Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 49
February 7, 2025
February 6, 2025
February 6, 2025
The U.S. has seen high-profile immigration raids since Trump took office, but Dara Kerr of The Guardian today reported that the Trump administration “is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations.” On January 24, 2025, old online press releases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from as much as a decade ago were updated to make Google prioritize them as new releases, thus creating the illusion that raids are taking place all over the country. When The Guardian asked ICE and Google about the changed dates, some of the new dates disappeared, dropping those stories out of the top of search results.
Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like them but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power to undeserving Black and Brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Over the past 45 years, that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the “Deep State,” whom they blame for destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it.
But the Republicans’ vision of the nation never reflected reality and now, under President Donald Trump, it is entirely made-up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that last week’s fatal midair collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Trump today claimed CBS “defrauded the public” in “the greatest broadcasting scandal in history” when it exercised normal editing procedures on a 60 Minutes interview with then–vice president Kamala Harris that he insisted—falsely—involved replacing her actual answers with others. Today, Trump called for CBS News and 60 Minutes to be “immediately terminated,” despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of the press.
MAGA is amplifying right-wing lies. Today, influencers—including Musk—claimed that USAID secretly bankrolled Politico, claiming that the media site had taken $8 million from USAID. In fact, that sum was not an annual grant, but rather years of subscriptions from across the government to Politico Pro, a pricey subscription service for data and legislative analyses for lobbyists and government officials. “Politico…has never taken a cent of government subsidies or state funding,” said the chief executive officer of its parent company. “[P]eople are paying for… [Politico Pro] because they need the service,” he said. “It’s not subsidies, it’s capitalism.” When Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined the chorus parroting the lie, fact-checkers noted that her office is a subscriber: it paid $7,150 for a yearlong subscription starting last January.
Nonetheless, Trump posted in all-caps that it "LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A 'PAYOFF' FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS."
Another story spreading disinformation appeared today after the State Department claimed that Panama had agreed to let U.S. government vessels transit the Panama Canal for free. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino told reporters that the story was “lies and falsehoods” and noted that he had told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that he doesn’t have the legal authority to waive transit fees for anyone.
This morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump boasted that he had delivered water to California, saying: “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn’t that easy to do. But I opened it up and it’s pouring down.” Camille von Kaenel and Annie Snider of Politico talked to Trump supporters among California’s farmers. They reported today that the 2 billion gallons of water Trump dumped onto the ground last week was water for irrigation that could never make it to the Los Angeles fires, which were under control by the time he dumped the water, in any case. For now, the farmers are sticking with Trump despite the loss of the water intended for their fields in the dry summer, but called for “close coordination” over the “incredibly complex” California water system.
Brian Stelter posted a December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: "Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals." Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.”
Performative victories over “the Libs” make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders distort reality in order to stay in power?
The current administration’s actions strengthen the hand of foreign nations, especially China, against the U.S. Yesterday, Pam Bondi, Trump’s second choice for attorney general—the first had to withdraw after the House Ethics Committee drew attention to his drug use and sexual behavior—took the oath of office.
Today, Bondi disbanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Then-director of the FBI Christopher Wray established FITF in 2017 to stop countries like Russia and China from interfering with American politics, as Russia had done in 2016 to help elect Trump. FARA required anyone accepting money from a foreign government to declare that connection, and was key in helping law enforcement agencies to dismantle foreign influence operations. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, for example, pleaded guilty to violating FARA when he didn’t disclose that he was being paid by those linked to the Russian government. (In December 2020, before he left office, Trump pardoned Manafort.)
Prioritizing human smuggling and drug cartels, the Justice Department under Bondi is scaling back white-collar crimes like bribery of foreign officials, kleptocracy, and money laundering. In the past few years, the Justice Department has recovered yachts, planes, and real estate from Russians sanctioned because of the attack on Ukraine. “Taken together these changes are an invitation to foreign actors to interfere in American affairs,” Aaron Zelinsky, a former national security prosecutor for the Justice Department, told Ben Penn of Bloomberg Law. “Even worse, it’s an invitation to Americans to help them do it.”
The assault against the United States Agency for International Development is tangled in foreign power struggles, too. Andrew Duehren, Alan Rappeport and Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that while Trump administration officials claimed they were conducting a general review of the Treasury Department’s payments system when they sought access to it, emails show that the plan all along was to freeze payments to USAID.
Daniel Wu of the Washington Post noted today that the destruction of USAID will take billions of dollars from American farmers, as well as other businesses, and Paul Sonne of the New York Times reported today that authoritarian leaders, including those of Russia, Hungary, and El Salvador are cheering on Musk’s boast that he was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” USAID funding was less than 1% of the U.S. budget and focused on humanitarian assistance and healthcare for underserved populations. But it also promoted democracy. It has monitored elections in Russia, documenting extensive voting irregularities there. With the U.S. abandoning foreign aid, China can step in to fill the void.
China will also be able to step in at the G20 summit of the world’s largest economies to be held in November in Johannesburg, South Africa, if Secretary of State Marco Rubio keeps his vow not to attend. Rubio says he is walking away from the international table because Trump says he is unhappy that South Africa is “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” Trump ally Elon Musk hails from South Africa and has agreed that “white South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.” South Africa has also refused official approval of Musk’s Starlink satellite system because of a state requirement that 30% of a company must be owned locally, a requirement SpaceX has criticized.
Yesterday, a White House order signed by Trump required the Central Intelligence Agency to send over an unclassified email listing all the employees hired in the past two years. David Sanger and Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported that the list included the first names and first initial of the last name of those hires, including “a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, called the sharing of the information over unsecured channels “a disastrous national security development,” adding: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China.”
If there are advantages for foreign adversaries in the policies of the administration currently in power, there are also advantages to favored corporations. Musk’s team, along with Trump’s officials, is dismantling the government with the claim that it is inefficient and corrupt, but it appears their plan is to put Musk and his ilk in charge of the services Americans need.
In what sounds like an attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said—and here are his words, as Aaron Rupar transcribed them—“We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system one by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all the kinds of things necessary for that. And it's very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve, bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment . And one of things that’s gonna be, I'm gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys— I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted today that “the DOGE team” is “going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system,” saying that “‘experienced’ Washington bureaucrats are the reason our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling.”
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton pointed out that “US airlines had gone 16 years without fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22-year-olds fix things fast.”
Critics of the idea of Musk taking over the nation’s air traffic control systems note that his Tesla electric vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America. The average fatal crash rate is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven; Tesla has a rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven. On social media, “God” posted: “Thou shalt not let the foreign billionaire whose rockets blow up all the time anywhere near the air traffic control system,” an apparent reference to the January 16 explosion of a SpaceX rocket over the Caribbean that scattered debris over the region led the Federal Aviation Administration to lock down airspace over Turks and Caicos.
There is apparently yet another reason that people will lie to gain power. Today, Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal reported that one of Musk’s young team of engineers, Marko Elez, 25, abruptly resigned after Long linked him to a social-media account that championed racism and eugenics, the idea that human populations can be improved by selective breeding, an idea embraced in Nazi Germany.
Last night, Senate Democrats filibustered for 30 hours in an attempt to convince Republicans to join them in rejecting Trump’s right-wing religious extremist nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. In the House, Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act to stop Musk and DOGE from accessing personal financial data.
U.S. District Judge John Coughenour indefinitely blocked Trump’s executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” “It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain,” Coughenour said.
The Department of Justice under Attorney General Bondi immediately said it would appeal the ruling. And tonight, Senate Republicans confirmed Christian nationalist Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Stephen Groves of the Associated Press noted that Vought once described the budget director’s job as “a President’s air-traffic control system.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) described his confirmation as a “triple-header of a disaster for hardworking Americans.”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google
https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/06/colorado-immigration-raids-rattle-advocates-authorities/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/06/media/mathias-dopfner-fareed-zakaria-politico/index.html
https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/1738849968906adae8d853eee/raw
https://digbysblog.net/2025/02/06/dementia-on-parade/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/06/trump-california-water-policy-farmers-00202751
https://cyberscoop.com/doj-disbands-foreign-influence-task-force/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/06/politics/bondi-trump-election-fara-justice/index.html
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-cbs-60-minutes-transcript-fcc-rcna190986
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/trump-musk-usaid.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/world/europe/usaid-russia-putin.html
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5131025-rubio-g20-summit-south-africa/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/science/spacex-starship-explosion-debris-turks-caicos/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5130744-trump-judge-birthright-order-blocked/
https://www.wsj.com/tech/doge-staffer-resigns-over-racist-posts-d9f11a93?mod=hp_lead_pos4
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/trump-usaid-money-american-farms/
Bluesky:
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February 5, 2025
February 5, 2025
Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.”
Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.
But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.
This week’s threatened tariff war blew up in Trump’s face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially assured him they would do things they are already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump’s tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S.
Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump’s team “had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea” when Trump blurted it out. “[T]here had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal,” Swan and Haberman wrote, “let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” an idea his own officials considered “fantastical even for Mr. Trump.”
Trump’s comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there.
Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left.
In his important piece “The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It,” published February 2 in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president’s multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump’s term. Snyder referred to the president as “a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras.”
Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.
Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”
Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”
This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country’s healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.
On X, Musk said “this is where the big money fraud is happening.” But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.
Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, “DOGE has not presented evidence of ‘fraud’; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don’t need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]”
“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. “They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom's Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."
While Murphy didn’t say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk’s team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that “[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?”
Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”
In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”
Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) announced he would introduce the ELON MUSK Act—the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act—which would ban federal contracts for Special Government Employees, similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees.
Opposition might well continue to grow, as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home (the collapse of USAID is already an international crisis). Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump’s own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive healthcare from federally qualified health centers; half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education; the top six states that receive grants under the department—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—all voted for Trump in 2024.
Tonight, Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR), Patty Murray (WA), Gary Peters (MI), and Brian Schatz (HI), will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Vought’s proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” the senators said. “Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump’s illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs.”
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Notes:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/trump-plots-revenge-on-bolton-impeachment-enemies
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/trump-executive-orders-project-2025/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/politics/trump-policy-project-2025-executive-orders-invs/index.html
Thinking about...The Logic of DestructionWhat is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together…Read more4 days ago · 8527 likes · 258 comments · Timothy Snyderhttps://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-doge/
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-doge-medicare-medicaid-fraud-e697b162
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/politics/trump-gaza-takeover.html
Public NoticeTrump declares flawless victory in pointless trade warRead morea day ago · 320 likes · 20 comments · Liz Dyehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/05/doge-health-agencies-labor/
https://newrepublic.com/post/191133/trump-order-abolish-education-department-republicans-red-states
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/02/05/congress/democrats-elon-musk-act-00202567
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February 4, 2025
February 4, 2025
Shortly after 1:00 this morning, Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, according to three of their sources, “[a] 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies [SpaceX and X], has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.”
According to the reporters, Elez apparently has the privileges to write code on the programs at the Bureau of Fiscal Service that control more than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans’ pay. The admin privileges he has typically permit a user “to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.”
“If you would have asked me a week ago” if an outsider could’ve been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, “I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*ck knows."
The reporters note that control of the Bureau of Fiscal Service computers could enable someone to cut off monies to specific agencies or even individuals. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like?” asked Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reported that his sources said that Elez and possibly others got full admin access to the Treasury computers on Friday, January 31, and that he—or they—have “already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system.” They are leaning on existing staff in the agency for help, which those workers have provided reluctantly in hopes of keeping the entire system from crashing. Marshall reports those staffers are “freaking out.” The system is due to undergo a migration to another system this weekend; how the changes will interact with that long-planned migration is unclear.
The changes, Marshall’s sources tell him, “all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.”
Both Wired and the New York Times reported yesterday that Musk’s team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government.
Today Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media reported that they had obtained the audio of a meeting held Monday by Thomas Shedd for government technology workers. Shedd is a former Musk employee at Tesla who is now leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), the team that is recoding the government programs.
At the meeting, Shedd told government workers that “things are going to get intense” as his team creates “AI coding agents” to write software that would, for example, change the way logging into the government systems works. Currently, that software cannot access any information about individuals; as the reporters note, login.gov currently assures users that it “does not affect or have any information related to the specific agency you are trying to access.”
But Shedd said they were working through how to change that login “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud.”
When a government employee pointed out that the Privacy Act makes it illegal for agencies to share personal information without consent, Shedd appeared unfazed by the idea they were trying something illegal. “The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow, but again, that's an example of something that we have a vision, that needs [to be] worked on, and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”
A government employee told Koebler, Cox, and Maiberg that using AI coding agents is a major security risk. “Government software is concerned with things like foreign adversaries attempting to insert backdoors into government code. With code generated by AI, it seems possible that security vulnerabilities could be introduced unintentionally. Or could be introduced intentionally via an AI-related exploit that creates obfuscated code that includes vulnerabilities that might expose the data of American citizens or of national security importance.”
A blizzard of lawsuits has greeted Musk’s campaign and other Trump administration efforts to undermine Congress. Today, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the minority leaders in their respective chambers, announced they were introducing legislation to stop Musk’s unlawful actions in the Treasury’s payment systems and to protect Americans, calling it “Stop the Steal,” a play on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
This evening, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of protesters rallied at the Treasury Department to take a stand against Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. Treasury payment system. “Nobody Elected Elon,” their signs read. “He has access to all our information, our Social Security numbers, the federal payment system,” Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) said. “What’s going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money?”
Tonight, the Washington Post noted that Musk’s actions “appear to violate federal law.” David Super of Georgetown Law School told journalists Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Hannah Natanson, and Jacqueline Alemany: “So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”
Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.
Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—“liberal” because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and “consensus” because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.
But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.
That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.
When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda. Republicans came to believe that they were the only legitimate lawmakers in the nation; when Democrats won, the election must have been rigged. Even so, they were unable to destroy the post–World War II government completely because policies like the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid, or the elimination of the Department of Education, remained unpopular.
Now, MAGA Republicans in charge of the government have made it clear they intend to get rid of that government once and for all. Trump’s nominee to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for dramatically reducing the power of Congress and the United States civil service. Vought has referred to career civil servants as “villains” and called for ending funding for most government programs. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said recently.
In the name of combatting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Trump administration is taking down websites of information paid for with tax dollars, slashing programs that advance health and science, ending investments in infrastructure, trying to end foreign aid, working to eliminate the Department of Education, and so on. Today the administration offered buyouts to all the people who work at the Central Intelligence Agency, saying that anyone who opposes Trump’s policies should leave. Today, Musk’s people entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides daily weather and wind predictions; cutting NOAA and privatizing its services is listed as a priority in Project 2025.
Stunningly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the U.S. has made a deal with El Salvador to send deportees of any nationality—including U.S. citizens, which would be wildly unconstitutional—for imprisonment in that nation’s 40,000-person Terrorism Confinement Center, for a fee that would pay for El Salvador’s prison system.
Tonight the Senate confirmed Trump loyalist Pam Bondi as attorney general. Bondi is an election denier who refuses to say that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, a coalition of more than 300 civil rights groups urged senators to vote against her confirmation because of her opposition to LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and reproductive rights, and her record of anti-voting activities. The vote was along party lines except for Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who crossed over to vote in favor.
Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is the logical outcome of the mentality that the government should not enable Americans to create wealth but rather should put cash in the pockets of a few elites. Far from representing a majority, Musk is unelected, and he is slashing through the government programs he opposes. With full control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans could cut those parts themselves, but such cuts would be too unpopular ever to pass. So, instead, Musk is single-handedly slashing through the government Americans have built over the past 90 years.
Now, MAGA voters are about to discover that the wide-ranging cuts he claims to be making to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs skewer them as well as their neighbors. Attracting white voters with racism was always a tool to end the liberal consensus that worked for everyone, and if Musk’s cuts stand, the U.S. is about to learn that lesson the hard way.
In yet another bombshell, after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip,” and suggested sending troops to make that happen. “We’ll own it,” he said. “We’re going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of.” It could become “the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.
Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan “deranged” and “nuts.” Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was “speechless,” adding: “That’s insane.” While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were “a few kinks in that slinky,” a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) suggested that Trump was trying to distract people from “the real story—the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
—
Notes:
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-cronies-dive-into-treasury-dept-payments-code-base
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/technology/musk-allies-ai-government.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/feb/04/donald-trump-tariffs-live-blog-news-updates-canada-trudeau-mexico-china (This is the Treasury protest.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/04/pam-bondi-confirmed-trump-attorney-general
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/04/elon-musk-government-legal-doge/
https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-vought-center-renewing-america-maga
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/03/americas/el-salvador-migrant-deal-marco-rubio-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/world/middleeast/trump-gaza-take-over-reactions.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/politics/cia-workforce-buyouts/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/04/doge-noaa-headquarters
Bluesky:
trisresists.bsky.social/post/3lhezjt6kmc2r
X:
February 3, 2025
February 3, 2025
I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.
The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.
But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a “Deep State,” but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
Musk’s team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken control of the U.S. Treasury payment systems that handle about $6 trillion in annual transactions for the U.S. government, thus gaining access to Americans' personal information as well as information about Musk's competitors. From there, Musk claims to have been cancelling those transactions he thinks are wasteful. He claims, for example, to have “deleted” the popular Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Direct File system that enabled people to file their taxes online for free, without the help of paid tax preparers.
Musk’s team apparently consists of six engineers, aged 19 to 24, who are taking control of the computers at government agencies. From the Treasury Department, they went on to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Their breaching of the computers there compromises our national intelligence systems, which must now be considered insecure.
From there, they went on to the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government’s 7,500 or so buildings. Musk’s people sent an email to regional managers telling them to begin ending the leases on federal offices. According to Chris Megerian of the Associated Press, the person in charge of that initiative is Nicole Hollander, who describes herself on LinkedIn as employed at Musk’s social media company, X.
Today, according to an email sent to employees of the Small Business Administration, Musk’s people have gotten into that agency’s human resources, contracts, and payment systems. The Small Business Administration supports small businesses and entrepreneurs, and under the Biden-Harris administration, small businesses boomed thanks to small-dollar loans to women, Black, and Latino entrepreneurs.
By this afternoon, Musk’s people were digging into the data of the Department of Education with an eye to dismantling it from the inside before Trump tries to shut it down with an executive order, although only Congress itself can shutter the department. According to Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post, Musk’s DOGE staffers had accessed sensitive internal data systems, including the personal information of millions of students who are taking part in the federal student aid program. It is highly unlikely that Congress would destroy the Department of Education, so Musk and Trump hope to hollow it out from within.
On a livestream last night, Musk said of his destruction of the federal government: “If it’s not possible now, it will never be possible. This is our shot, This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”
Three federal employees unions are suing the Trump administration to stop Musk, and today, Democratic members of the House and Senate tried to enter the USAID building but were denied entry. Led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Democrats condemned what Raskin called Musk and Trump’s “illegal, unconstitutional interference with congressional power.”
“Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury,” Raskin said, “but you don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does that—under Article I of the Constitution. And just like the president, who was elected to something, cannot impound the money of the people, we don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk. And that’s going to become real clear.”
Senator Murphy said: "[L]et's not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China. And China is cheering at [the destruction of USAID]. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit.”
Murphy continued: “But there’s another reason this is happening. They’re shuttering agencies and sending employees home in order to create the illusion that they’re saving money, in order to…pass a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations.”
While Musk and his DOGE team are trying systematically to dismantle the government, today Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in grants and loans before DOGE got going. AliKhan said that by impounding funds—which Congress declared illegal in 1974—Trump’s Office of Management and Budget “attempted to wrest the power of the purse away from the only branch of government entitled to wield it.” It is Congress, not the president, that determines federal spending.
Meanwhile, the elected president, Donald Trump, sparked a crisis last Friday when his White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he fully intended to go through with the trade war he had hyped on the campaign trail. Trump announced he would levy tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada and of 10% on products from China, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, in violation of the trade agreement his own team had negotiated during his first term.
As soon as Leavitt announced the upcoming tariffs, the stock market began to fall, and by last night, stock market futures had fallen 450 points on the expectation of tariffs hitting at midnight tonight. Today, the stock market continued to fall. Even reliable Trump allies began to complain that the tariffs would raise prices. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.”
Today, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she and Trump had “reached a series of agreements” that would pause the threatened tariffs for a month. Mexico agreed to “reinforce the northern border with 10,000 elements of the National Guard immediately, to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States,” while the U.S. “commits to work to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
When Trump announced their conversation shortly afterward, he omitted the part of the agreement that committed the U.S. to try to stop the flow of guns to Mexico. He also did not mention that, in fact, Mexico committed to putting 10,000 troops at the border in 2021. As Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post commented above a record of Mexican troop deployments: “Any news outlet reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done its homework. Trump boasts he got Mexico to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn’t realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there[.]”
The crisis at the northern border worked out in a similar fashion. After conferring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump announced a 30-day pause in the implementation of tariffs. Trudeau agreed to appoint a border czar and to implement a $1.3 billion border plan that Canada had announced in December.
In other words, while Musk was causing a constitutional crisis, Trump created an economic crisis that threatened both domestic and global chaos, then claimed Biden administration achievements as his own and declared victory.
The tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect as planned. China has promised to levy tariffs of up to 15% on certain U.S. products beginning a week from today. It also said it will investigate Google to see if it has violated antitrust laws.
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-5285539/doge-musk-usaid-trump
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.276842/gov.uscourts.dcd.276842.30.0_3.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/white-house-spending-freeze-omb-judge.html
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-donald-trump-doge-21153a742fbad86284369bb173ec343c
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/03/democrats-usaid-building-house-senate-protest
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/04/china-levies-tariffs-on-select-us-imports-starting-feb-10.html
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/04/treasury-sued-doge-sensitive-information-musk-trump
https://apnews.com/article/china-tariffs-us-trump-150fab3a44ec055845e47c82bde544c2
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/02/trump-tariffs-wall-street-journal-editorial
Bluesky:
meidastouch.com/post/3lhbwpt7dyc25
crampell.bsky.social/post/3lhcalxfhi22k
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lhc3hhxzc223
lbarronlopez.bsky.social/post/3lhcbictfds2e
markey.senate.gov/post/3lhcm574bjc2z
philinvestigates.com/post/3lhckanksnc2a
atrupar.com/post/3lhc65bdqst2e
X:
February 2, 2025
February 2, 2025
Billionaire Elon Musk’s team yesterday took control of the Treasury’s payment system, thus essentially gaining access to the checkbook with which the United States handles about $6 trillion annually and to all the financial information of Americans and American businesses with it. Apparently, it did not stop there.
Today Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press reported that yesterday two top security officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) tried to stop people associated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, from accessing classified information they did not have security clearance to see. The Trump administration put the officials on leave, and the DOGE team gained access to the information.
Vittoria Elliott of Wired has identified those associated with Musk’s takeover as six “engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college.” They are connected either to Musk or to his long-time associate Peter Thiel, who backed J.D. Vance’s Senate run eighteen months before he became Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Their names are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran, and they have little to no experience in government.
Public policy expert Dan Moynihan told reporter Elliott that the fact these people “are not really public officials” makes it hard for Congress to intervene. “So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world,” he said. Law professor Nick Bednar noted that “it is very unlikely” that the engineers “have the expertise to understand either the law or the administration needs that surround these agencies.”
After Musk’s team breached the USAID computers, cybersecurity specialist Matthew Garrett posted: “Random computers being plugged into federal networks is obviously terrifying in terms of what data they're deliberately accessing, but it's also terrifying because it implies controls are being disabled—unmanaged systems should never have access to this data. Who else has access to those systems?”
USAID receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Intelligence agencies must now assume U.S. intelligence systems are insecure.
Musk’s response was to post: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Also last night, according to Sam Stein of The Bulwark, “the majority of staff in the legislative and public affairs bureau lost access to their emails, implying they’ve been put on admin leave although this was never communicated to them.”
Congress established USAID in 1961 to bring together the many different programs that were administering foreign aid. Focusing on long-term socioeconomic development, USAID has a budget of more than $50 billion, less than 1% of the U.S. annual budget. It is one of the largest aid agencies in the world.
Musk is unelected, and it appears that DOGE has no legal authority. As political scientist Seth Masket put it in tusk: “Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.”
DOGE has simply taken over government systems. Musk, using President Donald Trump’s name, is personally deciding what he thinks should be cut from the U.S. government.
Today, Musk reposted a social media post from MAGA religious extremist General Mike Flynn, who resigned from his position as Trump’s national security advisor in 2017 after pleading guilty to secret conversations with a Russian agent—for which Trump pardoned him—and who publicly embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. In today’s post, Flynn complained about “the ‘Lutheran’ faith” and, referring to federal grants provided to Lutheran Family Services and affiliated organizations, said, “this use of ‘religion’ as a money laundering operation must end.” Musk added: “The [DOGE] team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”
In fact, this is money appropriated by Congress, and its payment is required by law. Republican lawmakers have pushed government subsidies and grants toward religious organizations for years, and Lutheran Social Services is one of the largest employers in South Dakota, where it operates senior living facilities.
South Dakota is the home of Senate majority leader John Thune, who has not been a strong Trump supporter, as well as Homeland Security secretary nominee Kristi Noem.
The news that DOGE has taken over U.S. government computers is not the only bombshell this weekend.
Another is that Trump has declared a trade war with the top trading partners of the United States: Mexico, Canada, and China. Although his first administration negotiated the current trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, on Saturday Trump broke the terms of that treaty.
He slapped tariffs of 25% on goods coming from Mexico and Canada, tariffs of 10% on Canadian energy, and tariffs of 10% on goods coming from China. He said he was doing so to force Mexico and Canada to do more about undocumented migration and drug trafficking, but while precursor chemicals to make fentanyl come from China and undocumented migrants come over the southern border with Mexico, Canada accounts for only about 1% of both. Further, Trump has diverted Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents combating drug trafficking to his immigration sweeps.
As soon as he took office, Trump designated Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and on Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded that “all options will be on the table” when a Fox News Channel host asked if the military will strike within Mexico. Today Trump was clearer: he posted on social media that without U.S. trade—which Trump somehow thinks is a “massive subsidy”—“Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada—AND NO TARIFFS!”
Trump inherited the best economy in the world from his predecessor, President Joe Biden, but on Friday, as soon as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Trump would levy the tariffs, the stock market plunged. Trump, who during his campaign insisted that tariffs would boost the economy, today said that Americans could feel “SOME PAIN” from them. He added “BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.” Tonight, stock market futures dropped 450 points before trading opens tomorrow.
Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum wrote, “We categorically reject the White House’s slander that the Mexican government has alliances with criminal organizations, as well as any intention of meddling in our territory,” and has promised retaliatory tariffs. China noted that it has been working with the U.S. to regulate precursor chemicals since 2019 and said it would sue the U.S. before the World Trade Organization.
Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau announced more than $100 billion in retaliatory 25% tariffs and then spoke directly to Americans. Echoing what economists have said all along, Trudeau warned that tariffs would cost jobs, raise prices, and limit the precious metals necessary for U.S. security. But then he turned from economics to principles.
“As President John F. Kennedy said many years ago,” Trudeau began, “geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends, economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies.” He noted that “from the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of the Korean Peninsula, from the fields of Flanders to the streets of Kandahar,” Canadians “have “fought and died alongside you.”
“During the summer of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged your great city of New Orleans, or mere weeks ago when we sent water bombers to tackle the wildfires in California. During the day, the world stood still—Sept. 11, 2001—when we provided refuge to stranded passengers and planes, we were always there, standing with you, grieving with you, the American people.
“Together, we’ve built the most successful economic, military and security partnership the world has ever seen. A relationship that has been the envy of the world…. Unfortunately, the actions taken today by the White House split us apart instead of bringing us together.”
Trudeau said Canada’s response would “be far reaching and include everyday items such as American beer, wine and bourbon, fruits and fruit juices, including orange juice, along with vegetables, perfume, clothing and shoes. It’ll include major consumer products like household appliances, furniture and sports equipment, and materials like lumber and plastics, along with much, much more. He assured Canadians: “[W]e are all in this together. The Canadian government, Canadian businesses, Canadian organized labour, Canadian civil society, Canada’s premiers, and tens of millions of Canadians from coast to coast to coast are aligned and united. This is Team Canada at its best.”
Canadian provincial leaders said they were removing alcohol from Republican-dominated states, and Canadian member of parliament Charlie Angus noted that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario buys more wine by dollar value than any other organization in the world and that Canada is the number one export market for Kentucky spirits. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario has stopped all purchases of American beer, wine, and spirits, turning instead to allies and local producers. Canada’s Irving Oil, which provides heating oil to New England, has already told customers that prices will reflect the tariffs.
In a riveting piece today, in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote that “[t]he people who now dominate the executive branch of the government…are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation.” “Think of the federal government as a car,” he wrote. “You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.”
On Friday, James E. Dennehy of the FBI’s New York field office told his staff that they are “in a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy.” He vowed that he, anyway, is going to “dig in.”
—
Notes:
https://www.state.gov/resources-and-reports-office-of-foreign-assistance/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/02/politics/usaid-officials-leave-musk-doge/index.html
TuskFriday Night Musk-acreFriday was a busy day in national politics, with the media fixated on two plane crashes, a tariff order that sparked vows of retaliation and a stock market selloff, embarrassing Senate confirmation hearings for a number cabinet appointees, and more. But we need to talk about the massive assault on democracy and the rule of law that occurred this day. It…Read more2 days ago · 278 likes · 25 comments · Seth Maskethttps://globalnews.ca/news/10993376/trudeau-trump-tariffs-us-canada/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/politics/fbi-new-york-email-trump.html
https://www.newsweek.com/stock-market-plunges-trump-tariffs-mexico-canada-china-2024502
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/
Thinking about...The Logic of DestructionWhat is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together…Read morea day ago · 4917 likes · 208 comments · Timothy Snyderhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/02/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
https://obamaadministration.archives.performance.gov/agency/department-state-and-usaid.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/01/usaid-website-offline-trump
https://www.lssliving.org/living/
https://lutheranservices.org/todays-front-line-hero-lutheran-social-services-of-south-dakota-2/
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-93996-4_821
Bluesky:
mjg59.eicar-test-file.zip/post/3lh5n4s75sk2n
andrewlebovich.bsky.social/post/3lh7llltink2y
joedunman.bsky.social/post/3lh7mnlmzwc2g
douglasirwin.bsky.social/post/3lh7jz3mjss2b
charlieangus104.bsky.social/post/3lh7htpmaqs2c
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3lhams26fgk2r
charlieangus104.bsky.social/post/3lha4wr6aqs2k
X:
samstein/status/1886085513896956041
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