President Trump took some questions yesterday as he finished yet another round of golf and wound up another long weekend at his Florida resort. Elon Musk was a big topic which appeared to get on his nerves especially when a reporter wanted to know what position the multi-billionaire actually held now that the White House has said that he is not actually running the DOGE department after all. He responded, “So, you know, you could call him an employee, you could call him a consultant, you could call him whatever you want… but you know what? Ukraine’s a bigger deal.” He sounded quite irritated that they were asking him about such trivialities when he is the one who has world leaders quaking in their boots as he re-makes the whole world in his image. He’s clearly delegated the wrecking of the federal government to Musk, to which he’s only peripherally paying attention, so that he can concentrate on wrecking the world order. Both men are doing a bang-up job so far.
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Trump: "Inflation is back" pic.twitter.com/r9CStL0xrP — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 19, 2025 It isn’t his fault though, naturally. Nothing ever is. But people aren’t buying it. He promised to fix it on day one: A pillar of Trump’s political strength has been public belief that his policies will be good for the economy, and his rating on the economy remains significantly higher than the final readings of his predecessor in office, Democrat Joe Biden, who ended his term with a 34% approval rating on the economy. But Trump’s rating for the economy is well below the 53% he had in Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted in February 2017, the first full month of his first term as U.S. president. In the latest poll, only 32% of respondents approved of Trump’s performance on inflation, a potential early sign of disappointment in the Republican’s performance on a core economic issue after several years of rising prices weakened Biden ahead of last year’s presidential election. Trump defeated Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, in the Electoral College and narrowly won the popular vote.
“We live in a bureaucracy.” Lol. No, it does not make sense. Here’s a little lesson for Elon that he must have missed when he became a citizen: He does seem to be familiar with this: The Führerprinzip was the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany. It placed the Führer’s word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. In practice, the Führerprinzip gave Adolf Hitler supreme power over the ideology and policies of his political party; this form of personal dictatorship was a basic characteristic of Nazism. The state itself received “political authority” from Hitler, and the Führerprinzip stipulated that only what the Führer “commands, allows, or does not allow is our conscience,” with party leaders pledging “eternal allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
Unless he’s going to ignore a court ruling, he may be getting ahead of himself: The Trump administration on Wednesday nixed federal approval of New York’s “congestion pricing” automobile tolls, which had been instituted just last month to raise funds for the region’s aging mass transit system. In a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the federal government has jurisdiction over highways leading to Manhattan and that these additional tolls posed an unfair burden in motorists outside the city. Duffy called the tolls, targeting Manhattan-bound drivers, “backwards and unfair.” “New York State’s congestion pricing plan is a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners,” Duffy said in statement. […] MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said Wednesday the New York transportation agency will go to court to fight any federal efforts to end the tolls.
This isn’t the most important thing in the scheme of things but it’s telling. Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center to create a new MAGA cultural center, no doubt based upon his fabulous playlist of Pavorotti and The Village People. And now he apparently wants to literally turn the White House in mar-a-Lago so he can hold court exactly as he does at his hideous gilded palaces. He truly thinks he’s a king: He has told associates that he wants to rip up the grass in the Rose Garden, one of the White House’s most iconic and meticulously maintained spots, and replace it with a hard surface to resemble a patio like the one he has at Mar-a-Lago. Designers have drafted options for how to remake the surface of the Rose Garden, which sits just outside the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room. Mr. Trump has discussed whether it should be limestone or an easily interchangeable hard surface, with the possibility of installing hardwood floors for dancing, according to four people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. […] Mr. Trump has other plans for the West Wing.
Using democracy to kill democracy The only thing American about supporters of Donald Trump’s rolling coup is their birth certificates. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (and others) excluded, of course. * Resistance isn’t futile, The Ink reminds readers this morning. Trump 2.0’s revival last week of NIxon’s Saturday Night Massacre, and its rejection of the rule of law nowadays is “just what happens on a Thursday.” The Ink begins: JD Vance claimed last week that mere judges had no place restraining the president’s “legitimate power.” Bad enough. But over the weekend, his boss went further. A lot further. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie called it “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” And it’s hard to think of one that outdoes it. But the refusal of acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle R. Sassoon, last week to carry out AG Pam Bondi’s demand to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams demonstrated that the rule of law is not dead yet.
Yesterday Trump made another ceremonial visit to Real America while President Musk ran the country: Donald Trump swept into Daytona, Florida for the Daytona 500 on Sunday while the arrival of a rainstorm — combined with the president’s own pre-race stunt — threatened to delay the race for hours. Sunday afternoon storms forced race officials to stop NASCAR’s biggest event on the 11th lap. Initial reports indicated that the race could be held up until around 7 p.m. EST. But the rain couldn’t stop the president from hogging the spotlight, which a crowd of cheering Trump fans in the audience didn’t appear to mind. The president took a lap around the track in “the Beast,” the president’s armored vehicle, followed by his motorcade ahead of the race’s start, while the Foo Fighters’ “There Goes My Hero” blared comically loud throughout the track. If it was meant as an ironic gesture, it was lost on the crowd who cheered the flyover of Air Force One and the arrival of Trump’s motorcade.
No doubt. Meanwhile, Trump’s co-president believes he is a god. He’s impregnating as many women as possible (through IVF so he doesn’t have to engage in the dirty work apparently) in order to spread his seed to create some sort of master race. That’s not hyperbolic. He really is that nuts. He has no idea what he’s doing with the US Government and neither does Trump, obviously. (He has never understood how government works.) They are simply taking a wrecking ball to all these government agencies and if somebody dies or people’s lives are ruined by doing that they say they’ll take a look at how they might fix the problem. That’s what he did with his companies and that’s what he thinks will work now. If you don’t care about people at all then this actually makes sense. They are just guinea pigs in your experiment and if they die you learn from what you did wrong. All the years of trial and error, research and implementation are tossed out the window so that a group of teenage coders can “fix” the problems that didn’t exist in the first place.
Dave Karpf wrote about the Silicon Valley Edgelords’ plan for world domination and it’s important: Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network State is a blueprint of sorts. It is the wild fever-dream of Silicon Valley’s libertarian investor-class. It imagines a near future in which online communities use the blockchain to opt out of government and form their own competing “network states.” It’s essentially just Galt’s Gulch, plus blockchain. If you want to know what the Tech Barons are attempting to replace democracy with, then it is important to take Srinivasan seriously. But Balaji is not a serious person. The book is manifestly ridiculous. It is a blueprint drawn in crayon. Balaji’s ideas are stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright.
I was unhappy earlier today about all the media attention to some Arizona voters who told a focus group that they think Donald Trump is just dreamy. It’s the same old same old form the media who are once again working feverishly to pump up Trump’s popularity. But Philip Bump at the Washington Post had some interesting information that indicates that an Arizona focus group may not have its finger on the pulse: YouGov measures the popularity of past presidents among all Americans. And a pair of professors conducts a survey asking members of the American Political Science Association to evaluate presidential “greatness.” At the upper end of the spectrum, there’s general agreement. Abraham Lincoln is the most positively viewed president among both groups. George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt are near the top as well. There’s some deviation on John F. Kennedy, who’s third on YouGov’s list and 10th among the presidential scholars. But that deviation is nothing compared with what happens at the other end of the spectrum. The worst-performing past president among the general public is James K.