Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 45
February 27, 2025
February 26, 2025
This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”
Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.
But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.
Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.
Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.
In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.
Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.
Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.
Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”
Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”
A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.
Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself. Trump didn’t turn to Vice President J.D. Vance until 56 minutes into the meeting, and Vance spoke for only 36 seconds.
But Trump appeared to be aware of the popular anger at Musk’s power over the government and today dared the Cabinet members to suggest they weren’t happy with the arrangements. “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump wrote on his social media channel this morning. “The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!”
“Is anybody unhappy?” Trump asked the Cabinet officers during the meeting. When they applauded in response, he commented: “I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/trump-executive-orders-project-2025/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/25/veterans-affairs-contracts-canceled/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/26/veterans-affairs-contracts-canceled-reversal/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-praises-project-2025-2000245
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/politics/amy-gleason-doge-administrator.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/26/politics/fact-check-trump-cabinet-meeting/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/26/trump-executive-order-musk-doge
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/26/politics/cabinet-meeting-musk-trump/index.html
Bluesky:
annabower.bsky.social/post/3lj4iyds7nk2y
February 26, 2025
February 25, 2025
February 25, 2025
On Friday, February 21, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg posted: “A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”
Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now: How should the U.S. raise money, and how should it spend money?
Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.
Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.
But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.
Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.
That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.
Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of “continuing resolutions,” measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next ten years, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail—including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments—that deficit jumps closer to $11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump’s claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers.
So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now, though, there is a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric: the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow.
On January 21, 2025, the U.S. Treasury had to begin using extraordinary measures to pay the debt obligations Congress has authorized. In order for Trump and the Republicans to get their tax cuts, that debt ceiling will have to be raised. But a number of MAGA Republicans are already furious at the growing debt and the budget deficits that feed it, and they say they will not raise that ceiling unless there are extreme cuts to the federal budget. Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it is actually Republican-dominated districts that receive the bulk of federal monies.
This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that is claiming to slash federal spending, although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five-biggest ticket items it had touted on its “wall of receipts.”
As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation, but they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the project over to Musk.
They are making it a point to look the other way when people, including judges, ask under what authorization Musk and his team are operating. Today, once again, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say who was in charge of DOGE, a day after Matt Bai reported in the Washington Post that two of Musk’s DOGE employees, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, used their access to payment systems to override explicit orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and shut off funding to the United States Agency for International Development. Bai reports that Farritor is 23-year-old dropout from the University of Nebraska who interned at SpaceX; Kliger, 25, spreads conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” attended Berkeley, and is now installed at the Treasury Department.
This afternoon the White House said that Amy Gleason, a former official at the U.S. Digital Service, the agency that Trump’s executive order may have turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, is serving as the acting administrator of DOGE. Reporters reached her by phone in Mexico.
In an interview with NPR, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman, explained that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary’s democracy into “a system that's designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values” in what became “a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class.” Trump and MAGAs see Orbán as a model, and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that manages civilian aviation and that Trump and DOGE gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet system for its information technology networks.
But even if Musk is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52–48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats and Independents, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not to advance that resolution.
Today the House was supposed to vote on its own budget resolution, and it is here that the stark contrast Buttigieg identified shows most strongly. The House resolution calls for cutting $4.5 trillion in taxes, primarily for the wealthy and corporations, while also adding $100 billion for immigration and border security, $90 billion for Homeland Security, and $100 billion in military spending. It enables those cuts and spending, at least in the short term, by raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
The plan offsets those tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts, including $880 billion over the next decade in cuts to the part of the budget that covers Medicare and Medicaid, and $230 billion in cuts to the part of the budget that covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. House speaker Mike Johnson claimed that all the cuts would come from the same place Musk claims, without evidence, to be cutting: “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
As Buttigieg noted, this budget cuts benefits for the poorest Americans in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, but the proposed cuts are not enough to get all MAGAs, many of whom want far more draconian cuts, on board. Johnson needed either to corral them or to get Democratic votes.
For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S.: on Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that “[t]he top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion in wealth,” while “[t]he bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth.”
Shauneen Miranda of the New Jersey Monitor reported the statement of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) today that 24% of Americans get their healthcare from Medicaid, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say that two thirds of nursing home patients receive Medicaid. Cuts would devastate American families. “For what, because Elon Musk needs another billion dollars?” Murphy asked. “The scope of this greed is something that we have never, ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”
At a press conference, House Democrats called out what Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) called “this billionaire budget resolution.” “I know that I and my colleagues here today are ready to go to the mat and fight all the way until we stop this budget and finally demand that, instead of a tax break for greedy billionaires, that we actually tax those greedy billionaires and expand the programs that working people deserve,” Casar said.
It took pressure from Trump to get the House resolution across the line this evening. It ultimately passed by a vote of 217 to 215, with only one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting with all the Democrats against it. Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave, so Representative Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) flew across the country with her one-month-old son to “vote NO on this disastrous budget proposal.”
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Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-
https://www.epi.org/policywatch/senate-passes-budget-resolution-s-con-res-7/
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/21/g-s1-50100/senate-budget-resolution
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/24/musk-doge-usaid-cuts-dc/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02//business/musk-faa-starlink-contract/inde25x.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/25/nx-s1-5308067/house-republicans-budget-vote-mike-johnson
https:// w.cnn.com/2025/02/25/politics/amy-gleason-doge-acting-administrator/index.html
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2798
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lizirg2u4z2l
schumer.senate.gov/post/3lizkzswcv22w
ditzkoff.bsky.social/post/3lizq7e6tbk2d
laureldavilacpa.bsky.social/post/3lizpit57sk2p
rbreich.bsky.social/post/3litynvxand2k
atrupar.com/post/3liza54mpbk2u
kylec.bsky.social/post/3lj2c5kw2ys2m
bbkogan.bsky.social/post/3lj27oihao32m
X:
February 24, 2025
February 24, 2025
Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”
For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.
At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.
“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.
In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”
As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.
Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.
On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”
The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”
Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”
“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”
It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.
On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.
The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.
“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”
Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.
Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.
John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”
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Notes:
https://www.ft.com/content/1511aa42-a9ad-4952-99c8-98bea07d0414
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0ng4eyr3xo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpv4n0dg3v3o
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/putins-three-years-of-humiliation/681810/
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-wounded-database-hospital/33323265.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/24/united-nations-ukraine-russia-trump/
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/11/ukraine-democracy-wartime-elections-russia-zelensky/
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_585
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/uk-announces-new-package-sanctions-against-russia-2025-02-24/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/world/europe/europe-trump-russia-ukraine.html
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/russia-hits-ukraine-with-largest-drone-attack-yet/ss-AA1zpXeb
https://www.reuters.com/world/macron-arrives-white-house-ukraine-talks-with-trump-2025-02-24/
Bluesky:
youranoncentral.bsky.social/post/3liwu4b2lek2f
thesgtjoker.bsky.social/post/3liwfcpvjf22f
February 23, 2025
February 23, 2025
Something is shifting,” scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder posted on Bluesky yesterday. “They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump,
Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”
Rather than backing down on their unpopular programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are intensifying their behavior as if trying to grab power before it slips away.
Trump’s blanket pardons of the people convicted for violent behavior in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were highly unpopular, with 83% of Americans opposed to those pardons. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent. And yet, on February 20, the Trump Justice Department expanded those pardons to cover gun and drug charges against two former January 6 defendants that were turned up during Federal Bureau of Investigation searches related to the January 6 attack.
Then, on February 21, a number of people pardoned after committing violent crimes, including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—who was sentenced to 22 years in prison—and Proud Boy Ethan Nordean (18 years) and Dominic Pezzola (10 years), as well as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes (18 years) and Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who sat with his feet on a desk in then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office (four and a half years), held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to announce they were going to sue the Justice Department for prosecuting them.
Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that the group followed the route they took around the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then posed for photos chanting as they had that day: “Whose house? Our house.” Protesters nearby heckled the group, and when one of them put her phone near Tarrio’s face while he was talking to a photographer, he batted her arm away. Capitol Police officers promptly arrested him for assault.
A number of the January 6 rioters were visiting the Capitol from the nearby Conservative Political Action Conference being held in Maryland. There, MAGA participants continued to normalize Nazi imagery as both Steve Bannon and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui threw fascist-style salutes to the crowd.
Yesterday, Tarrio posted a video of himself following officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 though the lobby of a Washington hotel where the anti-Trump Principles First conference was taking place. According to Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, Tarrio followed officers Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, and Aquilino Gonell, saying: “You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 f*cking years. Now you don’t want to look in my eyes, you f*cking cowards.” Fanone turned and told him: “You’re a traitor to this country.”
Today, the hotel had to be evacuated after someone claiming to be “MAGA” emailed a threat claiming to have rigged four bombs: two in the hotel, one in Fanone’s mother’s mailbox, and one in the mailbox of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic. After listing the names of several of the conference attendees—and singling out Fanone—the email said they “all deserve to die.” The perpetrator claimed to be acting “[t]o honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump.”
Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are also ramping up their behavior even as the public is starting to turn against the government cuts that are badly hurting American veterans, American farmers, and U.S. medical research. The courts keep ruling against their efforts and their claims of finding “waste, fraud, and abuse” are being widely debunked. Rather than rethinking their course in the face of opposition, they seem to be becoming more belligerent.
On Saturday, Trump urged Musk to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, although the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential advisor. “Will do, Mr. President,” Musk replied. He then posted a command to federal employees: “Consistent with [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Shortly after, emails went out giving workers 48 hours to list five things they had accomplished in the past week.
This sparked outrage among Americans who noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. S.V. Date of HuffPost noted on February 18 that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on 9 of his first 30 days in office and that Trump’s golf outings had already cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million.
Reddit was flooded with potential responses to Musk’s demand, scorching it and Musk. The demand also exposed a rift in the administration, as department heads—including Kash Patel, the newly confirmed head of the FBI, as well as officials at the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of the Navy—asserted their authority to review the workers in their own departments, telling them not to respond to Musk’s demand.
Then users pointed out that the new government employee email system the Department of Government Efficiency team set up explicitly says that using it is voluntary, and that resignations of federal employees must be voluntary. Musk responded by sending out a poll on X asking whether X users think federal employees should be “required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished” in the past week.
The entire exercise made it look as if the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus are dangerously loose. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “Drunk on power and ketamine.”
Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another,” Locke wrote.
Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, “with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws.” Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to “uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.”
“Otherwise,” Neem writes, “Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency.” He continues: “Trump’s actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself.”
In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is “grossly unconstitutional.” Trump’s concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is “absolutely straight up unconstitutional,” King said, “and it’s illegal.”
“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”
“This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It's the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don't want to buck the President, we'll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat's a copout. It's our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That's what we swear to when we enter this body.”
“What's it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what's going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What's it going to take?”
“[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we've got to respond to it. I'm just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat's what the framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that's what we're headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”
Senator King, along with Maine governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state.
On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. “I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” she said. “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
On July 28, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen (R-ME), who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority to draw up articles of impeachment against Republican president Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, “I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office; it’s just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment.”
Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate coverup came to light. “Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president,” Cohen recalled. “That’s when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, ‘We were wrong, and you were right, and we’ll support this.’ ”
It’s a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/tablet/2025/02/19/feb-13-18-2025-washington-post-ipsos-poll/
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/nx-s1-5304454/jan-6-pardons-drugs-firearms
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/21/proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-arrested-00205513
https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-arrested-us/story?id=119057808
https://www.justsecurity.org/108229/what-just-happened-musk-email-federal-employees/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-doge-musk-email-goes-seriously-sideways
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/politics/mar-a-lago-trump-remote-work-golf/index.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-golf-doge_n_67b50fbfe4b0319f377e6c6a
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5159062-donald-trump-elon-musk-advice/
https://people.com/ashley-st-clair-sues-elon-musk-for-sole-legal-custody-of-their-son-rsc-11684615
Johann’s SubstackDonald Trump Is No Longer the President of the United StatesI remember that day in 1985 when I accompanied my parents to a courthouse in San Francisco. As I recall, they stood before a judge and, with other new Americans all around them, said the Pledge of Allegiance and became American citizens. We then went out for sandwiches. I was in fifth grade. It was one of the most significant days of my life. That was t…Read more12 days ago · 52 likes · 5 comments · Johann Neemhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/upshot/doge-musk-trump-errors.html
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf
https://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/28/bill-cohens-lessons-from-watergate/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/22/enrique-tarrio-capitol-police
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Unauthorized Use of my Name
Hi Folks:
Just a quick heads up that I have not endorsed any of the events or protests circulating under my name.
This statement is neither opposition to the events nor support for them or projects like them. It’s simply clarifying that I don’t know the organizers, have not had a hand in any of the lists, and have not given permission for anyone to use my name in association with them.
Any time I want to put my name on something— and, crucially, have the time to do something other than write these letters and do the webcasts— you’ll hear it directly from me, either here or posted on my own, verified, social media accounts.
It’s a confusing world out there, I know. I hope this clears things up for all those who have written to ask.
Best,
Heather
February 22, 2025
February 22, 2025
Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.
In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.
Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”
National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”
Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.
While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.
In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.
In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.
When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.
It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.
In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.
In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”
That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."
Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”
Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.
This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”
Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”
No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”
Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.
While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.
And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”
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Notes:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/152
https://time.com/7260646/trump-fires-chairman-joint-chiefs-of-staff-other-military-officers/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs.html
https://apnews.com/article/tuberville-senate-military-holds-b4d4fe19bada70a085208c9d82c35cb5
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/cq-brown-and-friday-night-massacre/681803/
https://www.nsl4a.org/nsl4a-announcements/nsl4a-statement-firing-senior-military-officers
The BulwarkThe Cruelty Isn’t the Point. It’s the Pleasure.Over the years, we’ve piled up some indelible images of gutless Republican surrender to Trump. Ted Cruz’s face of pure pain as he phone-banked for Trump in 2016. Mitt Romney’s rueful smile at dinner with Trump after that election. And now, a dead-eyed Marco Rubio cheerleading Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine from…Read more4 days ago · 1075 likes · 397 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Will Selber
Scenes from a Slow Civil WarThere Are No FacesMy phone buzzed: a text message from a friend. “WTAF.” Below that, a link to a tweet. The official White House account. “ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” There was an emoji of a stereo speaker. I looked up ASMR, a term I’d heard before but with which I wasn’t familiar. Recent vintage; it stands for “autonomous sensory median response.” People ref…Read more4 days ago · 219 likes · 59 comments · Jeff SharletDonald Trump, Truth Social post, February 10, 2025, 9:16 a.m.
“Westerns,” Time, March 30, 1959, p. 52.
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/10/trump-military-academy-visitors-boards-purge
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-memorial-day-arlington-virginia
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/milley-farewell-speech-trump-dictator-00119130
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ominous-3
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