not hacked Signal, the cell phones or laptops several participants seem to have used could be compromised by malware.
Hegseth’s posts violate the Espionage Act. Apologists for the Trump administration have played legal/verbal games with the term “classified information”. Because Hegseth himself is the classifying authority for information like attack plans, they claim, he was implicitly declassifying it by posting it on Signal. But The Hill reports: “the Espionage Act … doesn’t rely on classification. Instead, it allows prosecution of those who share national defense information, whether intentionally or inadvertently. ‘While you can argue that it wasn’t classified — probably in bad faith — you cannot argue that it was not national defense information,’ said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a nonprofit law firm.” Whatever word-games you play, information about an imminent or ongoing attack is precisely the kind of thing the classification system was designed to protect.
No one on the chat objected. Back in the days when I had a Top Secret clearance myself, I was occasionally in conversations where an issue was alluded to, and then someone would say: “But we can’t talk about that here.” Everyone on the chat had an obligation to say that, and no one did. (The implication here is that this situation is not unusual. Possibly, highly-classified Signal chats are a regular occurrence in the Trump administration. I have not heard any Trump official address this precise point.)
Goldberg should not have been invited to the chat. People tend to focus on this part of the wrongness, but look how far we’ve gotten without mentioning it. The Russians could have been listening, and could have tipped off the Houthis to counter our attack or move what we were targeting. Goldberg is an inconsequential risk by comparison.
Hegseth had an obligation to verify that everyone on the chat had appropriate clearances to receive the information he was sending, but he did not. This is a problem even if you overlook the fundamental insecurity of Signal. Even if everyone on the chat had been gathered in a secure location like the Situation Room, attack plans shouldn’t have been shared when an uncleared person (i.e., Goldberg) was present. Protecting defense secrets is Hegseth’s job, not Goldberg’s, so the fault lies with him.
Waltz endangered intelligence sources in his after-action report. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” So the Houthis know that somebody with a view of the building that day was an American agent. Undoubtedly they are trying to find and kill this person.
The attack’s “success” is no excuse.Attorney General Bondi was one of many administration officials making this point: “what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission”. The best analogy I’ve heard is to drunk driving: The fact that you made it home safely doesn’t excuse it, or justify doing something similar in the future. If you take enough unnecessary risks, you will pay eventually. (BTW: Was the attack a success? Killing people and blowing things up is not an end in itself. The point of the attack was to either incapacitate or intimidate the Houthis so that they’ll stop shooting at ships. We don’t know yet whether the raid achieved that purpose. “The Signal chat reveals no suggestion of a strategic framework — or even the concept of a plan — into which the attack clearly fit.”)
So this is the kind of multi-layer screw-up that is hard to wrap your mind around. (An analogy: Imagine that your 15-year-old daughter is threatening suicide because her uncle has broken off their incestuous relationship after discovering that she’s pregnant. What aspect of the situation do you react to first? What’s the core problem here?)
Responses. One of the adages I heard while growing up was “It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong.” By that standard, there are no big men (or women) in the Trump administration. Across the board, everyone involved or implicated in the meeting has deflected, pointed elsewhere, or outright lied in order to deny responsibility.
Goldberg’s first article was circumspect about what he revealed. He wrote in generalities, like the quote above about “targets, weapons, … and attack sequencing”. Not wanting to damage national security himself, he didn’t spell out any details.
I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.
White House apologists took up the “no classified information” talking point. Director of National Intellligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee
There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to make the whole incident a he-said/she-said issue.
Do you trust the secretary of defense — who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honorably served our nation in uniform — or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?
Goldberg’s response was basically: Don’t trust me; trust your eyes and your common sense.
The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.
Since there was “no classified information” involved, he had no reason not to publish chunks of the transcript of the chat. Goldberg summarized one section:
This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.
The release of the transcript should (but won’t) put an end to the attempts to dodge responsibility by vilifying Goldberg. (Leavitt: “arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.” Trump: “The guy is a total sleazebag.” Hegseth: “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.) Goldberg’s transcript is either accurate or it’s not. If it’s not, other participants can release their own records. But they haven’t. So we can assume Goldberg’s reporting here is accurate, independent of what you think of the rest of his career. (Personally, I respect him as a journalist.)
How did this happen? The larger wrong — discussing an ongoing attack on an insecure platform — happened because the Trump administration is full of people who don’t take security seriously. Many of them — Hegseth in particular — are totally unqualified for their jobs. (Whenever the administration talks about “merit” as opposed to DEI, I think of Hegseth. Only a White man could ever get such an important job with such a flimsy resume and so many red flags in his personal life. Hegseth is a walking advertisement for why DEI is necessary.)
But none of that explains how Goldberg wound up on the chat. If we believe Goldberg’s account, it was a two-part process. First Mike Waltz (or somebody with access to Waltz’ Signal account) made a connection with Goldberg. Then two days later Goldberg was invited to join the Houthi PC small group. So it’s not just somebody hitting Goldberg’s number by fat-fingering a list. (That explanation would be more convincing if some “Johnny Goldsmith” should have been in the group and wasn’t. But I have heard no suggestion of who that person might be. And doesn’t anybody double-check lists with national security implications?)
The explanation (offered by Waltz) that Goldberg may have hacked his way onto the chat group is not only unlikely, but is damning in a different way. It’s bad enough to think that Trump officials are relying on an app that Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies might hack. But magazine editors?
Lacking any other explanation, I’m driven to a conspiracy theory formulated by former West Point history professor Terrence Goggin: “a highly effective cell operating deep in the Pentagon and National Security Council” that Goggin dubs “Deep Throat 2.0”. (Waltz denied this: “A staffer wasn’t responsible.”)
Goggin connects the Signal story with another leak that embarrassed the Trump defense establishment: The NYT finding out that Elon Musk was about to get a briefing on the Pentagon’s plans for a war with China.
Someone contacted the New York Times with a copy of a written order to brief Musk on the Operational Plan to oppose a massive invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (“PLAN”). … Someone transmitted the written order instructing the Joint Chiefs to brief Musk to the New York Times, 12 hours before the briefing was to take place, in order for this to reach its 10 million digital subscribers worldwide. … The leak was timed for a last minute shock without warning, for maximum public damage and embarrassment. This was not an accident, but a deadly strike.
Adding Goldberg to the Houthi PC small group was similarly “not a mistake” but “a well planed clandestine operation”.
Clearly rattled, President Trump declared today that the uproar is a “Witch Hunt”. Actually he may be right. But the witches are His Own Men! It is a planned and organized operation to destroy his ability to govern with unqualified and deficient officials using and exposing his Administration’s own national security mistakes to do so.
Imagine that you’re a career staffer at the Pentagon. You’ve seen people live and die by the book, and now a bunch of yahoos who can’t be bothered to take even minimal security precautions are in charge. You’ve tried to impress on them the reasons for doing things in the standard way, but they always think they know better.
What better way to get your point across than to let the public see what’s happening?
OK, you’ve already heard about the Signal chat where a journalist was admitted to a Principals meeting discussing highly classified information. It’s been has been widely discussed all over the media. So ordinarily, I’d just find a good link summarizing the whole thing and post it with minimal comment.
But I feel like this event deserves some special care, and I also believe I have some personal insight. (I used to have a Top Secret clearance, so I’ve listened to many briefings about how secrets are supposed to be safeguarded.) It’s a complicated multi-layer screw-up that is easy to mischaracterize and deflect. So this week’s featured post is “How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?” It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will cover tomorrow’s special elections, RFK Jr.’s ongoing war against vaccination, the administration’s continuing threats against Greenland, the most recent tariffs, and the latest on the legal battle to restrain the Trump administration’s illegal actions. It should be out around noon.
Every time I open my phone to read the news, I kind of just stare at the wall for 10 minutes.It’s horrifying what they’re doing, not only to the trans community, but also to migrants, to communities of color, to so many marginalized communities that are being systematically targeted by the new administration and having protections revoked. It’s cartoonishly evil.
This week everybody was talking about the rule of law
From the moment Trump took office, the big question has been whether his administration would obey court orders. We may be about to find out. Federal Judge James Boasberg ordered that the planes of Venezuelans being renditioned to El Salvador not take off, or be turned around if they had not yet landed. But prisoners were delivered to El Salvador all the same. Now he’s trying to get the government to tell him when exactly the planes took off and landed, and he’s being stonewalled. (More about that case below.)
Trump’s lawyers are claiming that they didn’t violate the court order, but their arguments are flimsy. Jack Goldsmith, the former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel inside the Justice Department, described the lawyers as “playing games that verge on defiance”. Goldsmith’s article is a good summary of the legal issues in the case.
Openly defying court orders — especially a Supreme Court order — is a clear line that would define Trump as an autocrat.
There’s a fundamental fact about rights that I don’t think most Americans understand. I was writing about it during the Bush administration, when “enemy combatants” were being whisked away into military custody, and it comes up again now: If there is anybody who doesn’t have habeas corpus rights, then nobody has rights.
This comes up now because of the alleged Venezuelan gangsters that the Trump administration took off the streets and flew to a prison in El Salvador. Trump’s supporters want the debate to be about whether or not these are bad guys, as in “Why are you taking the side of immigrant gangsters who victimize law-abiding American citizens?”
And who knows? Maybe they are bad guys. (Or maybe not.) Maybe we are all safer because they’re locked up. But that’s not the most important issue here.
Imagine, just for a moment, that somebody scooped you up and put you on a plane to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Probably your first reaction to that suggestion is “That could never happen because I’m an American citizen. They couldn’t do that to me.”
And you’re right: They couldn’t do it legally. But what if your name wound up on a list either by mistake or because you have an enemy somewhere inside the Trump administration or because some ICE officer was too enthusiastic about rounding people up? What if you were put on that plane without a hearing, the way the supposed gang members were? When would you have had a chance to offer evidence that you are an American citizen?
If the answer is “never”, then yes, they can do it to you. Because who stops them?
Habeas corpus means that anybody who is imprisoned has a right to state their case to somebody who is (1) impartial between the prisoner and his accusers, and (2) has the power to order the prisoner’s release.
If there’s a loophole in habeas corpus, then anybody — literally anybody — can vanish down that hole.
“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.“
That’s the problem in a nutshell: Inside the Trump administration, human rights like habeas corpus are “bureaucratic hurdles”. If the immigration enforcement people want to do something illegal, nobody should slow that operation down.
The administration seems to be obeying court orders to rehire many of the government workers it fired. Some are returning to the job, some have been put on administrative leave, and others are still waiting to hear.
When a probationary worker goes from being fired to being on leave, that may not look like much of a victory. But the bureaucratic fiction behind the firing was that the workers were all fired “for cause”, which means they would be ineligible to collect unemployment benefits. So rather than being cut off from all income, they’re getting their regular paycheck again.
It’s worth pointing out that in the name of “government efficiency”, we’re paying people to stay home. Also, many of the contracts DOGE has cancelled will eventually have to be paid for. When all is said and done, I wonder if Musk isn’t costing taxpayers money rather than saving us money.
Vox’ Ian Millhiser says that of the 132 lawsuits against the Trump administration, you should watch two: the ones about impoundment and birthright citizenship.
No competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude that Trump’s actions in either case are lawful. There is no serious debate about what the Constitution says about either issue. If the Court rules in favor of Trump in either case, it’s hard to imagine the justices offering any meaningful pushback to anything Trump wants to do.
MAGA folks sometimes claim they have nothing against immigrants, just illegal immigrants. But why then is Trump shutting down avenues for legal immigration? Friday, DHS announced that (as of April 24) it is revoking the legal status of half a million Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came here as part of a Biden-administration humanitarian parole program. Participants had to have US sponsors. They were granted work permits and a two-year parole from deportation.
Like so many Trump actions, this order is needlessly cruel. These people did nothing wrong, trusted US government promises, and made plans accordingly. Many of them presumably have jobs and leases. Trump could have just waited for their two-year paroles expire. But no, they have a month to leave the country.
Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described “the imperial boomerang effect”:
[T]echniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.
and Social Security
Since my wife made more money in her career than I did, I am eligible for higher Social Security benefits as her survivor than on my own employment record. The system is swamped because the SSA is understaffed, so I had to spend a lot of time on hold when I applied over the phone in February. But at least I was home and able to do other things while I waited.
Thank God I got that done before the new rules kicked in:
The Social Security Administration (SSA) says it will no longer allow beneficiaries and those applying for Social Security to confirm their identity over the phone and will instead require that they do so online or in person at a local office to complete the application process.
Simultaneously, SSA is closing local offices and firing staff.
In 2023 about 119,000 people visited local Social Security offices daily to get help or receive services. The SSA announced plans last month to reduce its workforce by 12 percent, from about 57,000 employees to 50,000, and multiple offices have been closed in recent weeks, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the office established by President Donald Trump to slash federal spending. … SSA staffing was already near a 50-year low when the agency initiated the planned reductions.
The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system — effectively denying many Americans the benefits they are due.
According to MAGA propaganda, Democrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Well, listen to this: Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggests that the best way to find fraudsters in the Social Security system would be to just not send out checks some month.
Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.
Elon [Musk] knows this by heart. Anyone who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing!
Before Social Security, elderly Americans were more likely than any other age group to be living in poverty. (Elderly and disabled poverty are the most hopeless kinds, because your earning prospects are so low.) Now they are the least likely to be poor. That’s what Social Security has meant to America.
But if you’re a billionaire like Lutnick, or a centi-billionaire like Musk, you find it hard to imagine that a check not arriving some month might mean that you don’t get to eat, or that you might care enough about not eating that you might complain. Those are the kind of people who are running our country now.
and sabotaging the US tourism industry
Becky Burke from Wales was on a backpacking trip across North America when she was arrested by ICE and held for 19 days. Then she was taken to an airport in leg irons and sent home to the UK. Her crime? She did housework in exchange for a free room, which apparently broke the no-employment condition of her tourist visa.
How many tourist dollars does the US lose every time there’s a story like this?
Here’s another story, this time from a Canadian: Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a sociology professor at the University of New Brunswick. Having previously been denied entry to the US, he went through the bureaucratic steps necessary to be assured of admittance, which included an interview with someone from the State Department. This time he was detained for three hours and thoroughly searched, causing him to miss his flight.
Both times, Kalman-Lamb was coming to the US to promote his new book The End of College Football. Exploitation of college athletes has been his special focus in recent years.
Kalman-Lamb’s crime seems to be having opinions about Palestine and Israel. He signed a statement supporting a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Toronto (where he is an alum) and is a supporter of the movement to divest from Israel. (He has also written articles whose titles include words like gender and intersectionality.) His opinions have caused him to be fingered by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission as “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic”.
National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. … The mRNA technology is under study at the NIH for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including flu and AIDS, and also cancer. It was deployed in the development of covid-19 vaccines credited with saving 3 million lives in the U.S. alone — an accomplishment President Donald Trump bragged about in his first term.
A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.”
“It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,” the scientist added.
In some ways RFK Jr. is worse than an ideologue; he’s a crank, the kind of amateur who thinks he’s smarter than the consensus of the scientific community. Anti-scientific ideas get into his head and no amount of evidence will get them out.
Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleedin’ nutcase! George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo. Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.
In Gaza, a ceasefire deal that came into effect when Trump took office — and for which he took full credit — has effectively collapsed. With Israel and Hamas at a stalemate over whether to extend the ceasefire or move on to fresh talks on ending the conflict, Netanyahu has resumed a full-scale bombing of the enclave. More than 400 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were injured on Tuesday, one of the deadliest days of the war.
The official death toll in Gaza is now over 50,000.
The NYT documented the losses of the Abu Naser family, four generations of which lived in a single five-story apartment building in Gaza. 132 of them died in a single Israeli attack. The entire neighborhood is now rubble.
Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan jailed his most serious challenger in the next elections. Protesters across the country were met with substantial police violence. Over 1000 protesters have been arrested.
the President had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago. Really transformational, I would describe it. I think it’s been underreported, to tell you the truth. … I think the President has a relationship with Erdogan and that’s going to be important. And there’s some good coming – just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation. So I think you’ll see that in the reporting in the coming days.
I have to wonder if part of the conversation was “Go ahead. Crack down on the opposition.” Or if the current unrest is part of the “good news” Witkoff was expecting.
Witkoff’s comments about Ukraine are also striking. Up front, he grants most of what Putin wants: Russia will get the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies. Ukraine will not join NATO. What Ukraine will get out of this deal is left vague. And he takes seriously the referendums Russia held in the occupied Ukrainian provinces, as if those were fair elections:
They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.
He also promises to back down any time Putin threatens nuclear war, even if it means not getting a “fair deal” for Ukraine.
And while I think we have to get a fair deal for Ukraine, we cannot allow that country to drag us into World War Three.
And he completely ignores Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine being an illegitimate country that has always been part of Russia.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?
STEVE WITKOFF: 100% not.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. Like, why would they.
STEVE WITKOFF: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza. Why do the Israelis really want to occupy Gaza for the rest of their lives? They don’t. They want stability there they don’t want to deal with. But the Russians also have what they want. They’ve gotten—they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more?
I don’t know. After Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland at Munich, why did he need the rest of Czechoslovakia?
And the idea that Putin doesn’t want to reclaim dominance over Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia and Poland, what does Witkoff base that on? And “I wouldn’t want those countries”? How do Polish-Americans feel about that?
Trump is using the power of government to extort concessions from non-government institutions: Columbia University and a major law firm are the latest trophies for Trump’s mantle. This is the Orban model from Hungary.
What happens to democracy when directing and misdirecting public attention becomes more important than convincing voters to agree with you?
Chris Hayes’ recent book The Sirens’ Call is worth reading in its entirety, but there is one particular aspect of it that I want to highlight. Once you’ve had this thought, it’s perfectly obvious, but I’ve never seen it spelled out so clearly before: Getting attention and holding attention are two very different problems. Getting attention is easy; holding attention is hard.
If you’re in a roomful of people and you want to get their attention, you have a lot of options: Drop something breakable, start yelling obscenities, run through the room naked or covered in blood, fire a gun in the air. The possibilities are endless.
But now imagine that you want to hold people’s attention long enough to explain something to them or convince them of something. That’s much harder. If the waiter who just dropped a tray of glasses starts trying to tell you about the dangers of climate change or rising government debt, you’re probably going to tune him out pretty quickly.
Traditionally, politics has been all about holding people’s attention long enough to change their minds about something or motivate them to do something. Politically active people might want to convince you that abortion is wrong or gays are people too or the rich have too much money or government regulations stifle economic growth, just to name a few possibilities. Yes, they need to get your attention. But more than that, they need to hold your attention long enough to present their case, maybe even long enough to overcome your initial resistance.
Hayes flashes back to something that seems unimaginable now: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in 1858, people in Illinois more or less agreed that the biggest issue the nation faced was slavery and what to do about it. So that year’s two Senate candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, toured the state together, debating the slavery issue for three hours at a time. (My home town, Quincy, hosted one of the debates.) That format gave each man a chance to explain some fairly complex and subtle ideas.
Admittedly, that’s unusual. For well over a century, most American politics has revolved around slogans: “Equal pay for equal work”, “No third term”, “Remember the Maine”, and many others. A slogan boils a political message down to its absolute minimum. You still have to hold attention, but you don’t have to hold it very long. Sometime a slogan is just a placeholder that your supporters will flesh out later; it makes people curious to find out what the slogan means. In 2024, “Make America great again” and “Democracy is on the ballot” were both like that. If you didn’t have at least a little background, both were so vague as to be meaningless.
But Hayes describes a way of managing attention that skips the difficult hold-attention step completely. It has been pioneered by the social-media platforms and has now been adapted to politics: If you want to keep somebody on your platform for hours at a time, you don’t need to produce an epic like Lord of the Rings or Lawrence of Arabia — content capable of holding a person’s attention that long. Instead, you just grab somebody’s attention, then grab it again, and grab it again. Keep doing that for hours. That’s the secret of the infinite scroll. Hardly anybody sits down thinking they’re going to devote the next two hours to TikTok or Facebook. They just look up and realize they’re late for something.
Now apply that idea to politics. What if I’m not trying to explain anything at all, even at the slogan level? What if I’m just trying to grab your attention in a particular way and prevent my opponent from grabbing it some other way?
This is something the Trump campaign seemed to understand much better than the Harris campaign. If a voter went into the voting booth thinking about inflation, immigration, or trans athletes, probably that vote would go to Trump. But a voter thinking about democracy, climate change, racism, or healthcare probably would probably choose Harris. It almost didn’t matter what a voter thought about any of those issues. Just direct their attention and you command their vote.
That was the method behind the madness of the Trump campaign. As far back as 2015, Trump has been saying things that were supposed to be political suicide. When he said that immigrants were “animals” or spouted “facts” about them that were obviously false, it didn’t matter if he looked like an ignorant asshole, because he made you think about immigration. If he grossly overstated the price of bacon and was proven wrong the next day, so what? He made you think about inflation — and the debunking article the next morning made you think about it again.
Harris could never catch up. I kept reading columns by pundits frustrated that Harris didn’t just say X — and those columns frustrated me, because I knew that Harris DID say X, but nobody paid attention.
The big thing I got wrong about the election was that I expected voters to get serious at the end of the campaign; low-interest and low-information voters who had been checked out all summer would check back in long enough to decide who to vote for. It never happened. Right up to the last day, Trump dominated the news cycle with his look-here, look-there, look-at-this-other-thing tactics. He had no message to speak of, just the idea that things were bad and he would somehow make them better.
What we’ve been seeing these last two months is the new attention-politics as a governing strategy. In traditional politics, an incoming administration tried to focus on a few simple themes, with the idea of raising enough public support to push one or two big ideas through Congress. So George W. Bush came in promoting his tax cut. Barack Obama was focused on his stimulus plan and then healthcare. (I remember the frustration many environmentalists felt when a carbon tax and other items from a climate-change agenda were sidelined so as not to interfere with the healthcare push.)
Trump hasn’t been doing anything like that. Instead, he’s doing a million things at once, including many that circumvent Congress in a way that is flatly illegal. By ignoring Congress and relying on executive actions, he avoids the need to marshal public opinion. Quite the reverse: It’s the opposition that needs to marshal public opinion to stop him. And that’s difficult, because what opposition leader or opposition agenda can get attention when Trump grabs all the attention in the room with a new outrage every day? (Invade Greenland! Annex Canada! Brief Musk about China war plans! Defy court orders! Fire the people who keep track of nuclear weapons! Turn Gaza into a seaside resort!)
I’m frankly unsure what I ought to be rooting for. Eventually, assuming Trump doesn’t establish his own version of the Thousand-Year Reich, some Democrat will figure out how to master the new attention politics and become president. But how good is that outcome really? The new politics lends itself to autocracy. Probably a Democratic autocrat would do more things I like than Trump is doing. But I’m not sure what would take us back in the direction of democracy.
The Weekly Sift 