Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 47
February 17, 2025
February 16, 2025
February 16, 2025
The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.
At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.
Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.
Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.
After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.
After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”
Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”
Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.
Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.
Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.
Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.
In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.
On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.
On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.
After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”
But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”
Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”
European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.
After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”
Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”
Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”
He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”
A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-alice-weidel-meeting-germany-far-right
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-far-right-germans-proud-past-sins-rcna189281
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-elon-musk-new-international-reactionary-movement/
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-boosting-far-right-politics-globe-rcna189505
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5147425-german-officials-jd-vance-censorship-munich-speech/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/world/europe/ukraine-minerals-us-deal-rejected.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx242lw21jwo
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-inflation-gdp-growth-2031744
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/us/politics/hegseths-wicker-ukraine.html
Writing from LondonTrump’s true enemy isn’t China or Russia but liberal democracyAmericans looking with some desperation for a reputable rationale behind the betrayal of Ukraine have reached for the comfort of realpolitik…Read morea day ago · 155 likes · 31 comments · Nick CohenBluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lhynjo6lyc2p
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3liavmn7zn22n
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3lid4tbh6jk2l
Threads:
@norwaygirlaroundtheworld/post/DGJnOXPhwhl
X:
SarahLongwell25/status/1891172059931168783
rpsagainsttrump/status/1890874015599776189
billkristol/status/1890869328951566553
tvietor08/status/1890899551386517984
goangelo/status/1890943362364035562
February 15, 2025
February 15, 2025
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.
They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope. That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.
That argument began to take hold, and in 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan rode it to the White House with the story of the “welfare queen,” identified as a Cadillac-driving, unemployed moocher from Chicago’s South Side (to signal that the woman was Black). “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” The woman was real, but not typical—she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient—but the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy bled individual enterprise and handed tax dollars to undeserving Black Americans.
Republicans expanded that trope to denigrate all “liberals” of both parties, who supported an active government, claiming they were all wasting government monies. Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.
That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.
What has happened is that federal spending has expanded by five times as the U.S. has turned both to technology and to federal contractors, who outnumber federal workers by more than two to one. Those contractors are concentrated in the Department of Defense. At the same time, budget deficits have been driven by tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump as well as the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Treasury actually ran a surplus when Democratic president Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s.
When asked, Americans say they don’t actually want to get rid of government programs. A late January poll from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research—a gold-standard pollster for public attitudes—found that only about 29% of Americans wanted to see the elimination of a large number of federal jobs, with 40% opposed (29% had no opinion). Instead, 67% of adults believed the U.S. is spending too little on Social Security, 65% thought it was spending too little on education, 62% thought there is too little aid for the poor, 61% thought there is too little spending on Medicare, and 55% thought there is too little spending on Medicaid. Fifty-one percent thought the U.S. should spend more on border security.
Nonetheless, Trump is echoing forty years of Republican rhetoric when he claims to have a “mandate” to slash government and to purge it of the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that hold the playing field level for Black Americans, women, people of color, and ethnic, religious, and gender minorities.
On February 11, Trump signed an executive order putting billionaire Elon Musk in charge of “large-scale reductions in force,” and yesterday, Musk and his allies began purging the federal government of career employees, beginning with employees still in their probationary period, typically those with less than a year in the job. The Department of Veterans Affairs lost 1,000 people, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau lost more than 100 people, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lost more than 2,400, the U.S. Forest Service lost more than 3,000, the Environmental Protection Agency lost 400, the Small Business Administration lost more than 100, and the Interior Department lost 2,300, including workers at national parks. The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to lose nearly all of its 5,200 workers in their probationary period, including 1,300 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—10% of its workforce—while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost 1,500. “I am heartbroken, more than anything, for the future of science in this country as we gut this institution that has for so long been intentionally shielded as much as possible from politics,” an NIH employee told Will Stone, Pien Huang, and Rob Stein of NPR.
Five government employees’ unions have sued, saying the mass firings violate the formal procedures for reductions in force. Employees say they were already understaffed and there is no way they will be able to keep up the level of their performance under the cuts. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) points out that rather than saving money, “it is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars to fire employees the department just invested months into recruiting, vetting and training.”
On Reddit, federal employees shared their experience. One wrote: “The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my f*cking firing. I make $50K a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”
It certainly appears that those in charge of the firings didn’t know what they were doing: on Thursday they fired more than 300 workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently not aware that they were the people who oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons. Today, Peter Alexander and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News reported that officials are now trying to rehire them but can’t figure out how to reach them because the workers lost access to their work email when they were fired.
The firings of federal employees come after the Trump administration instituted a “freeze” on federal spending. This impoundment of funds is illegal—the Constitution, Congress, and the courts have all established that once Congress has established a program, the president must implement it. But the truth is that Congress implemented these programs for a reason, and members would not kill them because they recognize they are important for all Americans.
Now MAGA voters are now discovering that much of what billionaire Elon Musk is cutting as “waste, fraud, and corruption” is programs that benefit them, often more than they benefit Democratic-dominated states. Dramatically, farmers, who backed Trump by a margin of three to one, are badly hit by the freeze on funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act for conservation of land, soil, and water. “This isn’t just hippie-dippy stuff,” Wisconsin cattle, pig, and poultry farmer Aaron Pape told Linda Qiu and Julie Creswell of the New York Times. “This is affecting mainstream farmers.”
Similarly, the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a blow to the agricultural sector: USAID buys about $2 billion in agricultural products from U.S. farmers every year. It has also supported funding for research at state universities like the University of Tennessee, the University of Missouri, and the University of Louisiana.
Cuts to indirect spending in grants from the National Institutes of Health will also hit hard across the country, and states where Trump won more than 55% of the 2024 vote are no exception. Former college president Michael Nietzel noted in Forbes that Texas stands to lose more than $300 million; Ohio, more than $170 million; and Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida, more than $130 million apiece. These losses will cause thousands of layoffs and, as the Association of American Medical Colleges said, “diminish the nation’s research capacity, slow scientific progress and deprive patients, families and communities across the country of new treatments, diagnostics and preventive interventions.”
Trump said Wednesday he wanted to shutter the Department of Education immediately, calling it “a big con job.” That Department provides grants for schools in low-income communities as well as money for educating students with special needs: eight of the ten states receiving the most federal money for their K–12 schools are dominated by Republicans.
Trump has called the Federal Emergency Management Agency a “disaster” and said states should handle natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes on their own. But states do not have the resilience they need for such short-term emergencies. Once again, while all states receive FEMA money, Republican-dominated states get slightly more of that money than Democratic-dominated states do.
Before the 2024 election, Aaron Zitner, Jon Kamp, and Brian McGill of the Wall Street Journal noted that by 2022, 53% of the counties in the U.S. received at least a quarter of their income from government programs—primarily through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those counties heavily support Republicans, including Trump.
On Friday the Republican-dominated House Budget Committee presented its budget proposal to the House. It calls for adding $4.5 trillion to the budget deficit in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. It also calls for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and supplemental nutrition programs. Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said: “The era of wasteful, woke, and weaponized government is over.”
For forty years, Republican politicians could win elections by insisting that government spending redistributed wealth from hardworking taxpayers to the undeserving because they did not entirely purge the federal programs that their own voters liked. Now Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are purging funds for cancer research, family farms, national parks, food, nuclear security, and medical care—all programs his supporters care about—and threatening to throw the country into an economic tailspin that will badly hurt Republican-dominated states.
A January AP/NORC poll found that only 12% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for billionaires to advise presidents, while 60% thought it would be bad.
Forty years of ideology is under pressure now from reality, and the outcome remains uncertain.
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/trump-immigration-trade-policy-farmer-votes
https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/trump-election-farming-counties-trade-war/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/us/politics/trump-funding-freeze-farmers.html
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-every-american-should-know-about-u-s-foreign-aid/
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-most-federal-education-funding-2026257
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-federal-employees-probationary-firings-layoffs-workers-impact/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5147209-agencies-purging-federal-workers-explained/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-trump/index.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5297913/cdc-layoffs-hhs-trump-doge
Josh Levin, “The Welfare Queen,” Slate.com, December 19, 2013.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/trump-usaid-money-american-farms/
Bluesky:
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lhkcn76n3k2w
February 14, 2025
February 14, 2025
On this day, I always like to tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s terrible 1884 Valentine’s Day and how it led to the Progressive Era, but things are happening too fast these days to leave a gap in the record, so you’ll have to look back at last year—or forward to next—for that story. For this year, here goes:
The administration’s order to drop federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sparked a crisis in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by President Trump’s own appointees.
Yesterday that crisis led to multiple resignations from the department as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than drop the corruption charges. When the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, Emil Bove III, tried to do an end run around the Southern District of New York by taking the case to the Public Integrity Section in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and getting lawyer there to dismiss the case, at least five of them resigned as well.
This crisis is really over whether the Department of Justice will defend the rule of law or declare loyalty to Trump alone. And the crisis is growing.
Bove claims that administration officials did not make an arrangement with Adams to dismiss charges in exchange for his political support. But this morning, Adams and Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan undermined that assertion when they appeared together on the Fox News Channel. "If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams, "I'll be back in New York City and we won't be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office, up his butt saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to?'”
Today, Hagan Scotten, the acting assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned in a blistering letter to Bove, calling his justification for dropping the charges against Adams “transparently pretextual.” “[N]o system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he wrote.
Scotten was awarded two bronze stars as a troop commander in Iraq and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. He pointed out to Bove that “[t]here is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake…. [A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”
He continued: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss the case]. But it was never going to be me. Please consider this my resignation.”
Also this morning, legal analyst Barb McQuade reported that “DOJ leadership has put all Public Integrity Section lawyers into a room with 1 hour to decide who will dismiss Adams indictment or else all will be fired.” “Sending them strength to stand by their oath, which is to support the Constitution, not the president’s political agenda,” she added. According to Jeremy Roebuck, Shayna Jacobs, Mark Berman, and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post, one lawyer at the meeting said the discussion was “gut-wrenching” and “not anything any of us expected to see in America.”
At first, they all agreed to resign together, but then Edward Sullivan, a career federal prosecutor approaching retirement, said he would sign the motion to dismiss the case in a bid to save the jobs of his colleagues.
The crisis was reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes Nixon had recorded in the Oval Office concerning the break-in to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.
In that case, popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people: “I am not a crook.”
The administration’s determination to impose its will on the United States is behind its insistence that Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Denali, the highest peak in North America, by executive order. In 2017, Trump pushed hard to make Americans accept that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than those at President Barack Obama’s, an immediately disprovable lie that seemed unimportant at the time but was key to establishing the primacy of Trump’s vision over reality, an acceptance that led, eventually, to the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and now, apparently, to the lie that Elon Musk is cutting “waste and fraud” from the government when, in fact, he appears simply to be cutting programs he and Trump dislike.
Although tech companies and various media outlets have accepted Trump’s language, the Associated Press has continued to use the internationally accepted, historic name: the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative founded in 1846 that produces and distributes news reports across the country and the world. White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich today claimed that the AP’s use of “Gulf of Mexico” showed its “commitment to misinformation,” and announced that the AP would be barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One.
In the Senate, Alaska’s senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are pushing back on Trump’s name change for Denali, sponsoring a bill to require the mountain to be designated “Denali” on maps, documents, and any official U.S. records.
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) pushed back today on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” on Wednesday when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea.
Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Joe Gould and Jamie Dettmer of Politico identified Carlson as a “pro-Putin broadcaster.”
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”
Hackers pushed back today on Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” website, launched earlier this week after Musk claimed that the group was posting its actions on the DOGE website. At the time, the website was essentially blank. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported that the website was built out on Wednesday and Thursday. It appears not to be on government servers, is not secure, and pulls information from an open database that anyone could edit. Coders promptly added: “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN-roro.” One coder told Koebler that the website “[f]eels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
Indeed, Jennifer Bendery of HuffPost pointed out that one of the errors on the page is that it appears to have posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency. Security clearance lawyer Bradley Moss posted: “If you’re a clearance holder, stay away from the DOGE site. These ignorant virgins are going to find themselves prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act before all is said and done.”
Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.
Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”
Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/02/13/congress/murkowski-pushes-on-denali-00204228
https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-gov-website-2/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-doge-posts-classified-data_n_67ae646de4b0513a8d767112
https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/stonewall-era
https://www.nps.gov/ston/learn/index.htm
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-rivera
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson
Bluesky:
barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3li5qae6dy22c
froomkin.bsky.social/post/3li5setalrk23
barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3li5l7iirvh2s
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3li5fylb24c2b
bradmossesq.bsky.social/post/3li626oo5as2v
hughryan.bsky.social/post/3li5pln7ijk26
February 13, 2025
February 13, 2025
Four years ago today, on February 13, 2021, Senate Republicans acquitted former president Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial. Although 57 senators, including 7 Republicans, voted to convict Trump for launching the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, that vote did not reach the threshold of 67 votes—two thirds of the Senate—necessary to convict a president in an impeachment trial.
After the trial, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) explained his refusal to convict by saying he did not believe the Senate could convict an ex-president, although McConnell had been instrumental in delaying the impeachment trial until Trump was out of office, perhaps out of concern about dividing the Republican Party between pro-Trump MAGAs and his own establishment wing. McConnell acquitted Trump but, after the vote, blamed Trump alone for the events of January 6, calling his behavior “unconscionable” but adding: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
Four years later, Trump is back in the White House, and today McConnell provided the only Republican vote against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of health and human services, just as yesterday he provided the only Republican vote against the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
Of Kennedy’s confirmation, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said to his colleagues: “It’s truly astounding that the Senate stands on the brink of confirming Mr. Kennedy to lead America’s public health agencies. And if the Senate weren’t gripped in this soon-to-be infamous period of total capitulation, I don’t think this nominee would have made it as far as a hearing…. If I’d told you a couple of years ago, ‘There’s a guy who’s been nominated to run public health nationwide. His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He’s going to run the whole public health system: Medicare, Medicaid, the C[enters] for D[isease] C[ontrol and Prevention], the N[ational] I[nstitutes of] H[ealth]—all of it. He’ll decide how we protect the country from infectious disease, he’ll set the rules for every hospital in the country, he’ll decide what healthcare and medicines get covered by Medicare, he’ll manage our response in the event of a pandemic.’ And then I told you,… ‘Well,... there are a few concerns about this nominee. First of all, zero relevant experience. He’s a trial lawyer, a politician from a famous family. No medical or scientific background, he’s never run a hospital or a health system or anything like that. Second of all… he’s said some pretty wild stuff about public health, over and over and over again, like: he proposed that Covid-19 might be ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews. Ethnically targeted to spare Jews. He said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. For years he’s been persuading American families against routine childhood immunizations. He’s compared the work of the CDC to ‘Nazi death camps.’... If a couple of years ago I told you all that, and I told you that the Senate was about to put America’s health in this man’s hands, you’d probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind.”
All the Senate Republicans but McConnell voted to confirm Kennedy.
But while Senate Republicans are enabling the Trump administration, a significant revolt against it took place today in New York City and Washington, D.C., when at least six prosecutors resigned in protest after Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, ordered them to dismiss corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams.
In September 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted Adams on five counts of wire fraud, campaign finance offenses, and bribery. According to then–U.S. attorney Damian Williams, “Adams abused his position as this City’s highest elected official…to take bribes and solicit illegal campaign contributions. By allegedly taking improper and illegal benefits from foreign nationals—including to allow a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection—Adams put the interests of his benefactors, including a foreign official, above those of his constituents.”
But on February 10, 2025, Bove directed acting interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, who was elevated by the Trump administration just last month, to dismiss the charges against Adams. That same day, Adams told top New York City officials to stay out of the way of immigration enforcement and to refrain from criticizing President Trump.
Yesterday, February 12, Sassoon wrote an 8-page letter of protest to Attorney General Pam Bondi about the order to drop charges against Adams, but to keep open the possibility of future prosecution. She noted that “the evidence against Adams…proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed federal crimes” and suggested that Bove and the Trump administration proposed “dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws.” “[T]he rule of law depends upon the evenhanded administration of justice,” Sassoon wrote, and the “legal judgments of the Department of Justice must be impartial and insulated from political influence.”
“But Adams has argued in substance—and Mr. Bove appears prepared to concede—that Adams should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the Administration's policy priorities.” Sassoon called Adams’s offer of help to the Trump administration “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for the dismissal of his case.” She recounted a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of her office, in which Adams’s lawyers repeatedly offered an exchange, “indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” Bove ordered the confiscation of notes of the meeting taken by a member of Sassoon’s team.
“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” Sassoon wrote, “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal.” She continued: “I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel….” But if Attorney General Bondi was unwilling to meet or reconsider the dismissal, Sassoon wrote, she was “prepared to offer my resignation.”
Today, in a defensive 8-page letter, Bove attacked Sassoon and accepted her resignation, claiming she was “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution,” and dismissed her suggestion “that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the politics of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General.”
Bove transferred the Adams case to the Public Integrity Section (PIN) in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Rather than dismiss the case, the chief of the Public Integrity Section and the senior career official in the Criminal Division, as well as three of the deputy chiefs at PIN, also resigned. A fourth was giving birth, but Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported that she was expected to resign when she was able.
Today, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration to guarantee the release of more than $3 billion allocated to Pennsylvania’s state agencies. Shapiro noted that multiple federal judges have ordered administration officials to release the funding they have impounded, but that funding has not been restored. The lawsuit details the programs funded with federal money, including repairing abandoned mining lands and contaminated waterways, plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, upgrading energy efficiency for up to 28,000 low-income households to lower utility bills, and so on.
The lawsuit reiterates that “unilaterally suspending funds…violates the U.S. Constitution,” which gives Congress alone the power to write the laws that appropriate funding.
Also today, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the Trump administration to disburse the foreign aid it has impounded. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press note, the judge rejected the administration's argument that it impounded funds to review each program. He said officials “have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/tulsi-gabbard-confirmed
https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/02/10/eric-adams-donald-trump-pardon-2/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/doc-annotation-letter-to-bondi.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/doc-annotation-memo-from-bove.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/nyregion/danielle-sassoon-quit-eric-adams.html
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Kash Patel's ProblemsDo. Not. Confirm…Read more11 hours ago · 775 likes · 82 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/12025-02-13-Complaint.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277333/gov.uscourts.dcd.277333.17.0.pdf
YouTube:
February 12, 2025
February 12, 2025
Yesterday afternoon, in a bizarre performance, President Donald Trump hosted reporters in the Oval Office, the formal working space of the President of the United States. As Trump sat quietly behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States as a symbol of international friendship, billionaire Elon Musk held center stage. Musk talked to the reporters, wearing a jacket over a T-shirt, and a “Make America Great Again” ball cap—a likely violation of the Hatch Act, which Trump’s people routinely ignore—while his young son X wandered around the room, at one point exchanging a look with a downcast Trump that observers immediately captioned: “You’re sitting in my daddy’s chair.”
The event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in charge of the U.S. government. The executive order, titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” provides for an operative from DOGE to be assigned to every agency, where that operative will be in charge of all hiring and firing. It also puts downsizing in DOGE’s hands and establishes that only one new employee can be hired to replace four who leave.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that these operatives report to Musk, who is “clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.”
Trump said that Musk had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” but in fact they have produced no evidence of such waste. Today Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said Congress has had no information from Musk or DOGE, and when asked to produce evidence of fraud, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt simply listed things that seemed to be “against the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.”
As both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported today, the big winner from all the cuts to the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that were scrutinizing his businesses.
On the floor of Congress today, Moskowitz pointed out that Musk’s claims to have uncovered waste, fraud, and abuse present a problem for Congress. Led by House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Republicans have not yet managed to fund the government for 2025, but rather than trying to pass the 12 appropriations bills necessary before the March 14 deadline for a government shutdown, Johnson is hoping to pass a continuing resolution that will extend funding as a comprehensive package. Moskowitz pointed out that if, in fact, the government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress should debate each appropriations bill in detail rather than use a continuing resolution that would perpetuate what the Republicans say is billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Long gone is any pretense that the administration will work to lower prices for ordinary Americans. The Consumer Price Index report out today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that inflation surged in January, gaining a half a point as the cost of gas, rents, and groceries went up. Egg prices rose 15.2%. On Monday, Trump levied a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, raising concerns that prices for cars and trucks, as well as appliances and rebar for construction, will also rise.
Today Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) published an op-ed in the Louisville Courier Journal warning that “Kentuckians can’t afford the high cost of Trump’s tariffs,” which could cost the average Kentucky resident $1,200 a year. “[P]reserving the long-term prosperity of American industry and workers requires working with our allies, not against them,” McConnell wrote, and he called for “strengthen[ing] our friendships abroad.”
Trump responded to today’s report by posting on social media: “BIDEN INFLATION UP!”
The Republicans submitted their budget resolution for funding the government today. It called for cuts of $2 trillion to mandatory spending, a category that includes Social Security and Medicare. Two Republican lawmakers told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico that Republicans expect to cut food aid for more than 40 million low-income Americans; Hill’s colleague Grace Yarrow reports the House Agriculture Committee is eyeing about $150 billion in cuts to supplemental nutrition programs. The proposal also calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and an increase of $4 trillion in the debt ceiling.
Today saw a landmark shift in the foreign policy of the United States. Since World War II, the U.S. has stood behind the international organizations that worked to stabilize the globe by creating spaces for countries to work out their differences without resorting to war. Among the principles of those organizations was that bigger countries couldn’t simply take over other, smaller countries, and one of the ways countries enforced that principle was through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the collective security agreement in which signatories agreed that an attack on one would be an attack on all.
In 2016, Trump’s people weakened the U.S. stance against Russia’s incursions on Ukraine by softening the language of that year’s Republican platform, and Russia worked to help Trump get elected, apparently because Putin believed Trump would look the other way as Russia took not only Ukraine's Crimea but also significant territory in eastern Ukraine. Then, in his first term in office, Trump often took Putin’s side and threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO.
President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to strengthen NATO and pulled together a strong coalition to back Ukraine when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. But when he took office just three weeks ago, Trump alarmed observers by suddenly talking about taking over other countries like Panama and Canada, and Denmark’s territory of Greenland. Such moves would directly undermine the post–World War II international organizations the U.S. has always championed. They would destroy NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian organization that protects North America from aerospace threats, and would also rip apart the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that has joined Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since World War II.
Today it appears Trump is making good on this threat to turn away from the longstanding policy of the U.S. and toward the foreign policy advocated by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Trump has been talking about demanding $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for continued U.S. support, but today, at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group put together under Biden to coordinate assistance to Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested a new U.S. position. Hegseth echoed Putin’s demands, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus giving up two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders. He wanted, he said, to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”
Trump’s social media account—it did not sound like his own words—posted today that he “just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia…. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” thus offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine. And, the post said, they had agreed to start negotiations over Ukraine, although it also specified they had not included Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their talk. The post said that Trump “feel[s] strongly, [the talks] will be successful.”
The Russian government’s readout of the call added that “bilateral economic relations between Russia and the United States were also brought up during the conversation,” language that almost certainly means Putin wants Trump to lift the economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine that have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy.
The Trump administration also swapped U.S. teacher Marc Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a kingpin of Russian cybercrime who operated one of the world’s largest currency exchanges, facilitating drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering. When announcing Fogel’s release, Trump was asked if Russia had given anything in exchange. He answered: “Not much, no. They were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually." Russia refused to include Fogel, who was wrongfully detained in 2021, in the large prisoner swap of June 2024.
Today, the Senate approved Tulsi Gabbard, who has often made comments sympathetic to Russia and who has defended former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia after the Syrian people ousted him, as the U.S. director of national intelligence. All Democrats voted against Gabbard and all Republicans voted in favor of her, with the important exception of Senator Mitch McConnell, who said: “The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.”
Tonight, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom released a joint statement vowing to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and making it clear that “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.”
—
Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/not-hyperbole-anymore-musk-is-in-charge-of-the-us-government
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/11/trump-workforce-cuts-elon-musk/
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-macro-c9cfca50-e948-11ef-aa3f-a Nm e329e76baab5.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/business/economy/tariffs-steel-aluminum-manufacturing.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/191469/donald-trump-press-secretary-karoline-leavitt-fraud
https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/baerbock-weimar-2700212
https://apnews.com/article/inflation-economy-federal-reserve-48e77a855078b37bf3ccd58c9db94c82
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/inflation-increased-january-posing-obstacle-tariff-plans/story
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/12/trump-ukraine-rare-earth-critical-mineral-deal-bessent/
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-demands-500b-in-rare-earths-from-ukraine-for-support/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/tulsi-gabbard-confirmed
https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76259
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-republicans-budget-resolution-trump/
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILLS-119NAih.pdf
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-agriculture/2025/02/10/gop-plots-snips-to-snap-00203297
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5141580-trump-putin-meet-saudi-arabia/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
Bluesky:
carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3lhy64afkok2o
atrupar.com/post/3lhyfbruqck2r
newseye.bsky.social/post/3lhz7x32xtk2m
linjurz.bsky.social/post/3lhycezw6r22y
mrsbettybowers.bsky.social/post/3lhykjkft7k2b
axidentaliberal.bsky.social/post/3lhyos2gqk22x
atrupar.com/post/3lhynjo6lyc2p
atrupar.com/post/3lhyn3pkkbs2p
djrothkopf.bsky.social/post/3lhylrvqpak22
X
alexanderbolton/status/1889496319946789078
matthewamiller/status/1889676351378010462
Ronxyz00/status/1889342416747893058
acyn/status/1889363477715939461
byheatherlong/status/1889670034210869409
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1301 followers
