Trump’s assault on American democracy. Now that gerrymandering has failed as a strategy for hanging onto power, I eagerly await Trump’s next move.
Climate change. Check out George Manbiot’s column on the possible collapse of the the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
The Iran/Lebanon War. Formal peace talks aren’t happening. Saturday, Trump told Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to stay home for now. Iran is offering to re-open the Strait of Hormuz to end the war, essentially offering Trump no gain from it.
Ukraine. Here’s the Institute for the Study of War’s current update.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about gerrymandering
and the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Saturday, a gunman fired several shots during the dinner, which President Trump and many other administration officials were attending. The shots were audible inside the ballroom, but none of the guests were injured.
From a pure how-could-this-happen point of view, I found the analysis at the Doomsday Scenario blog informative and down to Earth. Garrett Graff is a journalist who has attended past WHC dinners and has written extensively about presidential security. He thinks the security plan worked pretty well: It’s unreasonable to expect the Secret Service to lock down an entire hotel that has multiple unrelated events and guests, so the goal is to stop would-be attackers well before they get within range of the president. That’s what happened Saturday.
My political response is that I’m glad the attack was unsuccessful. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I consider the Trump regime to be the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, and I have no great affection for Trump as a person. But I think we’re on track to restore the constitutional order through the electoral system, as the Founders intended and as Hungary has recently done. Anything that sends us off on a violent trajectory is a risk I’d rather not take.
Speaking frankly, the attack was fortuitously timed for Trump, perhaps breaking a cycle that sees his popularity touch new lows with each poll. Given the boost his 2024 campaign got from a failed assassination attempt, it’s hard not to be suspicious. But I’m not going to push any conspiracy theories unless substantial evidence presents itself. I’d be far more suspicious if the shooter hadn’t survived to tell his own story.
Dean Blundell (who is a little too rabidly anti-Trump for my taste) noted that it only took minutes to start the talking point that “This is why the White House needs its own ballroom.”
Predictably, the media is asking Democrats if they regret their anti-Trump rhetoric, and completely ignoring the overall rhetorical environment. Trump himself is by far the greatest source of inflammatory rhetoric, often referring to his opponents or critics as insane or treasonous.
and the war
Not much new to say. Trump continues to want to dictate terms to Iran as if he had won the war. Iran doesn’t feel defeated and won’t be dictated to. The Obama agreement that Trump tore up looks better and better all the time.
Everyone more-or-less agrees on the basic facts: The SPLC paid people to infiltrate various right-wing and white-supremacist groups, as it has done for decades. Since their agents were undercover, the SPLC didn’t publicize their work. DOJ is charging that this was a fraud against SPLC’s contributors. I haven’t given money to the SPLC in years, but I’m still probably fairly representative of their donors. I would not feel defrauded.
Remember the Afghans who are in trouble with the Taliban because they helped us? We’ve got 1100 of them housed at a military base in Qatar, and we’ve made them this amazing offer: Go to the Congo or go home to the Taliban.
Canary Media makes the case against biofuels, which sound like a great idea but often aren’t. Not only do biofuel crops (like corn) have a high carbon footprint in the US, but internationally they encourage cropland expansion that results in deforestation. Sadly, both parties have latched onto biofuels as a good idea.
Democrats need a new approach to agriculture, focused less on the 1% of Americans who farm and more on the 100% who eat. That would mean redistributing less money from ordinary taxpayers to the biggest farmers who grow the most common row crops, while also opposing the tariffs, price supports, and biofuel mandates that raise prices at the supermarket. Let Trump stand for giving farmers “much better than a level playing field.” Democrats should stand with everybody else.
Small farmers are in trouble this year: Thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, fertilizer and diesel fuel costs are way up. Most farmers voted for Trump.
Trump and his allies have been having a hard time in court. Laura Loomer’s $150 million lawsuit against Bill Maher (for saying on his comedy show that Trump “might be” f**king Loomer) was thrown out — at least partly because of evidence the claim was true.
And a federal judge appears skeptical of Trump’s $10 billion shake-down of the Treasury. He’s suing the IRS because some of his tax information got leaked to the media during his first term. Conceivably there might be damage there, but nothing like $10 billion. But that’s not what’s bothering the judge: Since Trump oversees the IRS, he controls both sides of the litigation. He is essentially in a position to award himself money.
The No Kings protester who dressed as a penis holding a “No Dick Tater” sign is not guilty of whatever police in Fairhope, Alabama tried to charge her with. Attempting to show the woman was trying to get arrested, the prosecution called her husband to the stand as a surprise witness, and asked if he had brought bail money to the protest.
“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world. Did he have bail money on him now? “Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.” The room erupted with laughter.
The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our rivals are more powerful.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Hungarian election has no direct effect on the US, but Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat (after Trump and Vance pulled out all the tops to support him) has to worry the Trump regime. Orbán was the prototype, and he failed.
Climate change. The difficulty opening the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting $100-per-barrel oil should motivate more countries to transition away from fossil fuels.
Israel/Palestine. The focus of conflict has moved to Lebanon, where Israel is applying a tactic it used in Gaza: domicide, i.e., to “systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable”.
Ukraine. One winner from the Hungarian election is Ukraine. Orbán was Putin’s man in the EU, and his objection was standing in the way of the EU making a 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine.
Epstein. The Iran War had gotten the Epstein scandal out of the headlines, but Melania put if back in. What was she thinking?
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the “peace” talks with Iran
One downside of taking a vacation is that I have missed my chance to say “I told you so” about the ceasefire and negotiations, because I did not in fact tell you so. During my vacation I told other people that Trump would announce a fake ceasefire, falsely claim that Iran had agreed to all kinds of concessions, and then resume the war when the reality became clear. But I have no written record to point to.
The reality is this: Trump badly miscalculated when he started this war. American air power can destroy anything it wants in Iran (other than the deeply buried uranium stocks), but it can’t make the Iranians surrender.
Trump, though, lives an in alternate reality where his power is absolute. J. D. Vance’s mission was doomed from the start because he went to Islamabad not to negotiate peace, but to dictate terms to an enemy Trump falsely insists is defeated. Vance explained his failure: “They have chosen not to accept our terms.” Of course they wouldn’t. As pummeled as Iran’s military currently is, the nation is not defeated. Defeating them will require either hundreds of thousands of ground troops or a willingness to commit genocide.
Increasingly, however, Trump’s alternate reality is being taken seriously in mainstream media. After Vance’s entirely predictable failure, The Washington Post wrote:
The involvement of Vice President JD Vance had raised hopes around the world that the weekend negotiations in Pakistan would solidify the ceasefire with Iran and put an end to the war within reach.
The WaPo article went on to describe Vance as “President Donald Trump’s most high-profile war skeptic“, which is probably how Vance will try to pitch himself in 2028. But there is no evidence that his pre-war self-description as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions” actually resulted in any protest once Trump started bombing.
As many people have reported, Trump went into the war with his Venezuela adventure as a model: A quick decapitation strike would convince the new leaders to do whatever Trump wanted.
Trump understood the Venezuelan leaders, because fundamentally they are like him: They are interested primarily in their own wealth and power, so there is nothing they are willing to die for. Iran’s leaders, on the other hand, are willing to lose everything including their lives. So Trump has no idea how to deal with them.
So Trump’s latest idea is to blockade the Strait of Hormuz himself. He didn’t like the idea that Iran could profit by charging tolls on the Strait, so he’s going to block everything, no matter what that does to the price of oil. And that would make sense if the Iranian leaders were motivated by profit the way Trump is. But they’re not, so Trump is essentially doing their job for them: Iran intended to disrupt the world economy by driving up the price of oil, and now Trump is helping them do it.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.
Two points:
Ending a country’s “civilization” is a war crime. And since the world does not recognize a Nuremberg defense (“I was just following orders”), Trump will be involving members of the American military in war crimes. If anyone you care about is in the military, this should worry you.
Like Netanyahu before him, Trump has fallen for the fallacy that if your opponent is evil, you can’t become the bad guy. But you can. Hamas is certainly evil, but nonetheless Netanyahu became the bad guy in the Gaza War. The Iranian regime is likewise evil. But if Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran turns genocidal, he will be the bad guy.
For a high-level view of the Iran War and its place in geo-political strategy, I recommend listening to an hour-long conversation between Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) and Phillips O’Brien (author of War and Power). That’s where the quote at the top comes from.
One scary conclusion they come to: The Iran War proves we would lose a non-nuclear war with China over Taiwan. Modern war is less about the big, expensive systems the US military is based on and more about manufacturing large numbers of cheap drones and similar devices. In World War II, the US was “the arsenal of democracy“, because we could manufacture planes, tanks, ships, and other munitions in larger quantities than anyone else. We’ve lost that edge. In the Iran War, we are firing advanced munitions like Tomahawk and Patriot missiles many times faster than we can build them.
Conversely, if you want to manufacture large numbers of things quickly today, where do you go? China. In a war with China, if we couldn’t win in a week, we would run out of weapons and lose.
Snyder and O’Brien both like the nonprofit foundation Come Back Alive, which supplies the Ukrainian military. As they describe it, CBA connects what the Ukrainians need to garage-level workshops that make drones and anti-drone tech. Their tech evolves constantly and is currently some of the best in the world.
The goal, at least immediately, is not a Hitler/Stalin style dictatorship where political opponents can be killed at will or arrested and sent to concentration camps. Instead, the government establishes a soft autocracy that maintains the appearance of freedom and democracy, but stacks the deck in ways that prevent the formation of any effective opposition. Vox sums up:
The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.
… The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz [i.e., Orbán’s party] managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.
The flaw in that model is that if the public gets sufficiently united against the government, the official thumb on the scale might not be heavy enough.
Sunday, Hungarians took advantage of what power they have left to oust Orbán. After 16 years in power, his party was decisively swept out. The opposition has won a 2/3rds supermajority in Parliament, which is big enough to undo the constitutional changes Orbán made.
I happened to be in Budapest Thursday, on a tour I arranged last fall without any journalistic motive. I don’t speak Hungarian and had little opportunity to talk to the locals, but I did see the election posters dominating every flat surface, and workmen setting up for a huge opposition concert Friday. I worried about a violent outcome to the election, so I was not sorry to get out before the action started.
and the astronauts
Sadly, the Artemis II mission all but vanished from the headlines. I’m showing my age here, but I remember when the whole nation was transfixed by each new space flight. One of the few things my grandfather and I were both interested in was watching the countdown for John Glenn’s launch. In school, we took time out of class to watch an unmanned mission that did nothing more than stick a TV camera onto a rocket and slam it into the Moon.
The four astronauts of Artemis II looped around the Moon, went farther from Earth than any human ever has, and successfully returned to Earth on Friday.
and you also might be interested in …
The week’s most mysterious story is why Melania called a news conference to read a statement saying that she was not connected to Jeffrey Epstein. She was not responding to anything obvious in the news cycle, so her main accomplishment was to start people wondering whether what she is denying is actually true.
The most logical explanation: The First Lady is trying to get ahead of forthcoming story about her ties to Epstein. But there are no specific rumors about such a story circulating on social media; it’s all just conjecture based on Melania’s statement.
But The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi offers a simpler theory:
I have another possible explanation. And that is that the Trumps aren’t just morally bankrupt, they’re also very, very stupid. A lot of people seem reluctant to acknowledge this about the president; they will tie themselves into knots trying to argue that his erratic actions actually represent a genius playing four-dimensional chess. He’s not really a madman, they insist, he’s just playing one on Truth Social! I understand why people want to believe this: it’s comforting to think there’s some sort of method behind the madness. But if there is any sort of method, I certainly can’t see it. All I can see is a man who thinks he can bully his way through life.
Here’s the thing: even if you are blessed with “a very high IQ”, when you are as rich and powerful as the Trumps, you can easily lose perspective. People rarely say “no” to you. Your employees don’t tell you that your ideas are ridiculous because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Melania may not be the president, but she is in the same sycophantic bubble as her husband. It’s possible she just thought she could hold a press conference and command all us plebs to stop talking about her, and we would immediately obey.
US Congressman and recent top contender to be the next governor of California Eric Swalwell has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least four women so far. He has denied the accusations, but a Democrat can’t ride something like this out the way Republicans can. He has suspended his campaign for governor, and I’ll be surprised if he hangs on to the House seat.
I’m always amazed by candidates who imagine something like this won’t come out. How do you recruit people to spend two years or more trying to get you elected, when you know that something you’ve done could result in all their effort being wasted?
As Congress returns to work, there is still no plan to fund DHS, and Trump really wants action on the vote-suppressing SAVE Act.
The regime revealed plans for Trump’s “arch of victory” monument, which is planned to be 250 feet tall. This motivated The Contrarian’s Tim Dickinson to review all the things Trump wants to name after himself.
All this self-aggrandizement is futile. As soon as he’s gone, everything he’s done will be reversed. The Kennedy Center will be the Kennedy Center again. Trump class battleships will never be built. The White House ballroom will be repurposed and renamed.
As for the money he’s planning to add his signature to, I think we can shame him out of it. You can get little stamping pads to add comments to currency. I think every Trump dollar should have “is America’s worst president” added to it.
Remember what Conan O’Brien said at the Oscars: “Welcome back, we are coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater! Let’s see him put his name in front of that.”
and let’s close with something far out
The Artemis II crew got some new views of the Earth and the Moon. Here we see how everything is relative: the Earth setting over the Moon looks tiny.
No sifts for two weeks. The next new articles will appear April 13.
In the dramatic circumstances of war … the media must guard against the risk of becoming propaganda. … It is up to you to show the sufferings that war always brings to the people; to show the face of war and to relate it through the eyes of the victims, so as not to transform it into a videogame.
Errata: Last week I did a particularly bad job as my own editor: I was fooled by a post apparently by the Stryker Corp IT chief, which was actually satire. (The community notes on X now say so explicitly.) The satirist posts a lot of imaginary inner monologues of tech company officials. They’re entertaining and occasionally insightful, but they’re not real. I also misspelled James Talarico’s name (two weeks in a row). And there were assorted typos that commenters pointed out.
Ongoing stories
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) Institute in Sweden maintains a “Liberal Democracy Index” to measure the overall level of democracy in the countries of the world. The US LDI rating has dropped precipitously in the last year to 57, just behind Ghana (61), tied with Panama, and just ahead of Columbia (52). Most other NATO countries are somewhere in the 70s or 80s, where the US was in the Obama years. V-DEM’s annual report notes “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.” Putin, Orban, and similar autocrats took much longer to unmake their democracies.
Climate change. If you worry about the impact of burning a tank of gasoline in your car, imagine how much damage is done by burning a whole tanker or a depot or setting a gas field on fire. In the long run, the Iran War raises the price of gas and points out the unreliability of fossil fuel supplies, which will push more people, corporations, and countries towards renewable energy. But the short-term impact is horrifying.
Israel/Palestine. The eyes of the world have mostly moved on, but NPR looks at Gaza during the Eid holiday. It observes that about 200 truckloads of aid get through Israeli checkpoints each day, when 600 are needed. Most of Gaza’s 2 million people “live in makeshift tents and rely on aid for survival”. Meanwhile, Israel is expanding its settlements in the West Bank “confining the Palestinian population to smaller and smaller patches of land”.
Ukraine. As winter ends, Russia is starting a new offensive and incurring large losses. The war in Iran works in Russia’s favor, as it is able to sell more oil at higher prices.
Epstein. The House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein affair has subpoenaed AG Pam Bondi. Bondi announced a briefing for the lawmakers, but indicated she saw this as a replacement for testifying under oath. Democrats on the committee were having none of this and walked out. The deadline for the subpoena is April 14. So the cover-up continues.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about Iran
The Iran War is the subject of the featured post. What didn’t get covered there is the $200 billion supplemental appropriation the Trump regime is seeking to fund the war. The official request hasn’t been made yet, and getting it through Congress can only happen if it is part of a reconciliation package that circumvents filibuster rules in the Senate. Given Republicans’ narrow margin in the House, it may not even pass there.
Politically, the best thing for Democrats would be the Republicans passing the appropriation on a party-line vote. At that point, they own the war, and every spending cut Republicans want can be compared to it. “Why was there no money to keep your local hospital open, when there was $200 billion to blow hospitals up in Iran? Why is there no money for cancer research when there is plenty to fight foreign wars?” And so on.
But for the nation, the best thing would be to get this thing stopped any way we can. Democrats can’t do that on their own, though. That’s what being in the minority means.
and the strange case of Joe Kent
Opponents of both the Gaza and Iran Wars have faced the same challenge: How do you denounce what the Israeli government does without making common cause with antisemites? For centuries, conspiracy theories have been tracing every unfortunate situation back to some nefarious plot by Jews. But sane people should not get involved in that project. While Netanyahu and his buddies are responsible for plenty of wrongdoing, they are not the cause of all the world’s problems.
This week delivered a case in point: Joe Kent. Kent is a twice-defeated Republican congressional candidate who failed up: Tulsi Gabbard got him a job as head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center. This week he became the first Trump insider to resign in protest over the Iran War. In the message that accompanied his resignation letter on X, Kent said
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,
So far so good, but the sentence didn’t stop there.
and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
Vox’ Zack Beauchamp acknowledges that he ought to welcome defections within the Trump war machine, but …
Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.
Kent’s particular awful thing is to portray an American president as nothing more than the dupe of sinister Jews.
Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark forces represent.
At the moment, most MAGA fascists are supporting the war whole-heartedly.
But if this war continues to go poorly, public opinion will turn — much in the same way as many Republicans now view President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as an obvious mistake. In such a future, Republican voters will be looking for someone to tell them why their president led them astray. Kent’s letter is setting up an obvious scapegoat: the Jews. … Kent’s letter, then, is not really a sign of rising Republican resistance to the Iran war that could augur its premature end. Rather, it is an opening salvo in a future political war over how the war’s (likely) failure should be interpreted — and an extremely ugly one at that.
I’m going to repeat a message that I’ve posted many times before: Americans should not bring the troubles of the Middle East home. American Jews who support the idea of Israel because they believe there should be a Jewish refuge somewhere in the world are not the same as Netanyahu’s fascists. And American Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who believe Palestinians also deserve a homeland are not the same as Hamas. Americans should not be persecuting or even killing other Americans because of their resemblance to overseas villains.
and ICE
Trump claims that today he will start sending ICE agents to help TSA at airports. Mark Jacob points out the obvious: This has nothing to do with ICE’s stated mission.
Trump’s plan to send ICE to the airports makes it clear that ICE isn’t really an immigration enforcement force. It’s Trump’s personal Gestapo, his goon squad ready to act out the dictator’s fever dreams, no matter how reckless and stupid.
Ron Filipkowski asks another obvious question: Will ICE agents at the airports wear masks?
BBC doesn’t sanewash the president’s plan, describing it as a “threat”. When you quote him more completely, it does sound that way:
I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before.
ICE agents behaving “like no one has ever seen before” is exactly what travelers should fear.
Republicans know that it looks bad for them when ICE agents murder American citizens in the streets and suffer no consequences. So they want to soften their rhetoric and present a more pleasant image. But the underlying thuggishness of ICE isn’t changing. Replacing Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin is just a change of figurehead at DHS. Stephen Miller still runs the show, and he likes the thugs.
If congressional Republicans really wanted a course correction at DHS, they have a straightforward opportunity without changing its leadership. The agency has been shutdown since Feb. 14, when Democrats refused to support legislation funding the agency because it lacked provisions reforming ICE. The list of demands in their counterproposal is straightforward. ICE agents would be required to wear identification badges and work without masks, and follow existing laws regarding warrants. They would also be banned from targeting people based on race. The GOP’s refusal to rein in the rogue agency even a little shows that the party does not want to “course correct” in any meaningful way.
Brian Beutler sees this as nothing more than an across-the-board plan to save Republicans in the midterms:
They now seem to be tacking back a subtler approach. Not just because they think they’ll get a second chance at authoritarian breakthrough, but because the nature of their conduct over the past 14 months has rendered the whole project politically toxic. What they want, therefore, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them. In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking.
Trump still calls the shots for the GOP in Congress, and he opposes “any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats”. The deal apparently on the table would lead to no changes at ICE, but would make Republicans fully own ICE’s rogue behavior: Democrats would vote to fund all of DHS other than ICE, while ICE funding would be part of a reconciliation bill that would be immune to filibuster.
To me, even the Democrats’ demands aren’t enough. At the very minimum, I want to see charges filed against the agents who murdered Rene Good and Alex Pretti. Until that happens, ICE’s thugs will go on assuming they have a 007-like license to kill.
ICE has illegally been taking DNA samples from protesters it arrests. “It’s very concerning to me because what it looks like the government is doing is creating this catalog of political dissidents.” DHS hasn’t said what it does with this information.
and law
The Trump administration had another bad week in court.
They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security. In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”
Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”
According to Law Dork, third-country removals — deportations to someplace other than the deportee’s home country — is one of Trump regime’s “most dramatic anti-immigrant policies”. I invite you to think about what an extreme punishment this is: Imagine being dropped into a country you know nothing about, possibly a war-torn country like Sudan. You have no friends there and you may not speak the local language. You don’t know what rights (if any) the local system grants you. Even if you aren’t immediately imprisoned, you are in rough shape: You have no job and no prospect of getting one.
In its Wednesday post, LD gives a good summary of where the case to restrain these deportations stands: A district court has been trying to rein in this practice, and recently issued its final opinion — not an injunction or any similar temporary judgment.
[Judge Brian] Murphy has ordered the Trump administration to provide people with “meaningful“ due process before carrying out third country removals.
Trump’s DoJ took that ruling to the First Circuit appellate court, which put a stay on the lower court’s order while they consider the merits of the case. That stay allows third-country removals to continue temporarily, but LD interprets this as possibly a strategic move by one of the Biden appointees who might ultimately want to affirm the lower-court ruling.
Looking at this strategically, in light of the Supreme Court’s prior shadow docket order, the stay grant prevented the case from going to the Supreme Court now — allowing the First Circuit to fully consider these questions and issue a full merits ruling before this important case goes back up to the Supreme Court.
Instead, the First Circuit is going to hear this case quickly, with briefs and oral arguments finished in April.
RFK Jr.’s reign of error at Health and Human Services got bad news from the courts on two fronts.
Just about everything RFK Jr. has done to discourage vaccine use got thrown out by the same Judge Murphy.
A different federal judge set aside HHS’s declaration that gender-affirming care “is neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors.”
Both rulings make similar arguments: There are legal ways to change HHS policy, but Kennedy circumvented them.
The vaccine ruling revolves around the role of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is supposed to be a board of scientific experts on vaccines. Back in June, Kennedy fired the entire committee, which he subsequently replaced with hacks who agree with him. Judge Murphy noted that of ACIP’s 15 current members “only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines”. This violates the legislation that established ACIP and numerous laws that refer to it.
HHS, sometimes with the advice of the new unqualified ACIP and sometimes without, changed childhood vaccination schedules and made other vaccine-related rulings — all pointing in the direction of Americans receiving fewer vaccinations. These moves also violated various laws, including the Administrative Procedures Act.
The ruling blocks these changes to HHS vaccine policy and bars ACIP from continuing to meet in its current form.
In the weeks after Mr. Kennedy issued his written declaration, the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that it would investigate institutions that continued to prescribe medication to minors for gender transitions and would potentially bar them from receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funds. (As an aside, the declaration re-names “gender-affirming care” as “sex-rejecting procedures”. )
The court ruling prevents HHS from enforcing its new policy. HHS will undoubtedly appeal.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop construction of Trump’s massive White House ballroom until the project gets congressional approval and submits to the ordinary review process. Verbal comments by the judge in this case have observers speculating that he will side with NTHP when he rules later this month.
and Robert Mueller
The death of Robert Mueller at age 81 provides a news hook for renewed discussion of what Mueller investigated: Trump’s ties to Russia. Certainly Trump himself sees the connection:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!
(Remember all the handwringing about “civility” when liberals weren’t sufficiently deferential about Charlie Kirk’s death?) But certainly Trump is not one of those “innocent people”. Marcy Wheeler reviews the convictions Mueller’s Russia investigation led to, and points to the pardons of key figures that kept Mueller from fully uncovering the Trump/Russia conspiracy.
Mueller’s failure, solidified by Democrats’ failure to do anything with the impeachment referral, to thwart Trump’s betrayal of the United States is one of many aspects of a larger lesson that the US legal system was not built to hold a corrupt President accountable. Impeachment does not work, and even before John Roberts gave Trump a retrospective and prospective Get Out of Jail Free card, Presidents had too much power to tamper in investigations of their own crimes.
and the Illinois primary
Tuesday, Illinois held primaries for both parties. It’s a blue state, so the big news was on the Democratic side. Several races were interpreted in the media as progressive/moderate races, with moderates doing somewhat better. But there was not a clear trend. Illinois does not have a run-off rule, so several multi-candidate races were won with less than 50% of the vote.
The top of the ticket was the race to replace retiring Dick Durbin in the Senate. (Side note: I was living in New Hampshire during the 2008 primary campaign. The Obama victory party was supposed to be upstairs from my favorite brew-pub, but Obama was surprisingly defeated by Hillary Clinton. I was in the pub for dinner, went to the bar for some reason, and noticed I was standing next to Dick Durbin. I let him mourn in peace.) Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won with 40%.
Another noteworthy race was for the 9th congressional district. I was rooting for Kat Abughazaleh, but Evanston Mayor David Biss performed well during the ICE focus on the Chicago area, so I was not sorry to see him win. The big loser in this race was AIPAC, which put a lot of money behind the third-place candidate.
The somewhat better showing of moderates touched off the usual debate about which direction the Democratic Party should go, with many voices pushing for what Matt Yglesias calls “popularism”: backing away from unpopular positions. Unfortunately, this is generally interpreted to mean throwing trans people under the bus. I have trouble seeing how this actually works in practice. Harris never mentioned trans issues during the 2024 fall campaign, but that didn’t save her because she had supported the trans community in the past.
About the only way this can work is to do what my congressman, Seth Moulton, did: repeat anti-trans talking points yourself. (He’s running for the Senate now, and I will not be voting for him in the primary against incumbent Ed Markey.) Even that probably won’t work, because your Republican opponent can always make a more extreme anti-trans attack and dare you to match him.
I’m struck by how seldom the same popularist point is made to Republicans about issues like abortion. At most, Republicans are told to soften their rhetoric, not change their position (that abortion should be illegal in nearly all situations, often including ones that endanger a pregnant woman’s health). Chair Richard Hudson of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Punchbowl News:
Republicans don’t have a policy problem. We have a branding problem.
Their policy is that a woman who is raped should be forced to bear her rapist’s child. In other words, rape should be a viable male reproductive strategy; if you’re having trouble attracting women, you can still propagate your genes by force.
Republicans think they can win the issue by painting Democrats as even more out-of-step with the public than Republicans are.
We need to point out that the Democrat position is abortion for any reason, up until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers.
But that’s hardly any Democrat’s real position. Not that the truth actually matters.
Here’s my take on where most voters are: They generally dislike abortions and wish the US had fewer of them. But if someone in their family needs one, they don’t want the government to tell them they can’t get one.
Coincidentally, I think most voters have exactly the same opinion about guns.
TPM collects what is known so far about the DHS contracting scandal. The gist: DHS funds big projects through dummy general contractors who then farm the work out to politically connected sub-contractors. This, plus a few other gimmicks, circumvents the usual government contracting process — which is cumbersome but designed to prevent exactly this kind of corruption.
Republican rhetoric about the SAVE Act started as painting the bill as common-sense, nothing-to-see-here. But as it looks increasingly unlikely to get through the Senate, they are revving up evidence-free conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.
The accusation that there is rampant cheating in our election is dramatic, alarming, and oft-repeated. It is also totally false.
After years of audits, recounts, lawsuits, academic studies, and investigations across red states and blue states alike, there is absolutely no evidence—zero—that substantial, outcome-changing voter fraud is present in American elections. There simply isn’t proof.
It turns out that the real fraud is not at the ballot box; it’s claims like the one the president made as he addressed a joint session of Congress.
If I were a Democrat in a general-election debate with a Republican, I’d want to ask this question: “Do any of your proposals address a problem that actually exists?”
The Idaho House has passed another transgender persecution bill. This one makes it a misdemeanor to “knowingly and willfully enter a restroom or changing room … designated for use by the opposite biological sex”. First offense can get you a year in prison, while the second offense can get you five.
OK, I see how this makes life more difficult for transfolk. But how does it make life better for the rest of us? What problem do such bills solve?
Accept for the moment that transgender and nonbinary people exist. (Off the top of my head I can think of three that I’ve met personally. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others that I haven’t noticed.) So picture a person with a female birth certificate who now presents as male, to the point that you really can’t tell unless you stare. Like all humans, that person may need a public bathroom from time to time. Which is more disruptive?
Going into the men’s bathroom and using a stall.
Going into the women’s bathroom looking like a man.
I think the answer is obvious. Idaho’s law is mandating the more disruptive outcome. So the point isn’t to make society work more smoothly. The point is to persecute trans people.
Trump’s concentration of lies seems to be rising. This post must be some kind of record:
FREE TINA PETERS, A 73-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, WITH CANCER, GIVEN A NINE YEAR DEATH SENTENCE IN A COLORADO PRISON BY DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR, JARED POLIS, AND A CORRUPT POLITICAL MACHINE, FOR EXPOSING FRAUD BY THE DEMOCRATS IN THE 2020 ELECTION.
Kyle Clark finds four false claims in those 40 words:
Peters is 70 (not 73), does not have cancer, was sentenced by a judge in Mesa County (not the Governor), and did not expose fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.
This week’s featured post is “The Longer View“, where three articles try to answer the question “What’s wrong with those people in the Trump administration?”
Ongoing stories
This week I didn’t have the time and energy to look at the ongoing stories I usually keep track of. I’ll try to do better next week.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was still talking about Iran
I don’t think I need to say a lot about the progress of the war: The US and Israel continue to blow things up in Iran and in Lebanon, and while Iranian casualties are far larger than ours, we’re still getting our own people killed. And they’re dying for some goal that seems to exist only in Trump’s inarticulate mind. He certainly hasn’t figured out a way to explain it to the rest of us.
As the cartoon indicates, even though everyday Americans are largely insulated from the killing (at least until the next big terrorist attack), the war has significant effects everyone can see: immediately, higher gas prices, and down the road, higher prices overall.
Trump appears to have thought through none of this. Articles about how the go-to-war decision got made are largely based on anonymous sources, so they’re not as reliable as I’d like. But they do all paint a similar picture: Trump imagined his Iran attack going like Venezuela: He’d take out the country’s leadership, and the next leaders would be so intimidated they’d cooperate with whatever plan he came up with. It would all be over in a few days.
No one else thought it would go that way, including a lot of folks inside the administration. What has happened since was easily predictable: Iran’s theocratic leadership would take a next-man-up approach. The next leader would face the prospect of martyrdom with the same dispassion the last leader did and would refuse to surrender. Iran would attack US allies in the region with missiles and drones, and they would shut the Strait of Hormuz, jacking up world oil prices.
But in his second administration, Trump has surrounded himself with opportunists, weaklings, and cowards. No one is willing to lose his job to save the country from some wrong-headed notion that gets into the Great Leader’s head. So: We’re at war, gas prices are high and rising, overall inflation will start rising soon, victory remains undefined, and the Iranian regime is as entrenched as ever. We face the prospect of either stopping our attack without any lasting accomplishment, or significantly escalating the war with either ground troops or nuclear weapons.
So far, I haven’t heard anyone in the administration talk specifically about nuclear weapons, so my mention of them in the previous paragraph may seem unwarranted.
But I worry about them anyway. As I’ve said before, Trump has only two ways of dealing with opposition: buy them off or intimidate them. If opponents refuse to be intimidated, he makes a series of ever more extreme threats — which he is then on the spot to carry out.
Wednesday, Iran flexed its cyber-terrorism muscle. The Iranian hacker group Handala somehow got high-level privileges on the network of medical device maker Stryker. At the very least, the attack will delay delivery of devices. But it raises the possibility of homocidal mischief in the future.
Chillingly, Stryker’s chief of IT emphasizes that nothing went wrong on the technical side:
I build the robots that perform your surgery. The defibrillators that restart your heart. The systems that let your nurse find your doctor at three in the morning when something goes wrong. Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Fifty-six thousand employees. Sixty-one countries. Every device in every country, managed from one console.
On March 11th, someone who was not me sat down at that console and erased everything. I should be precise. They did not hack us. They logged in. … My security tool did not fail. It performed exactly as designed. It wiped every device it was told to wipe, without error, on schedule. The architect of my destruction was my own IT budget line item. The command went out. The devices obeyed.
The man who rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan quite likely was motivated by learning that four of his family members had been killed in Lebanon by an Israel bombing raid. He was wrong to do what he did, and it is fortunate no one died but the perpetrator. But it’s not hard for me to imagine being in that situation and feeling like the only conceivable response is to kill someone.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran. In his post, Trump alleged that “many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz strait, will be sending war ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the strait open and safe”.
In a later post, Trump extended his call to all “the countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz strait” to send naval support.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesperson, Stefan Kornelius, underlined that “it is not Nato’s war. Nato is an alliance to defend the alliance area.”
The time to look for allies is before you start a war, not after. Trump is like the guy who starts a bar fight nobody else wanted without giving his buddies any warning, but then expects them to come fight on his side.
Josh Marshall asked the same question I’ve been wondering about: Why do oil markets respond to what Trump says, when so much of what he says is nonsense?
Courts have been proving troublesome to the Trump administration.
Friday, a judge unsealed an opinion quashing subpoenas in the investigation of Fed chair Jerome Powell. The investigation appears to be nothing more than an effort to harass Powell into doing what Trump wants: lowering interest rates. The US attorney’s brief in support of the subpoenas vaguely asserts that cost overruns in renovations at the Fed might be due to fraud, and that testimony Powell gave to Congress might be false. No further specifics are given.
After the opinion was released, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro went on a rant about “activist judges”. But
The striking thing about the brief, and about Pirro’s press conference, in fact, is that neither seems remotely concerned with establishing that there is a predicate for a criminal investigation at all. … [N]either shows any awareness that investigative agencies aren’t supposed to initiate criminal investigations at all without an appropriate evidentiary predicate.
In her rant, Pirro “said she was willing to see acquittals and willing to see grand juries reject her proposed indictments”. Grand juries used to almost never reject the government’s attempts to indict someone. But now they regularly do, because the government pursues so many indictments purely to harass Trump’s enemies.
Lawfare examines proposals circulating in administration circles for Trump to declare a national emergency to take control of the fall elections. Unsurprisingly, such an order would likely be illegal.
Under the new law, a voter registration applicant’s citizenship status must be verified by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Until that happens, an applicant will be registered as an unverified voter and must vote with a provisional ballot that will not be counted if his or her legal status as a citizen cannot be verified through the department’s records.
The law doesn’t just impact new registrations. It also requires the Florida Department of State to verify the citizenship status of all registered voters who have not already been verified as U.S. citizens. If the citizenship status of a registered voter cannot be established or the voter record does not indicate that the registered voter’s citizenship is verified, the department must notify local election officials, who then notify the registered voter.
Unless courts intervene, we can expect chaos in Florida in November.
Remember all those people claiming that ICE agents were randomly rounding up brown people because they had arrest quotas to meet? A wild, crazy accusation, right?
Well, now some ICE agents have been interviewed under oath, and it turns out they were supposed to make eight arrests a day. They found people to arrest using a custom AI-app that made a lot of mistakes. And this part is beyond parody:
JB said the team decided to follow the van once it departed, even though officers didn’t confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the registered owner of the vehicle. JB found it suspicious that the driver was making multiple stops for passengers, saying: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.” The fact that the occupants were “only speaking Spanish” during the stop seemed to “confirm” there was smuggling or “harboring people that are not supposed to be here in the United States”, JB said.
It was a car pool, taking farm workers to their worksite. But
JB’s team pulled over a van of farm workers heading to their job early in the morning, smashed the car windows and detained all seven occupants.
One of them, a plaintiff in the suit that resulted in this deposition, had entered the US legally. But she
was taken to a detention center in Washington state before ICE released her “without explanation and left her to find her own way back home to Oregon”.
Under the proposed rule, the attorney general could ask any independent disciplinary authority to suspend ethics proceedings against a Justice Department lawyer (on threat of unspecified enforcement action) and send the matter to the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. But a review by that office is not a serious substitute for a state bar investigation. Even before Mr. Trump, the office, which answers to a political appointee, had a reputation for operating like a black hole, with the details of investigative findings almost never made public.
and trans people
The effort to demonize and dehumanize the trans community continues.
So, most but not all states allow you to change or choose the gender marker on your driver’s license. Blocking that is one level of discrimination, but the state of Kansas has taken it a step further: They retroactively cancelled any license where the gender had been changed while it was legal to do so: 1700 of them in all.
Hundreds of trans drivers already received letters from the state informing them their documents were “invalid immediately” and they “may be subject to additional penalties” if they continue to drive, unless they surrender the license to the Kansas Division of Vehicles and receive a new one with their birth sex.
Does forcing the gender on a drivers license to match the one on the corresponding birth certificate solve any problem? Let’s think about what drivers licenses are for and how they’re used. It makes perfect sense for states to want to keep track of who can drive on their roads and to impose standards to disqualify unsafe drivers. In addition, drivers licenses get used as an commonly available form of ID.
Why is gender on a license at all? Like height and eye color and the picture, it helps verify that you really are the licensed person. But if your appearance corresponds to a different gender than the one on your license, that actually makes the license less useful as ID. Worse, it sets you up for discrimination and abuse: Anyone who has a legitimate reason to ask for your license now knows that you’re trans.
Now think about situations where you might show your drivers license. Is there any reason why a policeman or a cashier or anybody else needs to know what gender is on your birth certificate? I can’t think of one. So this law solves absolutely zero problems.
All it does is harass trans people and expose them to discrimination and abuse. The only motive Kansas had to pass this law was to encourage such discrimination and abuse.
Last week, I talked about how the Supreme Court only takes “sincerely held religious beliefs” seriously if they are conservative religious beliefs about topics like abortion or gender.
Example: On March 2, the Court set aside a California law that prevents schools from telling parents about a student’s change in gender presentation without the student’s permission. The Court said the law prevents parents from implementing their sincerely held beliefs in the religious upbringing of their children.
It remains to be seen whether teachers and school districts who keep a child’s confidences will be held liable in some way. If a child ever confided some deep issue to me and asked me not to tell their parents, I would hope that my first response would not be to go rat them out. (I haven’t had that conversation about gender transition, but I have occasionally kept confidences about drugs or sex.) That practice comes from my sincerely held moral beliefs, which I fear the current Court would not recognize.
I also wonder when a student’s behavior might trip such a requirement. If Samantha tells her teachers she wants to be called Sam, and starts wearing gender-nonspecific jeans and t-shirts, are they supposed to call the parents?
It’s a telling point that the version of the SAVE Act (another law that solves no problems) that Trump is throwing his hissy fit about isn’t just about making it harder to vote, it’s also about attacking trans people. The version of SAVE passed by the House and held up in the Senate just focused on disenfranchising people who don’t have passports or easy access to their birth certificates or marriage licenses. But Trump wants to add:
NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN!
Translation: Ban transwomen from women’s sports and make gender-affirming care illegal for minors. Those provisions deserve their own argument, which maybe I’ll get to later. But the simpler question is: Why should they be part of a voter-suppression law?
The answer is simple: Transfolk are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler or Blacks have been to the KKK. His base has been trained to hate them, and he can sometimes transfer the energy of that hatred to some other issue, even a completely unrelated issue like voting.
Trump just declared that he’d ban trans women from the Olympics. Only one openly transgender woman has ever competed in the Olympic Games in its history. In 2020. She did not win a medal. This is fabricated controversy to fuel bigotry. Like banning trans women from owning nuclear weapons.
and you also might be interested in …
Courts near the border are clogged with misdemeanor trespass cases that serve little purpose and are usually thrown out by judges. By declaring the border area a military zone, the administration created a new crime that most people who commit it have never heard of.
More and more, the Bezos-owned Washington Post is becoming a mouthpiece for a billionaire agenda. Here’s what I saw in their opinion section on just one day (yesterday). This piece on Pittsburgh sets up a false dichotomy between city services and progressive politics, essentially blaming progressive Democrats for the state of the city, which is painted in the same gloomy colors MAGA uses to describe all Democrat-run big cities. Pittsburgh’s new centrist Democrat mayor is a “lesson” for the national party to shift away from its progressive wing.
Zohran Mamdani wants to tax New Yorkers “to death“, but
Of course, New York doesn’t need more revenue — the city could simply cut expenditures, starting with Mamdani’s $127 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2027.
which is described in the next paragraph as “a socialist laundry list”.
Chicago also is portrayed as on the brink of insolvency. And San Francisco’s BART is “headed for a financial death spiral”. What looks on the surface like a fluffy denunciation of fancy coffee drinks is some guy from the Hoover Institute quoting Edmund Burke about how our failure to control our appetites is ruining society. A fair point, maybe, but why is the example a type of excess associated with upscale liberals, rather than say Bezos’ half-billion-dollar yacht?
And James Talarico’s candidacy isn’t inviting Christians to return to the teachings of Jesus, it’s a return to the failed views of liberal Christians in general, which the religion market rejected in the 20th century in favor of right-wing Christianity.
None of these pieces is outright pro-fascist, and any one of them might have a place on the editorial page of a newspaper trying to present a balance of views. But the WaPo bombards readers with all of them on the same day, with no voices at all from left of center.
NPR has an article about Spartanburg County, South Carolina, which is experiencing “the biggest measles outbreak in the U.S. in more than three decades, with nearly 1,000 confirmed cases”. The reason? The vaccination rate has fallen to 89%, well below the 95% necessary to achieve herd immunity.
And why are parents so reluctant to vaccinate their kids? One of the reasons is “lingering resentment over COVID mandates”.
“I think it should have been a choice. It shouldn’t have been shoved down your throat like you have to do it.”
It’s amazing to me how quickly the popular culture has minimized the COVID pandemic. (Starting with Trump, who minimized it while it was happening.) 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. When the country has to deal with a disaster that big, you’re not going to keep all your freedom. I mean, think about 9-11, and how much disruption of daily life followed from that. But in terms of deaths, COVID was hundreds of times larger than 9-11. At the pandemic’s peak, it was like a 9-11 was happening every day or two.
So yes, once a vaccine existed, the government absolutely should have “shoved it down your throat”. And they should shove a lot of other vaccines down your throat too, so that the general population doesn’t have to worry about polio or smallpox.
A deposition under oath made it clear that a DOGE staffer tasked with flagging National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cancel due to DEI actually had no idea what DEI was and no education in the humanities. Having no knowledge himself, he used ChatGPT to
search programs and grants to cut using terms such as “Black,” “gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “equality.” However, DOGE would not search for cuts from anything involving terms like “caucasian” and “heterosexual.”
That and similar clips went viral, but I can’t link to them because a judge has ordered them removed. Apparently, they exposed the DOGE tech bros to “widespread ridicule”.
Imagine that: Young idiots served as judge and jury over NEH grants they did not understand. And now they’re being ridiculed. How unfair!
I’ve been a fan of Kat Abughazaleh since days when she used to do quick summaries each week of what Fox News was covering. Now she’s running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district. The Democratic primary is hotly contested, and Kat (a Palestinian-American who has been outspoken about the Gaza genocide) has been targeted by AIPAC.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump continues to lose in court. I’ll try to do a round-up next week.
Climate change. Trump killed a report on the health of nature in the US, but the researchers released it anyway.
Ukraine. Ukraine is offering us anti-drone tech for our war with Iran. Russia is offering Iran targeting information on our forces. So Trump lowered sanctions on Russian oil. No wonder Adam Kinzinger wonders what Putin has on Trump.
Epstein.Miami Herald: “Three FBI interviews that contain graphic sexual and physical assault allegations against President Donald Trump were released Thursday by the Justice Department.” If the purpose of attacking Iran was to make Epstein go away, it’s not working.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Iran War
When I wrote last week, the war had only just started and it was hard to know what was happening. So I focused on the Trump regime’s lack of preparation: The first lesson of our defeat in Vietnam was that a long-term war effort would fail without popular support. So any war but the briefest needs to be preceded by marshaling public opinion at home. George W. Bush did nearly everything else wrong in Iraq, but that part he understood. Conversely, Trump had done virtually nothing to explain why we needed to attack Iran.
At the time it was still plausible that there was a clear reason, but we weren’t being told what it was. This week it became apparent that there is no explanation for why we attacked Iran. Or at least there is no explanation that connects clear national goals with some likely outcome of this war. For several days Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth contradicted each other and sometimes themselves. It was about nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles or regime change or freedom for the Iranian people or punishing evil or making the world safe for Israel or remaking the Middle East or some other thing that you would hear about one day but not the next. The war would be short or maybe long or maybe something in between.
If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a ‘strategy’ at all. When your goals or met you’re done and you leave. … This war is probably just about Donald Trump being in charge. That’s not a clear or definable goal. It leaves the initiative in the hands of whoever currently controls the Iran state and military. It’s a recipe for unclarity.
Here are the most insightful takes on the war I’ve seen:
James Fallows’ “The Arrogance of Ignorance”. He’s been reporting on war and the military since the1980s, and boils the lessons we should have learned during that time, but haven’t, into five points.
“How does this end?” That’s the question to ask before you begin.
The importance of morale and moral factors. Your side needs to believe that you are right and your cause is just.
The memories a war creates will persistent for decades. Iranians still remember 1953, when the US engineered a coup to topple the elected government and install the tyrannical Shah.
What if the war comes home? Even a country that is dominant militarily can be vulnerable to terrorism.
Leadership matters. Fallows drives this point home with the following juxtaposition of photos: George Marshall and Pete Hegseth.
[T]hink of the clowns and posturers who now have the controls. They don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what they are unleashing. It took years for the United States to get into its quagmire in Vietnam. It took many months to prepare the groundwork for the disaster in Iraq. These people have changed the world, for the worse, in just nine days. And none of us knows how it will end.
One leader views the world as a transactional playground where everything is for sale, while the other views his own survival as a world-historic necessity, regardless of the ruin it brings to his people.
Trump really has only two methods of trying to influence people: He buys them off or he intimidates them. He does not understand people who act out of values deeper than greed or fear (which is why he gets so frustrated with “the Deep State”, i.e., government workers who believe in the mission of their agency). And he is fundamentally incapable of forming a shared understanding of the situation and arriving at a win/win solution.
Khamenei, on the other hand, did not want money and welcomed the prospect of martyrdom. So none of Trump’s levers could move him. Quite possibly, Trump won’t do any better moving Khamenei’s successor, his son.
Marcy Wheeler looks at how the NYT and other mainstream publications indulge Trump’s fantasies of omnipotence.
The most irksome reporting, however, is the response to Trump’s promise, on the fourth day of this war, that he will jerry-rig a program to ensure the “FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD … as soon as possible.”
His “program” is an order to the US Development Financing Corporation to offer risk insurance to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz “at a very reasonable price. Wheeler points out that such a program would take time to set up and funding from Congress. Maybe it could work if somebody had thought of it months ago and had it ready to implement as soon as the first bomb dropped.
But Politico covers this as if Trump’s tweet had already created this program in a “Fiat lux!” sort of way. Clearly the world sees through this: That’s why the price of a barrel of oil has jumped from below $60 in January to over $100 today.
The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by U.S. Navy warships into Iran since Feb. 28, when the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran began.
James Fallows commends the NYT for reporting this straight rather than watering it down to please Trump.
Not “appears to contradict” or “is at odds with” or “may give rise to suspicions that.” Flat out: “Contradicts.” “Video shows.” About the US blowing up a school full of little girls.
If your pastor is telling you that murdering Iranians will hasten the return of Jesus, you’re not a church member. You’re a cult member.
and the primaries
The flashy news from Tuesday’s primaries in Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina was the Texas Senate race. (Complete primary calendar here.) James Talerico defeated Jasmine Crockett on the Democratic side, while Republican incumbent John Cornyn goes to a run-off with Ken Paxton.
Turning Texas blue is a longstanding dream of the Democrats. The hope is that Texas follows the California model: Republican hostility to the growing Hispanic population eventually makes the state unwinnable for them. So far it hasn’t happened. Beto O’Rourke got within three points of Ted Cruz in 2018, but so far that has been the high-water mark. (Cruz beat Colin Allred in 2024 by 6.5%.)
This race was interesting from both sides. Cornyn and Paxton have waged a nasty and expensive campaign, and unless Trump forces one of them to drop out — he’s been making noises — the run-off is likely to be even nastier and more expensive. Paxton is the more true-blue MAGA, but is a scandal machine. The Texas House passed 20 articles of impeachment against him in 2023, mostly focusing on misuse of his office and bribery, but the Senate didn’t convict him. Last year, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce “on biblical grounds”. His legal problems go back to 2008, and he appears to have never held an office he didn’t misuse for personal gain.
Talerico is a Presbyterian seminarian who speaks the language of religion comfortably without compromising progressive positions on the major issues. I discuss what this might mean for the nation in the featured post.
Give Crockett credit for offering a timely and complete concession to Talerico. The only way Democrats pull this off is if they stay united. Crockett showed the kind of class that used to be standard, but is rare these days.
One of the winners in Texas was Rep. Tony Gonzalez who, despite being married with six children, pressured a staffer into an affair; she later committed suicide by setting herself on fire. Fortunately for Republicans, party leadership is wiser than Gonazlez’ voters: They forced Gonzalez out on Thursday, but want him to serve out his term because they have such a small margin in the House. (Moral considerations only go so far. Power is more important.)
Prior to his withdrawal, Gonzalez provided a lesson in how Republican Christianity works. Here, Gonzalez admits to the affair, but assures the voters that it’s all fine now.
I have reconciled with my wife Angel, I’ve asked God to forgive me (which He has), and my faith is as strong as ever.
What the staffer’s family thinks is not worth mentioning.
I love the “which He has.” Not “I believe He has” or “I trust He has” or “My faith tells me He has.” Just “He has.”
How convenient a powerful man must find it, to believe in a God who lets you speak for Him. And once God had spoken (through Rep. Gonzalez), what voter would dare not to forgive him too? No wonder Gonzalez’ faith has remained strong, probably just as strong as it was when he was screwing his staff.
Republican Christianity is a very convenient religion. I recommend it to powerful-but-amoral people everywhere.
and Noem
Kristi Noem finally lost her job as Homeland Security Secretary, but not for of the reasons you might expect. It wasn’t that her agents murdered two people in Minneapolis, or that she blatantly lied about it. It wasn’t because DHS under her leadership routinely ignored court orders. It wasn’t that she had DHS buy a $70 million luxury jet under the guise of “deportations”, but really for her own use.
An executive jet the Department of Homeland Security has told the White House’s Office of Management and Budget it needs for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet officials’ travel features a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and even a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.
I can’t quite imagine who we’d want to deport in that kind of luxury. But that is just corruption; you can’t get fired for that in this administration.
It also wasn’t because of her barely-hidden affair with underling Cory Lewandowski. (They’re both married.) And it wasn’t even because she wasted $220 million of DHS money on TV ads that seem aimed more at raising her name recognition and personal profile than any legitimate DHS purpose.
During a congressional hearing this week, Ms. Noem was asked if Mr. Trump had approved a $200 million-plus government ad campaign in which she was prominently featured. Ms. Noem said Mr. Trump had tasked her with “getting the message out to the country.” Asked if Mr. Trump had signed off on the campaign before the ads aired, Ms. Noem responded, “We had that conversation, yes, before I was put in this position and sworn in and confirmed. And since then as well.”
That’s Rule #1 in the Trump regime: Nothing is the Boss’ fault.
You can now add a third covered-up murder to Noem’s tally: We now have video showing that Ruben Ray Martinez was not trying to run over an ICE agent when he was shot nearly a year ago. Like Rene Good and Alex Pretti, Martinez was a US citizen.
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The February jobs report was terrible: Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92K workers. It’s a mistake to read too much into any single month’s report, but the trend over the last year is not looking good. And things are not likely to improve now that oil prices are soaring.
Cutting-edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable explanation. … Kennedy has continued to spread misinformation and push politicised agendas at the expense of the country’s most vulnerable. When called to account for his decisions by Congress, he has been evasive and combative. The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.
This is discouraging. A 25-country survey by Pew Research asks whether your fellow citizens’ morals are very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad. US citizens showed the least trust in each other, with only 47% rating fellow citizens as very or somewhat good. No other country was under 50%, and Canada was the most trusting at 92%.
With so many substantive reasons to denounce Trump, I don’t like to focus on his symbolic outrages. But when he attended the return of the coffins of the first six American troops to die in the Iran War — known to the military as the “dignified transfer” and considered a solemn ritual — he wore a white USA golf hat that he sells on his website.
Fox News apparently realized how bad this was, because they “inadvertently” deceived their viewers to cover for him. Instead of showing the actual footage, they replayed video from a dignified transfer in December when he wasn’t wearing a hat.
The next time someone asks why you don’t like Trump, show them this 6 1/2 minute video from Dean Withers. He goes through Trump’s character, domestic policies, and foreign policies in an amazing amount of detail.
Thursday, Alabama is scheduled to execute Sonny Burton. Burton was involved in a 1991 robbery in which someone got killed. He was not the shooter. The shooter has already died in prison. He’s 75, and the victim’s daughter has asked for clemency. Will Governor Ivey intervene?
and let’s close with something anachronistic
What if “Staying Alive” had been done in the 1500s as a four-part madrigal?
I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party. We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage.
Climate change. The EPA has reversed the 2009 endangerment finding that named CO2 as a pollutant that can be regulated. The EPA is now essentially helpless to do anything to combat climate change.
Gaza. The “Board of Peace” that claims to be overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza includes no Gazans or other Palestinian representatives. But it’s building a base to house a multi-national peacekeeping force. Meanwhile, Israel is preparing to expand colonization of the West Bank.
Ukraine. M. Gessen looks at Ukraine after four years of war, a period longer than Russia and Ukraine experienced fighting the Nazis as part of the Soviet Union. “Now Ukraine’s patriotic war, against Russia, has crossed that threshold, with no end in sight. Russia’s offensive appeared to speed up in December. In February, Ukraine recaptured ground, in its most successful counteroffensive in more than two years. But on the whole, the front line has remained largely static for more than three years.”
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about tariffs
This is covered in the featured post. Short version: The Supreme Court has ruled that the “liberation day” tariffs are illegal. Trump immediately replaced them with 15% across-the-board tariffs, which are almost certainly illegal too.
One additional comment from Paul Krugman: Even if the new tariffs stand up in court “Tariffs as an instrument of arbitrary power have been dismantled.” Under this law, Trump can’t impose large tariffs on countries he doesn’t like and low tariffs on countries that grovel to him.
Something I didn’t mention in the featured post is how catty the conservative justices got with each other in their written opinions. For example, Roberts strongly implied that Kavanaugh was simply a Trump mouthpiece:
The Government, echoed point-for-point by the principal dissent, marshals several arguments in response.
and the Epstein files
The big recent news about the Epstein scandal is that other governments are taking it far more seriously than the Trump administration is. The former Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles of the UK, was arrested Thursday morning. The King expressed his “deepest concern” over Andrew, but showed no indication to help his brother in any practical way, saying “the law must take its course”.
US Republicans are mostly doing the exact opposite: expressing “concern” over Epstein’s victims, but not lifting a finger against the men who abused them.
Andrew was arrested for “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. I’m not sure how that correlates to anything in the US justice system. You can’t be convicted of “suspicion”, but a formal investigation will decide whether a charge will be pressed. Because “misconduct in public office” is such a catch-all term, the penalties range all the way up to life imprisonment. Ultimately, the charges may include not just sex crimes, but also leaking confidential information to Epstein. (Andrew used to be a trade envoy for the UK, so his insider knowledge could be useful to a financier.)
In spite of King Charles revoking Andrew’s title in November, for now he remains 8th in the line of succession to the throne. Removing him from succession requires an act of Parliament, which is under consideration.
I can’t discuss the Epstein case without mentioning Pam Bondi’s shameful testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She responded to virtually every question by yelling attacks at the questioner. Among other questions she dodged in this manner, she refused to comment on why the Justice Department had not talked to any of the Epstein victims who were present in the gallery, and segued onto the high stock market and how we really ought to be talking about that.
Just for the record: The performance of the stock market should never come up during the testimony of an attorney general. Her job has nothing to do with that.
The NY Times Pitchbot skewers both Andrew and the US Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity:
“Charges against Former Prince Andrew must be dropped if it’s determined that raping teenagers was an official act.” – by John Roberts (joined by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett).
WaPo lists prominent people — mostly non-US or in the US private sector — whose connections with Epstein have produced consequences. Notably missing: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The commerce secretary previously told Congress he cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after the late financier – a neighbour of Lutnick in New York – used sexual innuendo to explain why he owned a massage table in a room of his home. In Tuesday’s testimony, he said: “Over the next 14 years, I met him two other times that I can recall.” The justice department files show Lutnick visited Epstein’s Caribbean island on 23 December, 2012. That came four years after Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a child.
Hunting for revelations about the occupant of the Oval Office in this email blizzard is a fool’s errand. Trump’s name attached to anything incriminating is redacted. Of the 5,300 files with 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, or Mar-a-Lago, none are direct communications between Trump and Epstein. Deputy AG Todd Blanche has already said that the second half of the tranche—another two-and-a-half million pages—will never see the light of day.
Nonetheless, people are finding things. Jay Kuo summarizes what he’s seen so far. Nothing he mentions constitutes beyond-reasonable-doubt proof. But it’s a far cry from Trump’s claim “I’ve been totally exonerated.“
Celeste Davis wonders about the Epstein-files question hardly anybody asks:
Everyone is asking how did these men get away with so much rape? No one is asking what would cause so many to want to rape so much in the first place?
We seem to take for granted that men whose power puts them beyond any restraints will of course abuse underage girls. Why do we do that?
A. R. Moxon makes a related point not specific to the Epstein story. He comments on the “male loneliness epidemic”, which he finds frequently discussed in the media.
This is a problem. What I am inviting you to contemplate is how frequently it is treated as a problem for men, caused by women, to be solved by everyone else. I’m inviting you to contemplate how seldom it’s being treated as a problem caused by men who have never even started the work they need to do on themselves.
Moxon traces the “problem” to the decline of patriarchy: Men who expect to dominate a woman domestically and sexually are less and less likely to find a woman who agrees to be dominated.
The loneliness of women—also quite real—is not a problem that’s usually mentioned at all, much less as one worth seeking a solution to, and certainly never as one that ought to be solved by men deciding that they no longer need to dominate others as a core of their identity.
If patriarchal men are “dying off” (as they often phrase it) due to women finding them unfit for mating, that’s evolution at work. Survival-of-the-fittest isn’t always about becoming a better predator. Sometimes it’s about recognizing that the environment has changed, and adapting to it.
Continuing in this vein, Jessica Valenti discusses the Heritage Foundation’s plans for America’s cultural future, in a piece called “They’re Coming For Our Daughters“. Purportedly high-minded rhetoric about “Saving the Family” translates to limiting girls’ potential futures, and turning back the clock to a time when women could aspire to little other than the protection of a man and the opportunity to bear and raise his children.
People who didn’t take Heritage’s Project 2025 seriously enough are probably not taking this seriously enough either.
and Jesse Jackson
Jesse Jackson, who died last Tuesday at the age of 84, was the most visible Black leader of the post-Martin-Luther-King era. The Guardian published a summary of his influence on American politics.
One thing I remember from listening to Jackson was how he tried to unite all discriminated-against groups in a “rainbow coalition”. I’m going to get this quote wrong, but it went something like: “You have to decide whether you don’t want your group sent to the back of the bus, or you don’t want anybody sent to the back of the bus.”
and Iran
Are we going to war with Iran? We have an enormous armada in the region, including two of our largest aircraft carriers.
according to Robert A. Pape, the Founding Director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST), the US’s current force mobilization in the Middle East accounts for 40-50% of the deployable US air power worldwide.
Trump is giving deadlines and threatening “bad things will happen” if Iran doesn’t give him what he wants. Talking in his mob-boss style, Trump told reporters: “We’re either going to get a deal or it’s going to be unfortunate for them.”
and Cuba
Did you realize that we’re already more-or-less in a regime-change war with Cuba? I didn’t until recently, and I’m pretty sure a lot of Americans still don’t. (By contrast, the Cubans all know about it.)
Nine days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy, requiring immediate response to protect American citizens and interests”. The order imposed tariffs on “any country that directly or indirectly provides oil to Cuba”.
Venezuela had been supplying most of Cuba’s oil, until the Trump regime attacked. While the US has not formally announced a blockade of the island, on January 11 of this year, Trump posted:
THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.
Make a deal about what? Before it’s too late for what? But no list of demands accompanies Trump’s threats. The NYT reports:
Cuban tankers have hardly left the island’s shores for months. Oil-rich allies have halted shipments or declined to come to the rescue. The U.S. military has seized ships that have supported Cuba. And in recent days, vessels roaming the Caribbean Sea in search of fuel for Cuba have come up empty or been intercepted by the U.S. authorities. …
“Among us longtime Cuba watchers, we’ve always resisted people using the word blockade,” said Fulton Armstrong, the former lead Latin America analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, who has been studying Cuba since 1984. “But it is indeed a blockade.”
“There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” US President Donald Trump told reporters Monday, adding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading efforts to negotiate with top Cuban officials. Rubio, who is Cuban American and a longtime opponent of the Cuban government, has previously said the only thing he intends to discuss with the island’s communist leadership is when they would relinquish power.
“It is an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects, through which the United States seeks to exert coercion on the sovereign state of Cuba and compel other sovereign third States to alter their lawful commercial relations, under threat of punitive trade measures,” they said. … “There is no right under international law to impose economic penalties on third States for engaging in lawful trade with another sovereign country.”
And it’s having devastating effects on the people of Cuba: Not only is there little-to-no imported food, there isn’t fuel to bring food into the cities from the countryside. When food arrives, there may not be electric power to keep it refrigerated. Recently, the crisis has been damaging the healthcare system:
The situation however has reached a new extreme, with authorities now saying that ambulances are struggling to find fuel to respond to emergencies. Persistent power outages have also further deteriorated hospitals.
Flights bringing in vital supplies, which the island nation has been relying on since the blockade, have now stopped, as Havana is no longer capable of refuelling airplanes for their outbound flights from Cuban airports.
We’re doing that. And why, exactly?
and Gaza
Wielding a golden gavel, Trump presided over the first meeting of his Board of Peace, which, among other vague ambitions, is supposed to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. The meeting was held in the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (Like the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace’s name is in the legislation that established it. Legally, Trump has no power to change it, but his name is on the facade anyway.)
Trump pledged $10 billion in contributions from the US. Other BoP members have pledged $7 billion. (By contrast, the US is about $4.5 billion behind in its commitments to the United Nations.) You might wonder where this money will come from. Congress has not yet appropriated anything. But does that matter any more?
The Board, all of whom have been chosen by Trump, includes no Palestinian representative, but does include First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner, whose vision for Gaza is of high-rise towers and beaches full of tourists — basically pre-civil-war Beirut.
As I’ve pointed out before, the BoP’s charter gives all power to its chairman, who is defined in the charter to be “Donald J. Trump”. (Not the President of the United States, but Trump personally.) Like a king, he serves in perpetuity and names his own successor. If the taxpayers are going to contribute $10 billion to the BoP, we might as well just put the money directly into Trump’s pocket.
The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian. The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops.
During the Gaza War, death toll estimates were given by local Palestinian authorities who were answerable to the Hamas government. For this reason, many observers — especially those sympathetic to Israel — tended to discount them. Surely the carnage wasn’t as bad as the Palestinian numbers made it look.
In fact, it now appears to have been worse. The Lancet has raised its estimate of the death toll of the first 16 months of the two-year Gaza war: from 49,000 to 75,000. That total includes 22,800 children under 18.
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If you haven’t seen Illinois Governor Pritzker’s state-of-the-state speech, you should look it up. (The opening quote comes from it.) It is part political speech, but part sermon on the values that make America what it should be.
DHS is wildly unpopular, partly because it keeps telling the public ridiculous lies that are easily disproven by video. When DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin left the job, then, many hoped for a change in the department’s policy regarding the Truth. Not so fast. New spokesperson Lauren Bis might be worse.
Friday, students at a Philadelphia-area high school staged a walkout to protest against ICE. According to witnesses, a man in a brown jacket lunged towards students and put one girl in a chokehold. (There’s a picture of that.) Other students started hitting the man, as you well might when an adult attacks one of your classmates. Police arrived.
Marcy Wheeler sums up Marco Rubio’s message to European representatives to the Munich Security Conference like this: “We want to be friends, if you want to be as racist as we are.”
So Trump announced that he’s sending a hospital ship to Greenland “to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!”. No one seems to know what he’s talking about. Both of the Navy’s hospital ships (including the one he posted a picture of) are moored in Mobile.
In Greenland, as in Denmark, access to healthcare is free. There are five regional hospitals across the vast Arctic island, with the Nuuk hospital serving patients from all over the territory.
The Danish defense minister responded: “The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialised treatment, they receive it in Denmark. So it’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland.”
The Chinese Zodiac has 12 animals and five elements, so the pattern repeats every 60 years. This is a Fire year, and the Horse represents speed and energy, two fiery qualities. So a Fire Horse year is essentially “double fire“. Expect sparks to fly this year.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
– commonly attributed to George Orwell
What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist. If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.
– Rabbi Diane Tracht, explaining why she joined the hundreds of faith leaders who came to Minneapolis this week
Trump’s assault on American democracy. For the second week in a row, I’m ignoring all the other ongoing stories. I’ll get back to them as soon as the regime stops murdering people in the streets.
The Contrarian makes a list of reforms Senate Democrats might demand in exchange for passing DHS funding:
In the short run, Democrats can advance a batch of proposals, for example, to cut off funds to the Minneapolis deployment absent a request from the governor; limit CBP operations to the border (as used to be the case); require body cameras, immediate suspension of any agent after firing his/her weapon, and full cooperation with local and state authorities; eliminate masks; install an Inspector General to review all DHS actions and recommend policy and personnel changes; and ban arrests without a judicial warrant.
DOC quickly identified 68 cases in which individuals were lawfully transferred from Minnesota Department of Corrections custody directly to ICE, only for DHS officials to falsely claim these same individuals were “arrested” by waves of federal agents deployed into Minnesota communities.
This week European leaders proved something children have known for centuries: Fundamentally, bullies are cowards. If you give them what they want, they’ll demand more. But if you convince them you’re going to stand up for yourself, they’ll back down.
So of course, he asked for more: Denmark should give him Greenland, as if we were living in the age of absolute monarchs, and the rights and desires of 50,000 Greenlanders didn’t matter. He said ominous things about acquiring Greenland the easy way or the hard way. Stephen Miller, the ventriloquist who frequently speaks through Trump’s mouth, used his own lips to say that no one would fight us for Greenland.
But it turned out that someone would. Several of our (and Denmark’s) NATO allies sent troops to Greenland as an “exercise”. Not enough troops to repel a US invasion, but enough to possibly make American generals balk at killing allies they are treaty-bound to defend.
So Trump backed down on physical threats and instead threatened to raise tariffs again, breaking the agreement he had just made last summer. A list of European countries would face additional 10% tariffs, rising to 25% if they didn’t turn over Greenland.
So Trump backed down, claiming that he had worked out a “framework of a future deal” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. The framework appears to be what Denmark was offering all along: expanded NATO military bases in Greenland and negotiations about mining rights.
But there is a long-term cost, as Fahreed Zakaria observes in “How Not to Lead“:
When I asked a senior European leader whether there was relief that Trump had stepped back from the threat of military action, he said yes. “But we’ve now seen a pattern in his dealings with us,” the leader said. “He treats us with contempt. And even if this crisis gets resolved, we will remember.”
The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of the Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.
This framing goes back at least to J. D. Vance’s speech about “heritage Americans” at the Claremont Institute in July. But lately it is in virtually every department of Trump’s government.
At a press briefing January 8, the day after the murder of Renee Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spoke from a podium sporting the slogan: “One of ours, all of yours.” Regime critics widely interpreted this as a reference to the Nazi policy of collective retribution, as when the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed and all its adult males killed after the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich.
This attribution appears to be inaccurate, in that no one can find a record of the Nazis (in German, Czech, or any other language) using that slogan. But we’re left with the question: What was Noem trying to communicate here? Who is “us” and who is “you”? What are we — I assume I am one of “yours” rather than “ours” — being threatened with? Brendan Beebe examined the controversy in detail (and fairly, I would claim).
In the context of the Minneapolis incident, “ours” clearly referred to federal agents (and by extension, their political leadership), while “yours” implicitly meant the protesters, community watchdogs, and perhaps local authorities challenging federal actions. The slogan thus served to dehumanize and threaten the latter group – effectively saying their lives and rights are forfeit if they dare challenge federal power.
Beebe noted that Noem’s defenders refused to address the question of precisely what she meant.
Notably, few Republican politicians publicly commented on the slogan itself – neither repudiating nor explicitly endorsing it. Their responses mostly mirrored the administration’s talking points: defend the ICE agent, condemn “domestic terrorists” (a term Noem used for the driver and by extension the protesters[17]), and support sending federal reinforcements to Minnesota. By sidestepping the explicit phrase, allies of Noem effectively normalized it through lack of acknowledgement.
The same question could be asked across the board. If the people who made the “Which way American man?” post for the DHS Instagram page or the “Which way, Greenland man?” post for the White House X page weren’t trying to echo the classic white supremacist (and antisemitic) book “Which Way Western Man?” — then what were they trying to do?
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The Epstein files still have not been released. Nor is there any coherent explanation of the delay. When DOJ tries to indict someone Trump wants revenge on, like Jack Smith or Letitia James, they’re fond of saying “No one is above the law.”
But Trump is. When a law applies to Trump or his lackeys, it means nothing.
So J. D. Vance excused Trump’s bad economy by blaming it on Biden, saying “You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight.” When I first heard that quote, I thought it must be fake. Surely the Vice President of the United States is not that stupid, because nobody is. If you compare something to the Titanic, it must be sinking. Everybody must know that.
J. D. Vance doesn’t. He really said it.
Just to make sure he wasn’t taken out of context, I watched a 12-minute clip of the speech he gave Thursday to an audience of manufacturing workers. (He says it at about the 9:30 mark.) As is always the case, fact-checkers must be having a field day with this speech: For example, he lumps the statistical averages in such a way that the impact of COVID falls mainly on Biden, not on Trump, who played a major role in letting the virus get out of control. (Two can play the let’s-ignore-COVID game. When Trump handed the economy to Biden, the unemployment rate was 6.4%. When Biden gave it back, unemployment was 4.0%. Now it’s 4.4%.)
What’s makes the metaphor even worse is that it wasn’t some off-the-cuff screw-up in response to a difficult question. The Titanic metaphor was part of Vance’s prepared remarks. As one commenter put it: “His speech-writer must hate him.”
Trump created the Board of Peace to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. Its charter makes interesting reading.
The Board is very much a top-down organization, as the charter gives all power to the Chairman. The Chairman invites members to join and can expel them at any time. He appoints the executive board. Decisions are made by majority vote “subject to the approval of the Chairman”. Decisions of the executive board are “subject to veto by the Chairman at any time thereafter”. There is no procedure for overturning the Chairman’s veto. The Chairman is the “final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application of this Charter”. There is no provision for removing the Chairman, or a stated time when his term ends.
So who is this chairman? Who else?
Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural Chairman of the Board of Peace
Donald J. Trump, personally, by name, is the Chairman. He doesn’t hold office by being President of the United States. He holds office because he’s Donald J. Trump and his name is written into the charter. When his term as president ends, or even if he gets removed by impeachment, he continues as Chairman of the Board of Peace.
So let’s be clear: Any contribution to the Board of Peace is simply a bribe to Trump. He can do anything he wants with it, for as long as he lives. And like a medieval king, he names his own successor.
and let’s close with something threatening
BBC Wildlife posted its 2026 award-winning photos. The overall winner was this close-up of a crocodile. I hope to never see anything like this in real life.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Typically, I use “assault” metaphorically. But in Minneapolis the assault has become literal.
Climate change. The EPA will report only on the cost to industry of implementing new standards, not on the money or lives saved.
War. Venezuela already seems like ancient history. Now Trump is starting a trade war with Europe in order to claim Greenland.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about Minneapolis
In a sane world, the administration would look at videos of the Renee Good shooting — which clearly show Jonathan Ross killing her for no good reason — and say, “We’ve got to tone this down.” But of course, we haven’t been living in a sane world for nearly a year now. So ICE surged additional troops into Minneapolis in an attempt to bring the city to heel. There are now something like 3000 federal agents in Minneapolis, which Mayor Frey says is about five times the size of the municipal police force. More and more, the stories that come out of the city sound like reports of a military occupation rather than law enforcement.
NPR has witnessed multiple instances where people with legal status or U.S. citizenship have been questioned about their immigration status. Everyone NPR witnessed in the last week were people of color. We have also witnessed people being picked up by immigration agents off the streets.In one neighborhood, immigration officers crashed into a car of a U.S. citizen who refused to pull over. ICE officers ultimately let him go after running his license plate. In the same area, immigration agents dragged a woman out of her car. She said she was on her way to the doctor when she encountered the agents. The agents says she did not follow the commands to move. We witnessed how demonstrators blocked the federal agents from leaving the area and banged on their vehicles. In return, officers sprayed the large group with pepper spray and tear gas and left after throwing flash-bangs.
Meanwhile, DOJ reports that it is not investigating Ross, but is investigating the governor of Minnesota and the Mayor of Minneapolis for “actively encouraging” protesters “to go out on the street and impede ICE.” Previously, we learned that DOJ is investigating Good’s widow, prompting six career prosecutors to resign. Governor Walz summed up:
The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.
Mainstream media is not paying nearly enough attention to the role gender plays in these confrontations. ICE agents, with their masks and body armor and extreme weapons, are cosplaying hypermasculinity. They are trying to dominate and intimidate, and they get angry when people (especially women) fail to be impressed. Andi Zeisler writes in Salon:
It’s fair to assume, for instance, that Ross was looking to intimidate both Renee Good and her wife (who was outside the car, directing Renee in making a three-point turn). Neither woman gives him that satisfaction: Renee speaks to him calmly and clearly; she’s not gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles but has one hand on it. Rebecca more closely matches Ross’ energy. He has a phone in his hand; she has one in hers. She’s not scared of Ross either, instead poking fun at his obvious desire to intimidate.
Hence Ross walks in front of Good’s SUV and reaches for his gun long before she starts to roll forward. I think he was planning to point the gun in Good’s face and see if that finally scared her into submission. Her driving away was thwarting that plan. He felt a flash of rage and his gun was already drawn, so he shot.
As the various justifications for Ross’ actions dissolve under scrutiny, ICE supporters are falling back on blaming the victim for antagonizing Ross. Fox News columnist David Marcus made Good the exemplar of a class of uppity women:
According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%. … The video of Good and her partnerheckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many.
We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee. Let’s be clear, this is happening because we let it happen.
We? Are American men failing to keep their women sufficiently intimidated? It’s true, I guess. In 40 years of marriage, I don’t think I ever saw my wife cringe in fear of me.
And here is my warning: If we do not enforce the law, if we simply allow these cosplaying would-be revolutionaries to do whatever they want, including hitting cops with cars, Renee Good will not be the last to needlessly die. This madness needs to end, and it needs to end right now.
Let’s be clear: The “madness” Marcus refers to isn’t ICE agents killing people for no reason beyond offended pride. No, he insists that will continue until women learn their lesson. This agent agrees, asking a woman who is legally following his vehicle: “Have you not learned from the last couple of days?”
I’ve said, from March, if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decline, there’s going to be bloodshed. I’ve seen this movie before. And unfortunately, I was right. And there’s been a lot of bloodshed. … We need to let [the investigation] play out. But while we’re doing that, we’ve got to stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. And it’s just going to infuriate people more, which means there’s going to be more incidents like this because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, now has tripled down and doubled down.
So I get that it upsets Homan to hear his people called murderers. But I have a suggestion for that: Get them to stop murdering people.
I know that’s radical, but think about it: What if Jonathan Ross had never drawn his gun? What bad thing was he preventing by doing that? What if he hadn’t stood in front of her vehicle to begin with?
The “Great HealthCare Plan” Trump has been promising for a decade came out. It’s a title page and one page of explanation. Nothing in it is going to make a significant different in your life.
No vaccine is 100% effective, but the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine comes close. Two doses, usually given around age 1 and then again around age 4, are 97% effective at preventing measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for MMR in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.
Another story that is all but getting lost in the avalanche of news: Venezuelan oil has started coming under US control. We sold the first batch for $500 million, and put a bunch of the money in a Qatari bank. You might think Congress would need to be involved in deals this large, what with the constitutional power-of-the-purse and all. But no, of course not.
I worry that Democrats are repeating a mistake. Lately I’ve once again been seeing the slogan “Abolish ICE”, which reminds me a lot of “Defund the Police”.
I supported the strategy behind “Defund the Police” — namely, to empower more appropriate agencies with more appropriate specialists to respond to 911 calls that don’t involve violence. Instead of men and women with guns, we might send social workers, mental health workers, and so on, as the situation warranted. This would have the effect of lowering funding for the armed police.
It was a good idea and still is. But politically, the slogan was a disaster, because it allowed Republicans to smear Democrats as wanting to let criminals run wild, which was never the idea.
Same thing here. If we start demanding that Democratic candidates pledge to abolish ICE, that will come back to haunt us in general elections. Republicans will say that Democrats want to open our borders and let people in without any vetting or process. (They already say that.)
Under Trump, ICE has become a monster that needs to be slain. The outrageous budget it got in the Big Beautiful Bill needs to be scaled back. The thuggish agents it has recruited need to be let go. Possibly it should be cut up into smaller agencies with more targeted tasks. But border protection is a legitimate mission that some agency needs to take on.
I’m not sure how to put that into a slogan. But “Abolish ICE” isn’t it. When your opponents decide to lie about you, they shouldn’t be able to point to your own slogan for support.
The week’s most pathetic story was Donald Trump accepting María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize medal.
Trump has long campaigned to get a Nobel Peace Prize, which President Obama won in 2009. He said many times this year that he deserved the medal for (in his fantasy world) ending eight wars.
Trump holds leverage over Machado. Her opposition party won the 2024 election in Venezuela, but Nicolás Maduro remained in office anyway until US troops kidnapped Maduro three weeks ago. Rather than try to install Machado or her party’s winning candidate Edmundo González in the presidency, or even push for swift elections that her party might win again, Trump has backed Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez. He said of Machado:
I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.
Others have speculated that Trump was still miffed at Machado for winning the Peace Prize he had convinced himself he deserved. So Thursday, Machado attempted to appease Trump’s jealousy by presenting him with her Nobel medal. It probably won’t work, but it was worth a try.
Trump is president and a billionaire and the godlike idol of millions of MAGA sheep, replacing Jesus in the hearts of many who call themselves “Christians”. For almost anyone else, that would be enough. And yet his own heart is such a yawning abyss that he must have Machado’s Nobel medal so that he can pretend he deserves it.
As I said in the December article: Trump used to make me mad, but he doesn’t any more. He just seems pathetic.
The Internet has been ruthless, spreading manufactured images of Trump accepting other awards he never earned, like the TriWizard Cup.
Josh Marshall explains the wider effects of firing the government’s inspectors general and corrupting the Justice Department: It isn’t just that corrupt government actors don’t get prosecuted, but that they can escape public notice entirely.
There’s a natural trajectory: reporting builds a record, and then the record is the basis of an investigation. Then the progress of the investigation becomes the focus of more reporting and public disclosure. If you can decapitate the investigatory agencies, the whole ecosystem of investigation and accountability becomes like a car that can’t ever get out of second gear. You assume that axing the investigators just means no one will be criminally accountable. Actually it means much more than that: the whole system of public accountability and disclosure breaks down.
Also Josh Marshall: The corruption of the Supreme Court makes it much harder for a Democratic Project 2029 to outline the reforms necessary to safeguard democracy against the next would-be autocrat, because there’s no predicting what new pseudo-constitutional doctrines the Court will invent to strike reforms down. That’s why reforming the Court needs to be front-and-center in any set of reforms. Democratic planners have been slow to realize this, and it’s throwing a monkey-wrench into any kind of planning process.
The point is that the corruption of the Supreme Court is actually beginning to slow, disincentivize, detour policy work. It could not be more critical that people across the Democratic world — policy, law, electoral politics — have this realization. There’s no reason to accept a situation in which democratic self-government is only allowed now for Republicans.
and let’s close with something spooky
We all realize that we share certain features with other members of our families, but not to this extent. Canadian artist Ulric Collette has a project called “Genetic Portraits“, where he presents two relatives as left/right halves of a single face. Mother/son, sister/brother, and so on. The results are striking testimony to the heritability of facial features. This one is a grandmother/granddaughter pair.
They’re telling you to believe them and not your eyes. … So the message from this administration is clear: only they determine the truth, and when their forces come to your city, obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. A woman got in ICE’s way, so they killed her. Then the top people in the regime smeared her. See the featured post.
War. With the regime so enthused by its Mission-Accomplished moment in Venezuela, we all wait to see where they’ll strike next: Cuba, Colombia, Greenland?
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about ICE killing Renee Good
“The hateful rhetoric has caused a lot of this violence,” Homan said in a Sunday interview on “Fox News Sunday” with host Jacqui Heinrich. “So I said way back in March if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decrease, there will be bloodshed, and, unfortunately, I was right, and it’s not over. There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.”
Homan added that “I don’t want to see anybody die,” asking Minnesota leaders to “work with us” despite allegations from Frey and Walz that federal officials have not collaborated with them in investigating the incident.
If everyone would just do what he tells them, nobody would have to die. Lots of thugs say things like that.
The day after Renee Good’s death, ICE agents shot two people in Portland, Oregon. ICE claims they had “ties” to the Tren de Aragua criminal group, whatever that means.
DHS said the duo “weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol” and the agent fired at them in self-defense.
That seems to be what ICE says whenever they shoot somebody in a car. Maybe sometimes it’s true, but there have definitely been times where evidence shows they lied. There is no independent video of the Portland incident, but two eye-witnesses fail to support the ICE narrative.
One witness in the Portland shooting said he heard five gunshots fired in the parking lot of a Southeast Portland medical office after federal officers boxed in a Toyota truck that had pulled into the lot Thursday afternoon.
The man had been seeking care at the office near Adventist Health hospital when he said he saw the officers follow the truck into the lot at 10201 S.E. Main St. and approach it.
One officer pounded on the truck’s window and the driver appeared scared, the man said. The driver then backed up and moved forward, striking a car behind him at least twice, before turning and speeding off, he said.
About five shots rang out from the contingent of officers as the truck raced away, he said.
Back in October, Pro Publica wrote about the dangers of rapidly expanding ICE’s size and mission while simultaneously scrapping all independent oversight.
We’re still waiting for things to shake out on the ground. So far, the US isn’t occupying Venezuela, but Trump is acting as if he had the country completely pacified. Maduro is in US custody and facing trial, but his VP is now in charge and the rest of Maduro’s government remains in place. How cooperative they will be is still not clear.
If the point was to seize Venezuela’s oil, the Trump regime doesn’t seem to have thought it out very well. The country’s oil infrastructure is in bad shape, and US oil companies haven’t expressed much interest in fixing it. The CEO of ExxonMobil called the Venezuelan oil industry “uninvestable”.
Meanwhile, the tactical success of the Maduro operation has emboldened the regime. Trump has threatened to cut off the supply of oil Cuba has been getting from Venezuela, warning them to “make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE”. As usual, Trump’s threats contain no specific demands, so it’s not clear what Cuba is supposed to do.
Once again, it’s not clear what Trump specifically wants — and in particular, what he wants that he can’t get from Greenland as a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Trump claims to be worried about Russia or China taking over Greenland, but it’s not clear why we can’t defend as part of NATO.
The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There’s no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you’re asking of a military operation. Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.
The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group raised its toll to 192, while HRANA, a rights group based in Washington, said it had confirmed the deaths of nearly 500 protesters and almost 50 security personnel.
and you also might be interested in …
Anybody who stands in Trump’s way is going to have the Justice Department go after them sooner or later. Now it appears to be the turn of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
In a highly unusual move, Powell disclosed that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) served the agency with subpoenas and threatened a criminal indictment over testimony he gave to a Senate committee about renovations to Federal Reserve buildings.
Calling the probe “unprecedented”, Powell said he believed it was opened due to Donald Trump’s anger over the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates despite repeated public pressure from the president.
So Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has its own chatbot, Grok, which offers this amazing free-market feature: If you give it a picture of a person and ask it to give you an image of the same person naked, it will. Wired reports:
Paid tools that “strip” clothes from photos have been available on the darker corners of the internet for years. Elon Musk’s X is now removing barriers to entry—and making the results public.
So you might publicly or privately undress a celebrity like Taylor Swift, your colleague at work, your colleague’s 13-year-old daughter, or anybody else.
Grok’s website and app, which are are separate from X, include sophisticated video generation that is not available on X and is being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X. It may also have been used to create sexualized videos of apparent minors.
Is that a problem? Well, Elon’s people came up with this solution: They took the image-generating engine out of Grok’s free version. So if you want sexualized images of your pretty niece, you’ll have to upgrade to the paid subscription.
If you think this is an occasion for regulation, two governments agree with you: Malaysia and Indonesia, which aren’t the countries we usually count on to lead the world. Why hasn’t Europe acted? Well, maybe because X is an American company, and the Trump regime has threatened reprisals against attempts to regulate the US tech lords.
Financial Times found an interesting way to strike back without breaking its own policies against pornography: It used Grok to produce clown-face images of X executives.
I’m waiting for some curmudgeon to do this research: Prove that computer-generated deepfakes are hurting the economy by causing young men to lose their visual imaginations. That’ll get some action. “In my day, if you wanted to picture your teacher naked, you had to work at it.”
“I find myself in the middle of some sort of rom-com plot,” he says. “For me to be able to see my doctor to tend to my autoimmune disease, I had to marry my best friend — it’s like some weird twisted plot of Will and Grace.”
and let’s close with something too, too cute
After a week like this one, we can all use some baby animals.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. He’s trying to move CNN into the hands of an oligarch ally, and is maneuvering us towards war with Venezuela without consulting Congress.
Climate change. Based on the theory that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, the administration is planning to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, due to its “climate alarmism”.
Gaza and Ukraine. I didn’t run across anything new this week. Probably I was too busy with Christmas stuff.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was still talking about the Epstein files
Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act had set for the Justice Department to release all of its files about Jeffrey Epstein, with a few minor exceptions, mostly related to protecting the identities of the young women who were Epstein’s victims.
But the EFTA is just a law, one passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President Trump himself. Why should the Justice Department consider itself bound to obey? So of course, DoJ waited until the final day to release anything at all. When it did, the release was not complete, and appeared to be much more heavily redacted than mere victim-protection could account for. (One 119-page document is entirely redacted. One commenter characterized the release as a whole as “more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve”.)
on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”
By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.
Some of the pictures released did include former President Bill Clinton, an apparent effort to support Trump’s gaslighting that the Epstein affair was a Democratic scandal, not a Trump scandal. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that whattaboutism won’t get him out of this jam. “Democrats did it too” or even “Democrats did worse” isn’t a valid excuse. If Democrats are also guilty, expose them too.
The two sponsors of the EFTA, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, both denounced the partial release, which fails to identify anyone who victimized the girls other than Epstein, who is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in prison for sex trafficking (after apparently trafficking the girls to no one, if what has been released is the whole story).
What can Congress do to force DoJ to obey the law? Not much, apparently. It could find Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, but her own department would then be responsible for prosecuting her, which it would not do. Congress could impeach her, if it had the will to do so (which is doubtful). But Bondi could make the impeachment moot by resigning. Again, whatever Trump is hiding would stay hidden.
The only penalty Trump can be forced to pay is political, which they apparently believe they can mitigate by continuing to dribble out files little by little.
and war with Venezuela
Step-by-step, we are marching into a war with Venezuela. First we blew up their fishing boats, which may or may not have been smuggling cocaine and may or may not have been headed towards the US.
On December 10, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. And then Tuesday, Trump announced an oil blockade of Venezuela. He did it in a Truth Social post that was barely coherent, making references to “the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”.
It’s tempting to sanewash this by looking for some plausible reference — maybe the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. But nations all over the world (Saudi Arabia, for example) have nationalized their oil industries without getting attacked. And why oil previously claimed by an oil company should be “ours” is a bit of a stretch.
But while I think justifications like that should be put to administration spokespeople, I’m not going to assume Trump’s post makes sense at all until some official source explains it.
Here’s something more people should be saying: The recent moves make it clear that the attacks on boats were never about drugs, they were about regime change. And changing the Maduro regime is about getting control of Venezuela’s oil. Without the oil, Maduro could be five times as tyrannical and nobody in the Trump administration would care.
and the Bondi Beach shooting
On December 14, a father and son opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. 15 people were killed and 40 injured. The father was killed by police and the son badly wounded. No official statement of motive has surfaced, but antisemitism seems like an obvious guess.
I find two things noteworthy here: First, antisemitism really is rising around the world. I know some people falsely claim that any criticism of the current Israeli government is antisemitism, but you can brush off that canard and still recognize that antisemitism is real.
I’ll repeat what I’ve often said before: You can think whatever you want about Netanyahu or Hamas, but that’s no excuse to bring the war here. American Jews and American Muslims or Arabs are not the problem, and violence against them will not solve anything or prove anything. Ditto for Australians.
Second: Pro-gun people have been crowing about how Australia’s more rigorous gun restrictions didn’t stop this mass shooting. But they’re not thinking this through. The shooters used a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun, rather than semi-automatic weapons, because that’s what they could get their hands on in Australia. Because of that restriction, they only got off 83 shots in something like ten minutes. With American AR-15s, they could have unleashed hundreds of rounds and killed many more people. The 2017 Las Vegas shooter, by himself, fired over a thousand rounds and killed 60.
These kinds of restrictions make a difference, as do limits on the sizes of gun magazines. Shooters are most often stopped when they have to reload. The more bullets they have available without reloading, the longer it will take to stop them.
and Trump’s sad sick week
The Rob Reiner post, the strange plaques Trumpifying past presidents, the self-serving national address, and then the Trump-Kennedy Center. All in three days. The featured post covers these incidents, emphasizing how Trump’s attempts to aggrandize himself just make him smaller.
Vance’s conversion to Trumpism has been “sort of political”
OMB head Russell Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot”.
The destruction of the White House’s East Wing is just the beginning. “I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
There is no evidence to support Trump’s claims about Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
The component parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are popular. “That will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
Blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn’t about drugs, it’s about pressuring the Maduro government in Venezuela.
Trump’s attacks on the high seas don’t needs congressional approval, but an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would.
Trump believes Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the provinces he has claimed so far.
If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll be the Republican nominee.
Trump hasn’t been asleep in cabinet meetings. He’s just resting his eyes.
He insults female reporters because “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
Trump won’t run for a third term.
Trump doesn’t wake up thinking about revenge against enemies like James Comey, “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
Amazingly, Trump has not denounced her.
and pro-Trump media consolidation
Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often cited as a model for Trump’s authoritarian takeover. A key piece of Orbán’s strategy was to make sure the major media outlets wound up in friendly hands, creating a state media unofficially.
Trump has been doing the same thing, partly by acquisition, partly by coopting the oligarchs who already own media properties. And so:
The US’s second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns The Washington Post, and blocked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
The US’s third-richest man (Mark Zuckerberg) owns Meta, which controls Facebook.
The fourth-richest (Larry Ellison) controls Skydance, which owns Paramount, which owns CBS. His hand-picked news baron is Bari Weiss. She just spiked a 60 Minutes episode exposing the Trump gulag in El Salvador. Ellison also has wound up controlling the US version of TikTok.
Now Ellison’s empire is bidding against Netflix for Warner/Discovery, which controls CNN, among other notable media properties. Trump is in a position to influence how this goes: He could hint that DoJ would sue to stop a Netflix acquisition as a violation of antitrust laws, but let the Paramount bid go through.
and you also might be interested in …
To no one’s surprise, Republicans in Congress still have no solution to the ObamaCare insurance premiums that are set to skyrocket. The House did pass a bill roughly along the lines I told you about in November: You can lower your premiums by buying the kind of junk insurance that the Affordable Care Act made illegal. You won’t be insured if anything really bad happens to you or your family, but you can tell yourself you have insurance. And even that won’t get through the Senate.
North Carolina’s legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. That’s how a state that has had Democratic governors since 2017 and that Trump carried by a mere 3% in 2024 has substantial and rock-solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature: 30-20 in the Senate and 71-49 in the House.
It’s a great frustration to NC Republicans that you can’t gerrymander a statewide office like the governorship. So they’ve done the next best thing: Taken away nearly all the power of the governor and moved it to the legislature.
In essence, they have disempowered their own voters: The voters can control which party gets the governorship, but control of the legislature is baked into the maps.
The Democratic Party is about to go through its usual pattern in the Texas Senate race:
A firebrand progressive (Jasmine Crockett, who I love to watch on TV news shows) will excite the base and win the primary.
The national party will decide she can’t win and will refuse to put any resources into the race.
She’ll lose.
The finger-pointing will start: Was the problem that she’s too liberal or that the national party sabotaged her?
I’m not taking a side here, I’m just pointing to the pattern. Until the Party goes all-in on one of these races, we won’t know whose intuition is right.
Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.
The Weekly Sift 