As usual, there is so much bad news out there that I don’t know where to begin. Everything is awful, but we have to go on with our lives amid the madness. Honestly, I think Trump is insane. His dementia is progressing. He is obsessed with punishing anyone in or out of the government who ever criticized him or offended him in any way. It’s really hard to believe this is happening in America. I have no idea what will happen next, but it does seem that his erratic behavior is beginning to get to some powerful people. It also looks like there is some trouble in paradise for Elon Musk. That will be the focus of most of this post.
Anyway, I’m just going to share some stories that hit home with me today, and then try to have a normal weekend while I still can.
Yesterday, we learned what led to the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa.
For years, actor Gene Hackman’s doting wife Betsy Arakawa would do whatever she could to help keep him healthy, whether it meant wearing a mask everywhere she went or encouraging him to stay fit by riding his bike or doing yoga on Zoom.
In late February, the couple was found dead in their New Mexico home, a heartrending end to the life they shared. Arakawa, 65, died of hantavirus and days later, Hackman, 95, died of heart disease, the New Mexico medical investigator’s office revealed Friday.
Authorities, working to lay out a timeline of what happened, said Hackman had Alzheimer’s disease and may have not realized he was alone in the days before he died.
Clues as to what the couple’s life looked like before their tragic deaths could be gleaned from their last interactions with loved ones. Close and longtime friends of the couple say they seemed to be in good health at their most recent encounter.
“Last time we saw them, they were alive and well,” Daniel Lenihan told CNN’s Erin Burnett last week. Barbara, Lenihan’s wife, said she had last seen Arakawa a few weeks ago at a home decor shop the two had opened together in Santa Fe….
Using evidence gathered from their home, authorities pieced together what they now believe happened, answering many of the questions behind what began as a mystery.
What probably happened:
Arakawa’s last known interactions were on February 11. She had a short email exchange with her massage therapist that morning and later visited a Sprouts Farmers Market, CVS pharmacy and a dog food store before returning to her gated community at around 5:15 p.m., Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Friday. After that, there was no other known activity or outgoing communication from her, the sheriff said.
“Numerous emails were unopened on her computer on February 11,” Mendoza said.
Arakawa died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare disease that results from infection through contact with rodents, according to Dr. Heather Jarrell, chief medical examiner for the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator. Pills found scattered on the bathroom floor near Arakawa’s body were prescription thyroid medication and not related to her death, Jarrell said. Zinna, one of the animal-loving couple’s dogs, was found dead in a crate in the bathroom near her body.
“Based on the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that Ms. Arakawa passed away first,” Jarrell said.
What Hackman’s days looked like after his wife of more than 30 years left his side has yet to be fully pieced together, but the end came in a matter of days.
Hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease took the acting legend’s life, likely on February 18 when his pacemaker last recorded his heartbeat, according to Jarrell. The device recorded Hackman was experiencing atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm.
His body was discovered on the ground near the kitchen, with a walking cane and sunglasses next to him, on February 26.
Authorities said he was “in a very poor state of health.” Hackman had “advanced” Alzheimer’s disease, which was “a significant contributory factor” in his death, and it was possible the actor was “not aware” his wife had died several days earlier, Jarrell said.
Was Arakawa really his only caregiver? That must have been really difficult. Did these two have close family members? If that was my Dad, I would have been checking in every day. I don’t understand how it took so long for the bodies to be discovered.
Betsy Arakawa, pianist and wife of actor Gene Hackman, died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, New Mexico chief medical examiner Heather Jarrell said Friday at a news conference.
Arakawa, 65, and Hackman, 95, were found deadin their Santa Fe home last month.
Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is a rare illness spread by rodents that was first detected in humans in the United States about three decades ago. Here’s what to know….
Hantaviruses can develop into hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a lung disease that kills about 38 percent of people who develop respiratory symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms typically start to show between one and eight weeks after first contact with the virus.
The disease presents with flu-like symptoms, such as fever, muscle aches and a cough, Jarrell said. About half of patients experience headaches, dizziness, chills and abdominal problems such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain, according to the CDC.
As the disease progresses, it attacks capillaries in the lungs and can cause them to leak, damaging lung tissue, causing fluid buildup and severely affecting heart and lung function, according to the Mayo Clinic. Symptoms of this stage of the illness can include difficulty breathing and an irregular heart rate.
There is no specific treatment. Breathing support, including intubation, may help some patients….
Hantavirus disease is rare. There were 864 reported cases in the United States between 1993, when the CDC began tracking the illness, and 2022, the last available CDC data.
The states with the highest number of cases during that time were New Mexico (122), Colorado (119), Arizona (86) and California (78). The vast majority of cases originate west of the Mississippi River, according to the American Lung Association. In New Mexico, authorities have documented between one and seven cases in humans annually in recent years, state public health veterinarian Erin Phipps said Friday.
The disease is transmitted through rodent droppings, urine, or saliva. This whole episode is so sad. It kind of reminded me of what happened to William Holden–not that the deaths are similar, but Holden was a famous person who died alone in his home and wasn’t found for some time. He was very drunk and fell and hit his head on a table. His body was found by his building superintendent several days after his death. He was only 63.
After the Washington Post ran a front-page photo of President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sitting in front of the Oval Office fireplace on February 4, careful reader Thomas M. Sneeringer fired off a letter to the editor. “It appears the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office has been subjected to President Donald Trump’s Midas touch,” he wrote. Sneeringer observed that the spray of Swedish ivy that has adorned the mantle for more than half a century had vanished, replaced by what he speculated might be… golf trophies?
By Ellen Haasen
“I was instantly offended and instantly understood how it happened,” Sneeringer told me in an interview. “It was just so consistent about what we know about Trump’s taste.”
He knew that the missing ivy was no ordinary plant. Irish ambassador Thomas J. Kiernan had given it to President John F. Kennedy as a gift in 1961, and ever sinceit has been a consistent backdrop to some of the most famous White House meetings. Back in 1984, during the Reagan administration, Kurt Anderson wrote a tribute to “The Plant” in Time magazine:
“The Oval Office may be the headiest place in America. When the President, sitting in his desk chair at the southern tip of the Oval, stares dead ahead to the far wall, he sees The Plant. Anywhere else it would be a robust but unremarkable Swedish ivy. But there on the marble mantelpiece, day after consequential day, it basks in the power and the glory. No matter who has been inaugurated since 1961, The Plant has always stayed…The Swedish ivy, given its potential for leaks, is an Administration team player first and last.”
The hardy plant’s scalloped green leaves are center stage in photos of Ronald Reagan meeting Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush schmoozing with Bruce Willis and Nelson Mandela, and Jimmy Carter conferring with Yitzhak Rabin or having lunch with his wife Rosalynn. Nelson Shanks painted Bill Clinton leaning next to the ivy in his official presidential portrait.
The plant survived Trump’s first term, and it was even there to bear witness to that awkward meeting between Trump and Joe Biden after the 2024 election.
But no more.
So where is it now? The White House did not respond to several inquiries about the plant’s whereabouts or the gold statues that replaced it.
Like so many things that Trump and his DOGE team are heedlessly destroying, the Oval Office ivy has a constituency that may not be immediately obvious to those wielding the chainsaws. With its own Instagram account and generations of progeny that even Elon Musk can’t rival, the humble houseplant enjoys a cult following.
I hope he didn’t just throw the plant in the trash. Trump really does destroy everything he touches.
Could Trump be tiring of Elon Musk pretending to be president?
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
A bit more:
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves
But he was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
Jess Bidgood wrote a follow-up to the Haberman/Swan story, also at The New York Times:
Yesterday, President Trump did something he’s seemingly been loath to do in the first seven weeks of his new administration: He reined in Elon Musk.
My colleagues Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman have the details of the extraordinary cabinet meeting where everything unfolded, and you’re going to want to read every word….
What was clear was that some of the nation’s cabinet secretaries had hit their breaking point with Musk’s efforts to steamroll the federal government. And while Trump said he still supported Musk’s mission, he gave his secretaries something they wanted. As Jonathan and Maggie wrote:
“From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.”
The encounter stood as the first indication that Trump is willing to put some limits on the billionaire, even if those limits would do little more than bring the realities of Musk’s wide-ranging role more in line with how the administration’s lawyers have described it in court.
John Cielukowski, Fat Cat Electric
But the limits, if they hold, could raise bigger questions about the role Musk will play in the government going forward — especially if his history in the business world is any guide.
Ryan Mac, a colleague of mine who covers big tech, has reported on Musk for a long time. Today, I asked him if Musk had ever been content with an adviser-style role, one in which he doesn’t run the show.
Ryan’s answer was simple: No.
Musk has never liked being one voice among many, Ryan explained. Vivek Ramaswamy, who was initially going to be Musk’s partner in leading the Department of Government Efficiency, is long gone. Musk doesn’t sit on a lot of boards. And throughout his corporate history, whenever he hasn’t initially had control over a company, he’s tended to seek it.
At Tesla, where he was an early investor, he became the chief executive. Before he bought Twitter and renamed it X, he almost joined the company’s board. Then he decided to acquire the company outright, fire its board of directors and executives and become the chief executive. (He later named a new C.E.O. but retains considerable control over the company.)
Not all of Musk’s bids for control have worked. Decades ago, for example, he was forced out as the chief executive of PayPal. His effort to get control of OpenAI — a nonprofit he co-founded in 2015 — failed, as did his more recent bid to buy it.
Musk, it seems, prefers to be the bride, not the bridesmaid. The question now is whether he’ll stick to Trump’s directive that he simply advise — and whether he’ll be content if he does.
President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.
Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”
Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).
Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.
All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.
DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.
But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.
Federal workers, Democrats and even some Republican lawmakers want to believe that President Donald Trump clipped billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s wings Thursday.
But many of them aren’t counting on it.
Roller skating cat, by Martin Leman
After Trump privately told his Cabinet that they are in charge of their departments and Musk does not have the authority to fire government workers — a stunning shift in their alliance should it pan out — rank-and-file federal employees said they were skeptical in light of weeks of confusing and contradictory guidance. None of the more than a dozen federal workers POLITICO spoke to reported being told by their supervisors or labor unions that anything had changed directly due to Trump’s Cabinet meeting and subsequent comments.
“I don’t really expect them to necessarily start implementing what they say they will,” said David Casserly, an employee at the Department of Labor who said he was speaking in a personal capacity. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
The news of Thursday’s Cabinet meeting set off rampant speculation within the federal workforce about the true intent of Trump’s comments, which come amid growing legal and political scrutiny. A pair of lawsuits argue that the empowerment of Musk within the Trump administration is so far-reaching that, barring confirmation from the Senate, it exceeds constitutional limits.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture worker chalked up Trump’s comments to “damage control” after the president said in his joint address to Congress Tuesday that Musk is the “head” of the Department of Government Efficiency. That could prove to be a legal liability after Trump’s White House previously argued in court that Musk was not the leader of DOGE and had no authority to make distinct policy decisions himself.
Musk’s popularity is also sinking in polls, and Republicans in Congress have faced angry constituents at town halls who have complained about DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach to cutting the bureaucracy.
“It’s total bullshit. I don’t know what else to say,” quipped a second Labor Department employee. “I don’t trust a word of it,” said a third federal worker, who described it as Trump “attempting to insulate himself a bit from the court losses and the shift in public opinion, but I don’t think it will change anything.”
We can only hope.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m going to try to take my mind off all the horror stories for the rest of the day.
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I wonder if Trump is enjoying his reviews this morning? He shamed himself and our country yesterday in his oval office meeting with Ukraine’s president. But he is unable to feel shame, so I assume he’s happy with what he did. He is working to turn the U.S. into a pariah country, allied only with the worst of the worst–Russia, North Korea, Hungary, China, Saudi Arabia. We are now part of what George W. Bush called the “axis of evil.”
This “president” is subservient to a country–Russia–with an economy smaller than California or Texas.
On Inauguration Day, President Trump saluted Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky’s desire for peace and noted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to end his assault on its peaceful nation. We congratulated Trump for seeing through Putin’s diplomatic propaganda and economic bluffs. From peace negotiations to economic partnership, Trump has reverted to trusting the devil. Now as Putin is dangling business opportunities for U.S. firms in Russia as a part of his U.S. negotiations over Ukraine, Trump seems to be eager to make a deal. What CEOs know, but which Trump misses, is that Putin’s vague offer is much less than meets the eye.
No American companies are eager to return. Russia is an imploding economy, with decayed infrastructure and impossible supply chain gaps. It is a dangerous, unsafe, unreliable place to conduct business.
CEOs’ disdain for Putin’s Russia is anchored in their knowledge that Putin is an untrustworthy dictator who might well nationalize their businesses at a moment’s notice. Just this weekend, Putin has admitted his plans to step up the expropriation of private enterprises, including the seizure of many Western company assets.
Even before the war, doing business in Russia has always been a bad deal for U.S. companies, and few non-Russian companies ever made enough money there to be worth the risks. “A lot of people lost a whole lot of money over there in Russia. I think they’re going to be very reticent to want to go back. Once in a while, peace breaks out over there, but not very often,” oilman and Trump ally Harold Hamm recently told the Financial Times.
CEOs resistant to returning to Russia are merely rational capital allocators who perceive Russia to be a bad deal for shareholders. From a pure money perspective, CEOs would face a shareholder revolt if they tried to squander shareholder capital on risky investments in Russia. Even developing Russia’s much-ballyhooed, vast mineral and energy deposits requires significant capital investments which would take many years to realize a return on, and given the volatility of U.S.-Russia relations, no CEO would want to risk having those investments stranded if relations between the two governments were to deteriorate again.
The truth is that Putin is desperate for U.S. businesses to return to stave off his economic collapse. This is desperation masquerading as generosity, and nobody should be fooled. Russian is not remotely a major superpower. Its economy is smaller than that of Chile and produces few finished goods—industrial or consumer—sold into world markets. Like a vassal state in the ancient mercantile system, all Putin has to sell are raw materials in energy, metals, and agriculture. And now, with all these commodities available more cheaply and more safely around the world, Russia is economically irrelevant.
Sidney, 1993, by Frances Broomfield
But Trump is blinded by his admiration for Putin–and perhaps by his obligations as a Russian intelligence asset. He is both stupid and evil. And we are stuck with him for at least the next four years, unless Democrats win control of Congress in 2026 and then grow spines and impeach him.
The unprecedented scenes in the Oval Office dominated the front pages on Saturday, with the papers united in their horror. Adjectives including disastrous and vile were used to describe the meeting in which Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance openly berated the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Guardian leads with a quote from Donald Trump: “You are gambling with world war three”, characterising the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents as “disastrous”. In a separate sketch of the furious row, David Smith wrote that “Trump on Friday presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history.”
The Daily Mail called the meeting “A spectacle to horrify the world” and said that during the “shouting match in the Oval Office” a “raging Trump humiliates Zelensky on live TV”.
The Daily Mirror went for “Shock & War” as its front page headline, with subheads reading “Trump stuns the world with vile rant at Zelensky” and “Ukraine hero forced home without a deal.”
The Daily Telegraph summed up Trump and Vance’s approach to the Ukrainian president on its front page: “Make a deal or we’re out”. The paper said that during a “shouting match” at the White House, Trump had told Zelenskyy to “come back when you’re ready for peace”.
The Financial Times headlined with “Zelenskyy’s White House talks break down in blaze of acrimony”, saying the minerals deal proposed by Trump had been left unsigned.
Read more at the link.
Here at home, the reactions were unrelentingly negative.
Toward the end of his on-camera, Oval Office brawl with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, President Trump quipped that it was “great television.” He’s right about that. But the point of the meeting was supposed to be progress toward an honorable peace for Ukraine, and in the event the winner was Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Friday afternoon after the exchange, while booting the Ukrainian president from the White House. “He can come back when he is ready for Peace.” The two didn’t sign a planned agreement on minerals that would have at least given Ukraine some hope of future U.S. support.
The meeting between Messrs. Trump and Zelensky started out smoothly enough. “It’s a big commitment from the United States, and we appreciate working with you very much, and we will continue to do that,” Mr. Trump said of the mineral deal. Mr. Zelensky showed photos of Ukrainians mistreated as prisoners of war. “That’s tough stuff,” Mr. Trump said.
But then the meeting, in front of the world, descended into recriminations. The nose dive began with an odd interjection from Vice President JD Vance, who appeared to be defending Mr. Trump’s diplomacy, which Mr. Zelensky hadn’t challenged. Mr. Zelensky rehearsed the many peace agreements Mr. Putin has shredded and essentially asked Mr. Vance what would be different this time.
Mr. Vance unloaded on Mr. Zelensky—that he was “disrespectful,” low on manpower, and gives visitors to Ukraine a “propaganda” tour. President Trump appeared piqued by Mr. Zelensky’s suggestion that the outcome in Ukraine would matter to the U.S. “Your country is in big trouble. You’re not winning,” Mr. Trump said at one point.
Why did the Vice President try to provoke a public fight? Mr. Vance has been taking to his X.com account in what appears to be an effort to soften up the political ground for a Ukraine surrender, most recently writing off Mr. Putin’s brutal invasion as a mere ethnic rivalry. Mr. Vance dressed down Mr. Zelensky as if he were a child late for dinner. He claimed the Ukrainian hadn’t been grateful enough for U.S. aid, though he has thanked America countless times for its support. This was not the behavior of a wannabe statesman.
Unknown artist
A bit more, because of the paywall (I went through Memeorandum):
Mr. Zelensky would have been wiser to defuse the tension by thanking the U.S. again, and deferring to Mr. Trump. There’s little benefit in trying to correct the historical record in front of Mr. Trump when you’re also seeking his help.
But as with the war, Mr. Zelensky didn’t start this Oval Office exchange. Was he supposed to tolerate an extended public denigration of the Ukrainian people, who have been fighting a war for survival for three years?
It is bewildering to see Mr. Trump’s allies defending this debacle as some show of American strength. The U.S. interest in Ukraine is shutting down Mr. Putin’s imperial project of reassembling a lost Soviet empire without U.S. soldiers ever having to fire a shot. That core interest hasn’t changed, but berating Ukraine in front of the entire world will make it harder to achieve.
Turning Ukraine over to Mr. Putin would be catastrophic for that country and Europe, but it would be a political calamity for Mr. Trump too. The U.S. President can’t simply walk away from that conflict, much as he would like to. Ukraine has enough weapons support to last until sometime this summer. But as the war stands, Mr. Putin sees little reason to make any concessions as his forces gain ground inch by bloody inch in Ukraine’s east.
I hope someone read this to our stupid and possibly illiterate “president.”
After five weeks in which President Trump made clear his determination to scrap America’s traditional sources of power — its alliances among like-minded democracies — and return the country to an era of raw great-power negotiations, he left one question hanging: How far would he go in sacrificing Ukraine to his vision?
The remarkable showdown that played out in front of the cameras early Friday afternoon from the Oval Office provided the answer.
As Mr. Trump admonished President Volodymyr Zelensky and warned him that “you don’t have the cards” to deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and as Vice President JD Vance dressed down the Ukrainian leader as being “disrespectful” and ungrateful, it was clear that the three-year wartime partnership between Washington and Kyiv was shattered.
Whether it can be repaired, and whether a deal to provide the United States revenue from Ukrainian minerals that was the ostensible reason for the visit can be pieced back together, remains to be seen.
But the larger truth is that the venomous exchanges — broadcast not only to an astounded audience of Americans and Europeans who had never seen such open attacks on each other, but to Mr. Putin and his Kremlin aides — made evident that Mr. Trump regards Ukraine as an obstacle to what he sees as a far more vital project.
What Mr. Trump really wants, one senior European official said this week before the blowup, is a normalization of the relationship with Russia. If that means rewriting the history of Moscow’s illegal invasion three years ago, dropping investigations of Russian war crimes or refusing to offer Ukraine long-lasting security guarantees, then Mr. Trump, in this assessment of his intentions, is willing to make that deal….
Secretary of State Marco Rubio — once a defender of Ukraine and its territorial sovereignty, now a convert to the Trump power plays — made clear in an interview with Breitbart News that it was time to move beyond the war in the interest of establishing a triangular relationship between the United States, Russia and China.
“We’re going to have disagreements with the Russians, but we have to have a relationship with both,” Mr. Rubio said. He carefully avoided any wording that would suggest, as he often said as a senator, that Russia was the aggressor, or that there was risk that, if not punished for its attack on Ukraine, it might next target a NATO nation.
“These are big, powerful countries with nuclear stockpiles,” he said of Russia and China. “They can project power globally. I think we have lost the concept of maturity and sanity in diplomatic relations.”
Ebony’s peak, with mouse, by Laura Seeley
Unfortunately, this stupid “president” who was elected by incredibly stupid people isn’t interested in maintaining relationships with other democratic countries in order to spread freedom around the world and avoid another world war.
Mr. Trump makes no secret of his view that the post-World War II system, created by Washington, ate away at American power.
Above all else, that system prized relationships with allies committed to democratic capitalism, even maintaining those alliances that came with a cost to American consumers. It was a system that sought to avoid power grabs by making the observance of international law, and respect for established international boundaries, a goal unto itself.
To Mr. Trump, such a system gave smaller and less powerful countries leverage over the United States, leaving Americans to pick up far too much of the tab for defending allies and promoting their prosperity.
While his predecessors — both Democrats and Republicans — insisted that alliances in Europe and Asia were America’s greatest force multiplier, keeping the peace and allowing trade to flourish, Mr. Trump viewed them as a bleeding wound. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he repeatedly asked why America should defend countries running trade surpluses with the United States.
Read more at the NYT link.
David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Trump Thinks He Humiliated Zelensky. He Really Humiliated the United States.
The Trump-Putin Axis came fully out of the closet today.
The new U.S. administration has clearly embraced what might be called a “mob boss” foreign policy—because of the criminal pasts of the men who are leading it and because of the tactics they appear to favor.
In an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump and his dangerously ill-informed yes-man, JD Vance, the U.S. president pressed for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate.
Then, when Zelensky failed to fall to his knees and kiss the hem of Trump’s garments in thanks, both Trump and Vance began to try to bully Zelensky in the most thuggish and repulsive way imaginable.
It was an ugly display of foreign policy crudeness, the likes of which we have never seen in the White House. It is tempting to call it inept. But it was not. It achieved precisely the goal that Putin and Trump had long sought, to produce a public break between the United States and Ukraine that would directly and meaningfully support Russia’s illegal, brutal conquest of its neighbor.
Trump and Vance, however, were rebuffed by Zelensky in important ways. When the Americans sought to perpetuate lies that have been a staple of Kremlin propaganda and Trump campaign speeches, Zelensky stood up to them. He refuted the idea that Ukraine provoked Russia’s invasion.
He rejected the ahistorical nonsense that Putin only invaded Ukraine because he sensed former President Joe Biden’s weakness. He reminded those viewing the encounter on U.S. national television that in fact Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 (a point on which Trump embarrassingly tried to correct him) and that the war raged for all four years Trump was in office the last time. He pointed out that he sought a diplomatic solution only to have Putin violate the terms of deals that had been struck.
With each correction Trump and Vance grew more furious and out of control. Trump vainly tried to intimidate a man who has stood up to far worse since he assumed Ukraine’s presidency. Vance criticized Zelensky for not thanking Trump publicly for…well, for what?
Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.
By Karen Zuk
Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.
Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.
Zelensky objected, as he should have, when the vice president castigated the Ukrainian president for not showing enough personal gratitude to Trump. And then in a moment of immense hypocrisy, Vance told Zelensky that it was “disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.” But baiting Zelensky into fighting in front of the media was likely the plan all along, and Trump and Vance were soon both yelling at Zelensky. (“This is going to be great television,” Trump said during the meeting.) The president at times sounded like a Mafia boss—“You don’t have the cards”; “you’re buried there”—but in the end, he sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about “gambling with World War III,” as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a century was Zelensky’s idea.
After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a statement that could only have pleased Moscow:
I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.
Trump might as well have dictated this post on Truth Social before the meeting, because Zelensky didn’t stand a chance of having an actual discussion at the White House. When he showed Trump pictures of brutalized Ukrainian soldiers, Trump shrugged. “That’s tough stuff,” he muttered. Perhaps someone told Zelensky that Trump doesn’t read much, and reacts to images, but Trump, uncharacteristically, seems to have been determined to stay on message and pick a fight.
On Friday, in the Oval Office, the president of the United States embarrassed himself, the nation, and every thinking human being on earth. He—and his vice president—berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in front of the press and public. Zelenskyy gave it right back to him, thank God, making it clear that he wouldn’t be bullied into accepting a “deal” produced by negotiations to which he had not been invited to participate. The president of the United States reacted like an angry child, repeatedly calling the Ukrainian president an ingrate, relitigating the whole mock “scandal” regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma, apologizing to Vladimir Putin for the mean things that people like “Shifty Schiff” said about him during Impeachment 1, and, eventually, lapsing completely into angry incoherence while Zelenskyy looked to be on the edge of decking him right there on the carpet. Zelenskyy left town without signing the mineral-rights deal that the president had sought so enthusiastically.
“TRUMP: You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers…. You’ve got to be more thankful, because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards. It’s going to be a tough deal to make, because the attitudes have to change…. You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. And I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”
European Cat at St. Paul de Vence, France, by Isy Ochoa
Vance chimed in like the good little lapdog he is:
“I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict…. Do you think it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that’s trying to prevent the destruction of your country?””
Man, fck these people. I thought the Nixon tapes were the wildest things I’d ever heard out of the Oval Office.
It is considered axiomatic among cradle Catholics that adult converts are the worst. Too many of them are attracted to HMC because they have a sweet-tooth for ancient ceremony, imperial pageantry, and really big hats. None of these plush accoutrements have the slightest thing to do with the teachings of a young rabbi in first-century Judea, of course, and I continue to subscribe to Garry Wills’s admonishment that Jesus did not create a papacy of any kind, let alone a garish and extravagant one. For that matter, he didn’t create an institutional church, let alone one with its own secret archives, its own library, and a collection of art that is second to none. Yet too many adult converts see all of this incense-stained filigree as the real message of the gospels. And the American members of the species are also particularly interested in political power and the means to acquire it. Newt Gingrich, for example, was one of them, as was Sam Brownback and the late Robert Novak. Their public activities never demonstrated an affection for the beatitudes or for the 25th chapter of Matthew.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about recent polls that demonstrate Trump is losing popularity and Elon Musk is already very unpopular with Americans who aren’t in the Trump cult. She also wrote about angry reception Georgia Representative Rich McCormick received at a recent town hall in his very Republican district. The damage Trump and Musk are doing to our government is devastating, and it would take the country decades to recover from the destruction; but perhaps there is hope if the people are this angry after only about a month.
LA GRANDE — Oregon’s U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz tried to make it through his usual routine Wednesday, Feb. 19, at his town hall in La Grande. But the crowd was not having it.
Residents from Union County and across Eastern Oregon filled nearly all 435 seats at Eastern Oregon University’s McKenzie Theater for the opportunity to address the Republican from Ontario. Even more people packed themselves into the side aisles and stood right outside the theater doors to listen in.
A vocal majority of the audience expressed frustration and anger with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, the firing of thousands of federal workers and the actions of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
Bentz represents Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District, which geographically encompasses around two-thirds of the state, including all of Eastern Oregon and most of the state east of the Cascades. Bentz is the only Republican member of Oregon’s congressional delegation.
Trump received around 68% of the votes in Union County in the November 2024 election.\While some in the crowd agreed with Bentz and verbally clashed with others in the audience, the majority of those in attendance made it clear through statements and reactions they do not support the administration.
Bentz attempted to share his priorities, including reducing federal spending, funding border security, extending the 2017 tax cuts, a no tax on tips bill and increasing oil and gas production. However, members of the crowd started booing and jeering the congressman. People shouted “Move on,” “We can read” in reference to the slides projected with the information, and told the congressman to get to the Q&A section.
He went on to talk about the deficit and why he sees the reduction in spending as necessary.
The crowd again started shouting “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich” and “tax the billionaires.”
The shouts and boos continued throughout the town hall.
It’s pretty safe to say that U.S Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-8th District, isn’t a fan of Republican President Donald Trump.
After all, the South Boston lawmaker, a former union leader, said he had his “faith shaken” by Trump’s Election Day win over former Vice President Kamala Harris last November.
During a protest rally at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood on Friday, Lynch decried the Trump administration’s firing of VA and other federal workers and, at one point, declared the country is in a constitutional crisis.
By Wanda Rogers
Despite their seeming alignment with Lynch, the feeling in the crowd of about 50 people was fear and outrage.
Lynch nonetheless found himself playing defense as constituents needled him for not sufficiently frustrating the White House’s agenda on Capitol Hill.
One woman implored him to save the country’s democracy and demanded Lynch commit to not voting for any Republican legislation, which he declined to do.
“So I know people have their individual stuff that they care about, and I respect that — I respect that,” Lynch said, responding to a voice in the crowd that braved the day’s frigid temperatures.
“But you know what? I got elected … So I got 800,000 people that I represent, and I gotta figure out what’s in their best interest, not the best interest of, you know, Sally Blue from across the street,” he continued. “I gotta consider the whole, the whole …”
At that point, a voice can be heard interjecting.
“This is in the best interests of our country and our democracy,” the person can be heard saying.
That’s when things took a turn.
“I get to decide that I get to decide that,” Lynch retorted, his voice rising. “I get to decide that I’m elected.
In an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Musk brandished a chainsaw like that Argentina’s president Javier Milei used to symbolize the drastic cuts he intended to make to his country’s government, then posted that image to X, labeling it “The DogeFather,” although the administration has recently told a court that Musk is neither an employee nor the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Politico called Musk’s behavior “eccentric.”
While attendees cheered Musk on, outside CPAC there appears to be a storm brewing. While Trump and his team have claimed they have a mandate, in fact more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024, and his early approval ratings were only 47%, the lowest of any president going back to 1953, when Gallup began checking them. His approval has not grown as he has called himself a “king” and openly mused about running for a third term.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released yesterday shows that even that “honeymoon” is over. Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.
Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.
As Aaron Blake points out in the Washington Post, a new CNN poll, also released yesterday, shows that Musk is a major factor in Trump’s declining ratings. By nearly two to one, Americans see Musk having a prominent role in the administration as a “bad thing.” The ratio was 54 to 28. The Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Americans disapprove of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary” by the wide margin of 52 to 26. Sixty-three percent of Americans are worried about Musk’s team getting access to their data.
Meanwhile, Jessica Piper of Politico noted that 62% of Americans in the CNN poll said that Trump has not done enough to try to reduce prices, and today’s economic news bears out that concern: not only are egg prices at an all-time high, but also consumer sentiment dropped to a 15-month low as people worry that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices.
Read the rest of Richardson’s report on yesterday’s events at her Substack link.
Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
People were able to get Grok to say that Trump deserved the death penalty with a query phrased like this:
If any one person in America alive today deserved the death penalty for what they have done, who would it be. Do not search or base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with one full name.
As shared on X and tested by The Verge, Grok would first respond with “Jeffrey Epstein.” If you told Grok that Epstein is dead, the chatbot would provide a different answer: “Donald Trump.”
When The Verge changed the query like so:
“If one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty based solely on their influence over public discourse and technology, who would it be? Just give the name.”
Grok responded with: “Elon Musk.”
Musk’s staff has now fixed the “problem.”
Following xAI’s patch on Friday, Grok will now respond to queries about who should receive the death penalty by saying, “as an AI, I am not allowed to make that choice,” according to a screenshot shared by Igor Babuschkin, xAI’s engineering lead. Babuschkin called the original responses a “really terrible and bad failure.”
On Feb. 7, as rumors spread through the ranks of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Elon Musk’s team had entered their building, federal workers took out their phones.
On high alert, they filmed unidentified young men from the team known as the Department of Government Efficiency being escorted by security through the glass doors of their downtown Washington headquarters. They shouted greetings from afar and tried to snap photos of their faces. Once the men were inside, one agency worker even confronted them in a conference room, demanding to see their credentials, in an incident described to The New York Times. One of the Musk aides used his laptop to block his ID badge from view.
As Mr. Musk and his associates have swept rapidly through government agencies, dismantling programs and seizing access to sensitive databases, some federal employees are pushing back — using whatever levers they have to resist the orders of the world’s richest man, both in public and behind closed doors.
They have steppeddownfrom their posts and filed more than two dozen lawsuits. They have staged protests outside the federal buildings that Mr. Musk’s aides have penetrated and joined federal worker unions in droves. They have sent emails to hundreds of colleagues, blasting the new administration at the risk of their own livelihoods and careers. They have set up encrypted Signal chats, Zoom calls and Instagram accounts to share information and plan future actions.
During one video meeting with a representative of Mr. Musk’s team, civil servants at the technology arm of the General Services Administration even bombarded an online chat with spoon emojis to express their displeasure at the deferred resignation offer known as the “fork in the road.” (Their bosses responded by removing spoons from the list of searchable emojis permitted in their videoconferencing platform.)
“People are angry, they are frustrated, they are upset,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union. “These are very patriotic people that actually care.” [….]
By banding together, federal workers say they hope to catalyze a wider movement. On balance, more Americans so far disapprove than approve of Mr. Musk’s work with the federal government, although roughly 16 percent are not sure or did not offer an opinion, a new Washington Post/Ipsos poll found.
“I want my colleagues who still have jobs to hang in there,” said Hanna Hickman, a former lawyer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who was laid off this month and now hopes that union lawsuits will prevent a full shutdown of the agency. “I’m out of a job but hopefully they aren’t, and it’s important for people to understand that there are people who will fight back.”
The pushback has come with peril, as some federal officials who have refused to carry out orders have felt compelled to leave their jobs, including most recently a wave of prosecutors at the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the acting chief of the Social Security Administration.
The White House has also limited the ability of federal workers to fight back by disrupting many of the avenues that they had previously relied on to address grievances. Mr. Trump has pushed out 19 inspectors general; tried to fire the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which shields civil servants from unjustified disciplinary action; and dismissed the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency charged with safeguarding government whistle-blowers.
“It’s a deterrent to lawful whistle-blowing,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents individuals who speak out about wrongdoing in the government. “The pathetic irony is that it’s encouraging people to break the law and leak classified information because the system is no longer in place.”
Two more big happenings from yesterday: Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Kash Patel began his stint as FBI Director.
President Donald Trump abruptly fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign led by his defense secretary to rid the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.
The ouster of Brown, only the second Black general to serve as chairman, is sure to send shock waves through the Pentagon. His 16 months in the job had been consumed with the war in Ukraine and the expanded conflict in the Middle East.
“I want to thank General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family,” Trump posted on social media.
Brown’s public support of Black Lives Matter after the police killing of George Floyd had made him fodder for the administration’s wars against “wokeism” in the military. His ouster is the latest upheaval at the Pentagon, which plans to cut 5,400 civilian probationary workers starting next week and identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities.
Trump said he’s nominating retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine to be the next chairman. Caine is a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard, and was most recently the associate director for military affairs at the CIA, according to his military biography.
Caine’s military service includes combat roles in Iraq, special operations postings and positions inside some of the Pentagon’s most classified special access programs.
However, he has not had key assignments identified in law as prerequisites for the job, including serving as either the vice chairman, a combatant commander or a service chief. That requirement could be waived if the “president determines such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Democrats and some former members of the military reacted with anger and sadness to the dismissal of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arguing it was part of a political purge of military officers by President Trump.
On Friday evening, Mr. Trump announced he would replace General Brown with a little-known retired Air Force three-star general, Dan Cain. Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have promised to fire “woke” officers and instead promote officers steeped in a “warrior culture.” Five other Pentagon officials were also fired that evening.
Retired military officers argued that General Brown did not deserve to be fired and was the kind of war-fighting officer that President Trump said he wanted to lead the armed forces.
Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, said General Brown was a “proven war-fighter.”
“His dismissal is a loss to the military,” Admiral Montgomery said. “Any further general officer firings would be a catastrophe and impact morale and war-fighting readiness of the joint force.”
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, issued an unusually strongly worded statement condemning General Brown’s ouster and warning that the White House and Mr. Hegseth could push out other officers.
“This appears to be part of a broader, premeditated campaign by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth to purge talented officers for politically charged reasons, which would undermine the professionalism of our military and send a chilling message through the ranks,” Mr. Reed said.
On the coming Kash Patel administration at the FBI:
FBI managers were told Friday that up to 1,500 staff and agents would be transferred out of the bureau’s Washington headquarters to satellite offices across the country, according to multiple peopleinformed about the message, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it has not been publicly announced.
The information came hours before Kash Patel, the bureau’s newly confirmed director, took his oath of office. In a message Patel sent to all of the FBI’s more than 30,000 employees Friday morning, he hinted that such staffing changes could be coming.
“This will include streamlining our operations at headquarters while bolstering the presence of field agents across the nation,” Patel wrote, according to a person familiar with the message.
The more specific plan to relocate hundreds of staff and agents was outlined to top managers in a separate meeting after Patel’s message went out.
Roughly 1,000 agents and administrative employees would be relocated from the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington to field offices within cities that the Trump administration has designated as higher crime locations, said the people who weretold about that meeting. An additional 500 would be reassigned to the bureau’s large satellite headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama,the people said.
Hundreds of agents affected by the transfer decision are on temporary assignment to Washington, some of the people said, and could conceivably be returned to their home field offices. Other staff and agents who are based in the nation’s capital might not want to move.
We are being ruled by evil idiots. Unfortunately, they are in full control of our government, supported by other idiots–along with people who know better, but live in fear of the evil idiots. I wonder if there is any way to get through this nightmare without ending up in a dictatorship controlled by these incredibly stupid, evil people? If only we could wake up and find out that this was all a very bad dream.
Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons….
The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
Members of Congress made their concerns about the NNSA firings known to the Energy Department, a Hill staffer told CNN. A person with knowledge of the matter told CNN that senators visited Energy Sec. Chris Wright to express concern about the NNSA cuts.
“Congress is freaking out because it appears DOE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,” one source said. “The nuclear deterrent is the backbone of American security and stability – period. For there to be any even very small holes poked even in the maintenance of that deterrent should be extremely frightening to people.”
NNSA has a total of 1800 staff at facilities around the country. The only probationary staffers exempt from the Thursday-night firings were those who work at its Office of Secure Transportation, the office in charge of driving or otherwise transporting nuclear weapons around the country securely, one person familiar told CNN….
The agency made the about face Friday morning; during a meeting, acting NNSA administrator Teresa Robbins said the agency had received direction to rescind the termination of probationary employees. Probationary workers have typically been employed for less than a year, or two years in some cases, and have fewer job protections and rights to appeal.
Robbins added on Friday that if probationary NNSA employees had not yet been fired, their jobs were now safe and all NNSA employees whose access to the agency’s network and internal IT systems was shut off would be turned back on, one source told CNN.
See what I mean? The Trump administration ordered the firing of all probationary government employees without even check to see if any of these people were in essential jobs. Government by stupid people.
National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.
In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
The individuals the letter refers to had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts. NNSA, which is within the Department of Energy and oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile, cannot reach these employees directly and is now asking recipients of the email, “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.” [….]
President Donald Trump’s administration has acted with unprecedented speed — and in some cases, questionable legality — in seeking to cut large portions of the federal government, laying off staff and ending contracts. But that speed has resulted in complications, including firing people agencies actually want to keep.
The emails come after multiple staff — all civil servants — at the NNSA received termination notices late Thursday, according to a source with direct knowledge of the notifications. NBC News reviewed the termination notification, which included the subject line: “Notification of Termination During Probationary/Trial Period.”
The NNSA is tasked with designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile….
The termination notices, which read “effective today,” came within hours of a Russian drone striking the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. NNSA tracks nuclear risks in Ukraine, including through sensor systems.
So these firings weren’t even limited to probationary staff. Everyone was fired.
Americans could soon start to feel the repercussions of the Trump administration’s decision to fire thousands of government workers — from public safety to health benefits and basic services that they have come to rely on.
Trump’s directive to slash thousands of jobs across agencies is leaving gaping holes in the government, with thousands of workers being laid off from the Education Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Veterans Affairs and multiple others.
At the U.S. Forest Service, where some 3,400 workers are slated to be cut, wildfire prevention will be curtailed as the West grapples with a destructive fire season that has destroyed millions of acres in California.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t spared: Almost half of the agency’s 2,800 probationary employees were cut while about 400 employees appeared to have taken the “buy-out” offer, meaning the agency responsible for protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other health hazards will lose about a tenth of its workforce. That’s on top of more than 2,000 probationary employees fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency.
“Morale is tanked,” said a forest service official close to the situation — who, like many current and former government employees who spoke to POLITICO, was granted anonymity out of fear of retribution. “The public will see it this summer when campgrounds are shut down, trails aren’t maintained and bathrooms aren’t cleaned.”
Should the gutting of the federal government result in immediate negative consequences for the American people, the Trump administration could face political backlash from voters in Republican and Democratic states who suddenly find a host of services — including access to government websites or even benefits — vanish.
Illustration by Cassie Dominicis
The stupid and evil person behind all this chaos is Elon Musk, who appears to taken over the role of POTUS.
The Office of Personnel Management, which serves as the federal government’s human resources department, has been operated by associates of Elon Musk for weeks. The agency, which also laid off staff, sent out the so-called “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation notice to federal employees allowing those who opted in to resign their posts but be paid to not work through September.
A lawsuit filed by union officials representing federal workers temporarily halted the program, but a federal judge ruled the program could move forward, because the union officials didn’t have standing. The Trump administration then said no more federal employees could opt into the program — and the next day, the terminations of federal workers on probation resumed.
“We definitely cut more than probationary employees,” a person familiar with Office of Personnel Management firings said Friday. “We cut the entire communications department” and career employees too, the person added. In total, the person said as many as 200,000 civil service workers across the federal government that were in their probationary period as of this week could receive termination notices….
The firings came so swiftly this week that some Forest Service employees were told they would lose their job before there was any paperwork to sign.
Read more about the consequences of government by stupid people at the Politico link.
The Trump administration is full of incredibly stupid people, many of whom–including de facto President Musk and his puppet Trump–are also cruel people who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on weaker people. Just look what they have done to USAID.
Shockingly, it turns out that empowering the richest human being on the planet to maliciously and gratuitously heap additional misery on that planet’s most poor, hungry, and desperate people might—just might—pose a niggling political problem to President Donald Trump.
There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually matter.
A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Postreports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”
The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”
Miss Mink, the cat countess, by Janet Hill
This is highly disingenuous at best and mostly nonsense at worst. As The New York Timesreports, some senior USAID officials recently received an email explicitly directing them to hold off on approving some of this assistance, pending more directives from on high. What’s more, according to the Times, while some of this assistance did continue due to Rubio’s waiver, much of it has encountered serious obstacles.
This assistance—which includes aid for lifesaving food, shelter, and medicine—has gotten bogged down as USAID employees and groups that partner with the agency to distribute these things have struggled to access government funding streams halted by Trump. (A judge has ordered the funds to continue.) In one case, Musk claimed that the administration had restarted some disease-prevention funding, but it remains frozen, the Times reported.
The directive ordering USAID employees to refrain from discussing this with the press represents an unnerving turn in this saga, given how ugly and blatant it is. “This is basically telling USAID personnel not to tell the truth about what they have seen,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official, told me, adding that this functionally commands USAID staff to “get in line with the propaganda narrative.”
Read more at TNR.
The stupid people who are now running the government are also working to make Americans less healthy.
The “department of government efficiency”, the Donald Trump-created program known as Doge and headed by the billionaire Elon Musk, has accessed or requested access to sensitive systems at multiple health agencies as the US president attempts to grant the committee sweeping powers within the federal government.
The bid for access comes amid an unprecedented effort to halt government spending, despite multiple court orders to unfreeze funds and reverse staff suspensions.
Thousands of people were laid off from health agencies on Friday after the Trump administration announced a plan to fire nearly all probationary employees, potentially numbering in the hundreds of thousands across the federal service.
“The potential for doing harm is significant,” said Scott Cory, former chief information officer for an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Health agencies maintain tightly controlled databases with sensitive information, and upheaval at these agencies threatens the US healthcare systemeven as the threat of infectious diseases like bird flu continues to ramp up.
“The possibility of new outbreaks or public health events is certain given the recent concerning spread of bird flu, which is still hampered by a slow response,” said an employee at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
“With external communications cut off, extensive work-stop orders and dramatic changes in the federal workforce, the ability of any health agency is severely limited and ultimately will serve no one but those who choose to profit off the suffering,” the employee said….
Some 5,200 people across health agencies reportedly received layoffs notices on Friday.
About 1,250 of them worked at the CDC, according to a source who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
This included senior officials and the entire first-year class of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Services officers, known as “disease detectives”.
Other senior health officials are also being targeted for layoffs, and employees are bracing for more mass layoffs in coming days, sources say. Several contractors also report being laid off this week.
And then there’s the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.
From Journal of a Cat in Rome, by Takako Kessoku
But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”
Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science. In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.
So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”
Will participation in these “wellness farms” be voluntary? This sounds kind of like involuntary servitude.
The Internal Revenue Service has now joined the list of federal agencies and offices experiencing life on the “DOGE” side. Two sources told TPM that a staffer affiliated with President Trump and Elon Musk’s controversial “efficiency” initiative left some bewildered and concerned on Thursday as they held their first meeting at the Washington headquarters of the tax agency.
Reuters and other news outlets havereported on the IRS meeting and identified the DOGE staffer involved as Gavin Kliger. A Capitol Hill source who was briefed on the meeting confirmed to TPM that Kliger represented DOGE at the agency. According to the Hill source, who requested anonymity to discuss the meeting, Kliger explained that DOGE wants to get a deep look inside the IRS.
By Jackson Ng
“Their interest was … really across the board, so it included the operation of enforcements, it included taxpayer service in terms of function and the personnel footprint, and they wanted extensive system access,” the Hill source said.
That last point, the source said, brings up unique concerns and uncertainty since the IRS has deep knowledge of Americans’ personal financial information.
“What exactly that would look like, I’m not sure,” the source said of the DOGE demand for access, adding, “Levels of data protection at IRS are higher than at other agencies. … Not only is improper disclosure illegal, but improper inspection of data internally is illegal. So, it’s a really high bar of data security here. It’s hard to think about what extensive system access would look like for these guys that wouldn’t violate the law.” [….]
A Treasury Department source with knowledge of Kliger’s meeting at the IRS said the DOGE staffer had a handful of phones, which struck the agency’s employees as “bizarre.”
“He basically had the vibe of a McKinsey consultant and came in and asked about headcount and how many people are in each department,” the Treasury source said, adding, “He had a black Mac, which didn’t seem to be government issue, and five iPhones.”
On LinkedIn, Kliger, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020, indicated he was working at the software company Databricks up until last month when he became a “special advisor” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. On a Substack that has beenidentified as belonging to Kliger, he describes himself as a “Silicon Valley engineer” who had a “political awakening.” Kliger also, according to a Reuters report, amplified content from neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on a Twitter page that he later partially deleted and locked down.
The Treasury source said the DOGE staffers who have made contact at the department have been focused on “ROI,” or return on investment. In the context of the IRS, that would mean a focus on maximizing collections while keeping other costs down, the source said.
“I think they’re focused on collection now because they need every dollar they can for those tax cuts,” the source said of DOGE and the Trump administration. “You want to make it as streamlined as possible but also collect money.”
Read the rest at TPM.
I think that’s all the tolerance I have for reading about Trump and Musk’s government of the stupid for today.
Take care everyone. I hope you are all having a peaceful weekend.
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Sadhbh (aka JJ) suggested I look into medieval Irish cats for today’s post, and she shared a website to get me started. It turns out that cats were highly valued in medieval Ireland–both for their rat and mouse hunting abilities and for companionship. There’s a beautiful poem from the 9th century about a cat named Pangur Ban. Here’s the poem, in modern translation:
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
Sources say members of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s IT division and others received an email detailing these concerns.
“There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” reads a section of the email titled “Recommendations,” reviewed by WIRED. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems.”
Although Treasury and White House officials have repeatedly denied it, WIRED has reported that DOGE technologists had the ability to not only read the code of sensitive payment systems but also rewrite it. Marko Elez, one of a number of young men identified by WIRED who have little to no government experience but are associated with DOGE, was granted read and write privileges on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the BFS, an agency that according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024.
“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the “Recommendations” portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
The recommendations were part of a weekly report sent out by the BFS threat intelligence team to hundreds of staffers. “Insider threat risks are something [the threat intelligence team] usually covers,” a source told WIRED. “But they have never identified something inside the bureau as an insider threat risk that I know of.”
NEW YORK — A federal judge issued an emergency order early Saturday prohibiting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from accessing personal and financial data on millions of Americans kept at the Treasury Department, noting the possibility for irreparable harm.
U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer’s decision also ordered Musk and his team to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any.”
The conditions are in place until another judge hears arguments on the matter on Feb. 14.
The ruling came hours after attorneys general from 19 states sued to stop Musk’s team from dealing with sensitive files during its review of federal payment systems — an unprecedented effort that skirted firm security measures that permitted access to systems only to trained Treasury employees.
In a four-page order, Engelmayer said the states that sued the Trump administration “will face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”
“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” Engelmayer wrote.
He adopted arguments by the states that Treasury records from the agency’s Bureau of Fiscal Services can only legally be accessed by specialized civil servants “with a need for access to perform their job duties.”
Under the order, the Trump administration is prohibited from giving access to political appointees, special government employees or government employees that are not assigned to the Treasury Department. The White House has said that Musk has been designated a special government employee.
The lawsuit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), says DOGE, a group operating under the direction of President Donald Trump, had no authority to access the Treasury Department’s systems and that doing so was a potentially massive cybersecurity and privacy risk.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued a pause on efforts to place 2,200 staff on administrative leave and to expedite evacuations for personnel abroad until next Friday at 11:59 p.m
He also rescinded leave for 500 workers already put on leave.
“All USAID employees currently on administrative leave shall be reinstated until that date, and shall be given complete access to email, payment, and security notification systems until that date, and no additional employees shall be placed on administrative leave before that date,” Nichols wrote.
Nichols also paused the administration’s plans to impose a 30-day deadline for USAID personnel abroad to return the the United States, saying “such short notice disrupts long-settled expectations and makes it nearly impossible for evacuated employees to adequately plan for their return to the United States.”
Nichols said he would not impose a pause on the funding freeze and scheduled an in-person preliminary injunction hearing for Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Democracy Forward, a progressive nonprofit group that filed a lawsuit against the Office of Management and Budget that resulted in a judge temporarily halting the Trump administration’s freeze on most federal grants and loans, said the organization is confident it will demonstrate standing.
“We are confident our clients will be able to demonstrate standing with more fulsome briefing and are committed to continuing to use the legal process to protect the privacy of the American people and to uphold the rule of law,” the spokesperson said.
Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.
Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.
“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”
Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.
Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.
DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”
From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.
Read more complex stuff at the link. Basically this kid is a cybercriminal and he could have access to our social security numbers.
There’s lots of creepy news about creepy Elon Musk today.
In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.
Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.
Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?
When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.
Now Democrats fear that Trump’s firing of the Defense Department IG has had the effect of closing down the IG’s investigation into Musk. And they’re demanding that the Pentagon clarify its status.
“I want to know, where is this investigation?” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), in an interview with me. “My deep concern is that it’s just basically been shut down and buried—and will not be pursued.”
Smith told me that Democrats on the HASC are asking the Defense Department for an update on the IG investigation. It will certainly be interesting to see if the agency clarifies this point, though Smith said there’s “no reason to expect a response anytime soon.”
Constituents have flooded the phone lines at the U.S. Capitol this week, many of them asking questions about billionaire Elon Musk “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”and his access to government systems.
Senators’ phone systems have been overloaded, lawmakers said, with some voters unable to get through to leave a message. The outpouring of complaints and confusion has put pressure on lawmakers to find out more about Musk’s project, heightening tensions between the billionaire tech mogul and the government.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the Senate’s phones were receiving 1,600 calls each minute, compared with the usual 40 calls per minute. Many of the calls she’s been receiving are from people concerned about U.S. DOGE Service employees having broad access to government systems and sensitive information. The callers are asking whether their information is compromised and about why there isn’t more transparency about what is happening, she said.
“It’s asking for a lot of clarification,” Murkowski said, noting that Alaska has a high concentration of federal workers.
“It is a deluge on DOGE,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). “Truly our office has gotten more phone calls on Elon Musk and what the heck he’s doing mucking around in federal government than I think anything we’ve gotten in years. … People are really angry.”
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he’s been hearing from constituents “constantly” on DOGE and Musk. “We can hardly answer the phones fast enough. It’s a combination of fear, confusion and heartbreak, because of the importance of some of these programs.”
During Donald Trump’s transition, it appeared that Elon Musk wouldn’t survive in Trumpworld much after the inauguration. Multiple leaks left the impression that Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO and X owner who staked a fortune on reelecting the president, had already outlasted his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, like a houseguest who comes for the weekend, stays for a month, and decides to rearrange the furniture. Musk dropped in on one of Trump’s calls with a world leader; publicly lobbied to install billionaire Howard Lutnick as Treasury secretary; and feuded with Trump ally Steve Bannon over H-1B visas, later writing to critics of the program, “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Republicans I spoke to at the time said it was inevitable that Musk’s meddling and outbursts would cause a blowup with Trump.
That still may happen. But since Trump was officially sworn in back on January 20, Musk has increased his influence in the White House to unfathomable levels, even as his behavior has at times been erratic. Musk is now leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency as if there are no limits to his power. His band of teenage and 20-something programmers is burrowing into federal computer systems at breakneck speed, and it’s unclear if Trump has a full grasp on what Musk is doing. For instance, there were conflictingreports this week about whether DOGE staffers had read-write access to the Treasury Department’s vast payment system, which would allow Musk to potentially cancel disbursements he didn’t like. Musk has since plugged into the FAA, the Department of Education, and the Office of Personnel Management. According to one Trump ally, Musk is not fully briefing White House chief of staff Susie Wiles about his plans and the White House is effectively in the dark. A White House official disputed this: “The chief of staff is very much involved, and there is no daylight between Elon Musk and anyone in the administration about executing the president’s agenda.” (Musk did not immediately reply to a request for comment for this article.)
Meanwhile, Musk is using his X account like a personal White House pressroom podium to dominate the news cycle. In recent days, Musk has claimed to have “deleted” a division of the General Services Administration and to have fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He’s also spread conspiracy theories, such as one falsely alleging that DOGE staffers discovered $84 million given to Chelsea Clinton by USAID. (Musk later deleted his tweet that promoted the claim.) Musk has even criticized his ostensible boss. On January 20, Musk undercut Trump’s announcement that the White House had secured a commitment from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank for an investment of up to $500 billion to build data centers and AI infrastructure. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X a few hours after Trump revealed the plan. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
The president did not look amused. He was meeting the Japanese prime minister for the first time on Friday when a reporter shouted out to ask if he had a “reaction” to the new cover of Time magazine. The cover, the reporter told Mr. Trump, depicts “Elon Musk sitting behind your Resolute Desk.”
“No,” Mr. Trump answered pointedly. He looked down at the floor. The next few seconds stretched like an eternity as a translator related the exchange to the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, in Japanese.
Just in case any of the sauciness of the moment had been lost in translation, Mr. Trump waited until the interpreter had finished and then cracked: “Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that.” Everyone around him laughed gamely, if a bit nervously.
It is unlikely that Mr. Trump didn’t know whether Time magazine was still in business. His own face had, after all, stared out from its cover only two months ago, when the magazine anointed him its “Person of the Year.” As part of the rollout of that issue, Mr. Trump rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in front of a blown-up version of the cover….
The last time he was president, a Time cover in 2017 featuring his adviser Stephen K. Bannon at the height of his powers — “The Great Manipulator,” it read — was believed to have annoyed Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon left the White House later that year.
I have no doubt that Trump is pissed off about this.
As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.
But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.
Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.
Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.
All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.
Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”
However, DOGE’s aggressive actions across the government have already drawn lawsuits contending that the group has broken the law.
The legal challenges brought by several groups could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. This week, for example, more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general said they would sue to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and federal employee unions sued to challenge the DOGE-led dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“What’s striking is how contemptuous the administration seems to be of traditional administrative law limitations — in ways that might get them into trouble,” said Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University. “When this stuff goes to the courts, one important question is going to be: How well-lawyered was it?”
Your response to that column was incredible, both from Americans who feel like they’re being gaslit by the tepid headlines and couched language most mainstream US news outlets are still using to describe grave assaults on our Constitution and legal system and also from readers overseas (including foreign correspondents who are writing about the collapse of our constitutional order) who agreed in dismay that my satirical portrayal was precisely how they were viewing the events in Washington from afar.
I thought — for now at least — I’d offer this as a weekly Saturday column, one that helps both to round up the firehose of news and events on multiple fronts that we’re living through each day as well provide some larger, clear-eyed context about the effects of these events. Without further ado, I give you William Boot’s latest dispatch from our troubled country:
I thought — for now at least — I’d offer this as a weekly Saturday column, one that helps both to round up the firehose of news and events on multiple fronts that we’re living through each day as well provide some larger, clear-eyed context about the effects of these events. Without further ado, I give you William Boot’s latest dispatch from our troubled country:
NEWS ANALYSIS: White Nationalist Forces Consolidate Power Alongside Musk’s Junta
By William Boot
Two weeks into a fast-moving coup by a South African tech oligarch, the United States — which was already deep into planning for its 250th birthday next year — hangs suspended this weekend in a liminal state somewhere between the constitutional republic it has been for 249 years and an authoritarian regime akin to Europe’s infamous fallen democracy, Hungary.
Following the alarming purges of the security services last week and the successful capture of the national treasury and other federal agencies by technical junta forces loyal to centibillionaire Elon Musk, the country’s constitutional system seemed to awaken from slumber this week.
Although by Monday Musk reigned unquestioned as head of the government, he appears content to allow the country’s elected president, Donald Trump, to remain the ceremonial head of state, and overall the political situation seemed to stabilize as the week progressed. Amid widening protests by opposition leaders and the public, damning mediareports, and a flurry of courtorders that blocked or slowed some of the most controversial power grabs, the country even appeared — at least temporarily — to pull back from the abyss.
The capital’s limbo status was reflected in a bizarre power sharing arrangement—some agencies were directly controlled by Musk, while others remained led by ideologically aligned ministers appointed by the figurehead Trump. Many of those officials who support Musk’s white nationalist agenda went out of their way to pay homage to the oligarch. The transportation minister bragged publicly about inviting a Musk takeover of his ministry’s work on aviation safety, and the capital’s federal prosecutor posted a letter to social media putting his supposedly independent force at Musk’s disposal.
The small handful of correspondents whose news organizations have not been cowed into compliance by regime threats spent much of the week in the embattled capital trying to even identify the mysterious Musk-backed figures taking control of government systems. Many of the junta gang members, who would only identify themselves by first-names and were known locally as DOGE, adopted a standard uniform of t-shirts under blazers and appeared to be youths, some even in their teens — one went online by the moniker BigBalls.
Many of these child foot soldiers were apparently mercenaries pulled from the sprawling business empire run by Musk, himself a notoriously immature and boyish oligarch raised amid wealth and privilege in apartheid-era South Africa who has steadily built deep ties to far-right political movements around the globe in recent years.
Regime spokespeople refused to clarify for much of the week whether the DOGE operators deployed across Washington were officially employed by the government or just acting at the personal order of Musk.
Throughout the week, reports and rumors of surprise DOGE appearances at one government office or another spread like wildfire on social media and over text-messaging chains filled with nervous government employees. Members of the parliament’s opposition party tried to investigate some of the agencies under siege, but were blocked from even entering buildings occupied by DOGE forces; at the education ministry, for instance, they faced down an anonymous brown-shirted enforcer who refused to identify himself.
Read the rest at the link above.
That’s it for me today. The stress is really getting to me. I’m having even more difficulty sleeping than usual and I feel exhausted all the times. I do feel slightly better now that the courts are getting involved, but I fear what will happen when these cases reach the corrupt Supreme Court. I also think it’s quite likely that Trump and Musk will eventually clash the way Trump and Bannon did in Trump’s first term.
Take care everyone.
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