Uncategorized

Today Trump is meeting with Netanyahu and took some questions beforehand about Gaza during his daily Executive Order pageant. Once again he endorsed ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, saying that they will be happy to go in “large groups or many smaller groups” to some pieces of beautiful pieces of land where Saudi Arabia and others (not the US!) will build them some nice condos and everyone will live happily ever after. He has the mind of a child. Here is the full exchange: Trump: I’d like to see Jordan or Egypt take them. Look, the Gaza thing has not worked, it’s never worked and I feel very differently about Gaza than a lot of people. I think they should get a good fresh beautiful piece of land and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable and make it a home. Palestinians say they don’t want to leave though.I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some really nice with plenty of money in the area that’s for sure.

Brian Beutler has some useful thoughts on how to focus as we confront this complicated crisis. He writes: To my mind we have four main kinds of provocation raining down on us: headfakes, attacks on liberal pluralism, policy sabotage, and genuine constitutional crises. In the headfakes category he has Greenland, The Panama Canal and other grandiose ideas that may or may not happen or could just as easily be like the 25% tariffs which make a big splash but end up just being PR moves for Trump to declare victory. The attacks on liberal pluralism are all the heinous assaults on DEI, transgender kids, immigrants etc which makes us want to scream but which he says, and I think he’s right, still fit into the category of normal politics even though they are grotesque, cruel and disgusting which is not unprecedented. He says, and he’s right about this too, that a lot of this is bait to make us focus on that while they destroy the very firmament of our government and democracy. And these are all wedge issues designed to create division among Democrats.

In an age of renewed great-power competition Democrats play for Team USA. Republicans won’t even play for their home team. Elon Musk and his Elonjungen busted into USAID headquarters last week and illegally shuttered the foreign aid agency that for 60 years has been a key instument for projecting U.S. soft power in the world. He found and posted a list of small-dollar grants supporting mainly diversity-related projects he declared “waste and abuse,” lefty boondoggles proving that USAID had to die. The cited items amount to not even a fraction of a percent of the agency’s $40 billion budget. On that basis, the unelected Musk declared the agency “a criminal organization” and shuttered its operations around the world. How many quirky, objectionable line items might be found among the Pentagon’s $800 billion budget? (The public budget, that is, not the “black budget.”) A similar fraction? Similar enough and thus substantially more in dollar sums that means the Pentagon has to die? Has anyone looked? Just asking. When was the last time the Pentagon passed an audit? Oh, never.

Many of us are aghast at the unprecedented dismantlement of the US administrative state. Mass terminations. Website erasure. Removal of watchdogs. Unchecked access to the treasury. All around me, people are trying to connect what’s happening to historical events. Is this fascism? A hostile corporate takeover? A coup? People want a frame both to understand […]

During the last election economics were on everyone’s minds. Despite the greater economy being healthy with an extraordinary job market not seen since the 1960s, people told pollsters that they were extremely upset about the high cost of living that had been brought on by the disruption of the pandemic and took a couple of years to finally sort out. In poll after poll, Americans said that inflation was the biggest problem facing the nation. When asked what he planned to do about this, then candidate Donald Trump’s only answers were “tariffs!” and ” growth.” It was the cure all for every economic pain that ailed you. Here he is answering a question about what specific legislation he would propose to deal with the high cost of child care. Yes, you guessed it. Tariffs. He promised over and over again that he was going to lower the cost of living and he made it clear that the way he planned to do it was with his beloved tariffs. Well, we’re about to find out how that’s going to work.

This is an excerpt of a piece by legal expert Sam Bagenstos laying out a few of the illegal acts committed by Trump and Musk in the past two weeks.

At least one of them is: At the press conference outside of USAID headquarters, Senator Brian Schatz: "If you want to change an agency, introduce a bill and pass a law. You cannot wave away an agency that you don't like or that you disagree with by executive order, or by literally storming into the… pic.twitter.com/st0kaEmibI — Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) February 3, 2025 At the press conference outside of USAID headquarters, Senator Brian Schatz: “If you want to change an agency, introduce a bill and pass a law. You cannot wave away an agency that you don’t like or that you disagree with by executive order, or by literally storming into the building and taking over the servers. That is not how the American system of government works.” The WSJ reports: Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said he would place a “blanket hold” on all of President Trump’s State Department nominees until the administration’s attack on the leading U.S. foreign-assistance agency ends, a move that threatens to stall Trump’s ability to get his foreign-policy team in place.

Here we go JV Last at the Bulwark provides a handy guide to what’s happening this morning in the financial markets. The question is will the drop stay below 7 percent? The Dow plunged over 600 points right out of the gate. Donald Trump just launched the “dumbest trade war in history.” Thus saith the Wall Street Journal. While people are screaming for more affordable housing, Trump dramatically increased the price of lumber out of Canada just ahead of the spring building season. That’s on top of the “five-alarm fire” Trump started in firing inspectors general and FBI agensts from coast to coast. Oh, and Mr. America First allowing Elon Musk to shut down USAID: In Washington, USAID’s headquarters was closed for the day, with employees told in an email to remain at home. Logos and photos of its aid work have been stripped from building walls. And its website and social media accounts have gone dark, replaced with a reduced version of its webpage on the State Department’s website.

A man Ben Smith from Semafor calls a “MAGA Intellectual” (a contradiction in terms) has been tapped for Assisstant Secretary of State: Beattie has been a vocal critic of broad swathes of American foreign policy and represents a dramatic step away from the establishment Republicanism Rubio long embodied:  In a widely-circulated essay on the site he founded, Revolver, Darren Beattie compared the “color revolutions” that Western democracies backed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s to “the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.” Beattie, who has a PhD in political theory from Duke University, where he also taught, was fired in 2018 after attending a conference with white nationalists. He was appointed by Trump in 2020 to a the Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad, a move that the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called “outrageous” at the time. (Greenblatt declined to comment Sunday.) The commission works with other governments to preserve sites related to World War II and the Holocaust.

Is this what MAGA voted for? Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chairman of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy. WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer. Wired has now reported the names and backgrounds of all these young fellows.