In February 2022, Will Selber, a current contributor to Bulwark, was a Squadron Commander leading 240 Airmen and civilians conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations in support of five separate combatant commands, one of which was in Ukraine.

In an essay published today in Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Selber outlines how his unit had front-row seats to Russia’s unprovoked invasion and provided crucial intelligence to Ukraine that enabled it to “parry blows from Putin’s forces.” Selber writes:

While I cannot comment on the nature of this support, I can say it was incredibly helpful to our Ukrainian allies. America’s intelligence community has played a pivotal role in finding and fixing Russian forces and helping our Ukrainian allies launch devastating attacks. Without America’s intelligence community, which correctly predicted the invasion, Kyiv may have fallen.

I think it can be argued forcefully that there are three primary reasons why Russia failed to take Kyiv in those early days: Russian military incompetence, Ukraine’s military effectiveness and resourcefulness, and American intelligence.

Yesterday, in the administration’s continuing shakedown of Ukraine, President Trump ordered a stop to all intelligence sharing. This halt, resembling a classic Mafia protection scheme,  deprives Kyiv of a key tool in fighting Russian forces and was announced by Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe on, where else, the Fox Network. This latest move follows the administration stopping all “military aid” last week, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

Losing military and intelligence aid will cripple Ukraine and lead to many deaths, both civilian and military.

For example, last night, a Russian missile slammed into a hotel in Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, the hometown of President Zelensky, killing at least four people and injuring more than 30 others, Ukrainian authorities said. One of the dead was an infant.

“Just before the attack, volunteers from a humanitarian organization — citizens of Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom — had checked into the hotel,” President Zelensky said in a statement. “They survived because they managed to get down from their rooms in time.”

Officials in Kyiv have warned that Ukraine’s air defense capabilities would be among the first elements of its security to be compromised without American assistance.

And that is precisely what happened here.

Jon Gundersen is a retired senior foreign service officer who, following Ukraine’s independence in December 1991, had the distinction of opening the American Embassy there on 22 January 1992. He has taught national security affairs at the National Defense University, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the Foreign Service Institute. I asked him his thoughts about the Trump Administration cutting off all military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. He wrote back to me:

“On February 24, 2022,  Putin’s Russia attacked Ukraine; the attack was illegal, unprovoked, and brutal. For over three years, Ukrainian forces have fought valiantly against a numerically superior foe. Yet, Ukrainian President Zelensky did not ask for  American or NATO boots on the ground, merely the means to fight the aggressor. For the past three years, Washington and its NATO allies have provided military equipment, humanitarian aid, and intelligence to Ukraine. It is the least we can do. Ukraine is fighting our fight on their soil to defend democracy. Now, the Trump Administration is cutting off military aid and needed intelligence. This will cost Ukraine dearly; lives will be lost. Cui Bono? Only Putin will benefit. This is a dark day for Ukraine and our democracy.”

“Observe how he has made a breast out of his back.
In life he wished to see too far ahead of him,
And now he must crab backwards round this track.”
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno (Canto XX, Circle Eight – The Fortune Tellers and Diviners)

Watching and, God help me, listening to Donald Trump’s address to the nation last night, I was reminded of Dante’s special place in hell for those eternally condemned to eat their words.

If you sat down to watch the event and were ready for an address documenting the State of the Union, you were out of luck. Not one word was said about that.

The speech, lasting one hour and forty minutes, was fact-free, lie-filled, and offered nothing but a cruel, transactional future for America.

I think it’s the gleeful cruelty that bothers me the most. For example, as Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, said in a speech in 2023: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want them to feel trauma.”

Score one for them. There’s trauma aplenty.

Even now, Vought refuses to label his targets as anything but bureaucrats and the bureaucracy; he never mentions “workers,” which would humanize them.

Watching USAID employees sobbing outside the building where many of them worked for decades, seeing them frantically collect their office belongings because they’d been given a grand total of 15 minutes to do so, realizing the vanishing national security benefits of USAID’s soft-power initiatives in health care and education around the world, and viewing the complete dismantling of the nation’s foreign policy built up since the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s — all of this is heartbreaking.

However, it was indisputably apparent last night that neither Donald Trump nor his co-conspirators on the right side of the Chamber, as well as in the gallery, could care any less about any “trauma” in the disappearing workforce. The joy they all took in Trump lauding Elon Musk’s wood-chipper approach to remaking government was palpable — and disgusting.

An interesting point came when Trump acknowledged and celebrated Elon Musk as the head of DOGE. Last week, the administration’s lawyers argued in Court that Musk was simply an advisor and that someone named Amy Gleason, who happened to be vacationing in Mexico at the time, was, in fact, running DOGE.

My mother always advised me to avoid lies, because, “Lies will come back to haunt you, Tommy.” However, does anyone believe there will be any haunting here? Mom was always right — but in this case…?

Last night, Trump bragged, “We have done more in 43 days than any other administration in four years, even eight years.”

Mr. Trump, for once, I agree with you.

Meanwhile, over at the IRS

This morning, ProPublica is out with a deeply-researched story on the huge staffing cuts about to fall on the IRS.

According to ProPublica’s story, the IRS is drafting plans to cut its 90,000-person workforce by as much as half through a mix of layoffs, attrition, and incentivized buyouts, according to two people familiar with the situation. Six thousand have already been fired.

A reduction in force of that magnitude would render the IRS “dysfunctional,” said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner.

As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, congress approved $80 billion in new IRS funding, intended to support the troubled IRS crackdown on tax cheats and provide better service to taxpayers. A 2021 Treasury report estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade with that $80 billion investment.

For some reason I’ve never fully understood, Republicans were apoplectic about all this. They insinuated the IRS would use this funding to go after “hard-working Americans.”

In reality, the Treasury Report showed the IRS had been severely understaffed for at least a decade, and tax cheats were scoring big. In 2022, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers that staffing had shrunk to 1970s levels and that the IRS would need to hire 52,000 people over the next six years just to maintain current staffing levels to replace those who retire or otherwise leave.

So, following enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS began hiring.

However, since Donald Trump’s inauguration, Musk’s DOGE has had the tax agency in its crosshairs.

Perhaps a pertinent question is: What does this mean for tax revenue?

According to the ProPublica story:

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Now, the stated purpose of DOGE is to find “fraud, waste, and abuse.” If that is so, something is crazy here. If that is not so….?

The tariffs have landed

At 12:01 a.m. this morning, Donald Trump launched a gratuitous and unwarranted trade war as his tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China took effect.

The move imposes 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports, though Trump limited the levy to 10% on Canadian energy. He also doubled the tariff he imposed last month on Chinese products to 20%.

The three countries are our biggest trade partners, and all three immediately retaliated, which is what happens in a trade war.

China retaliated with tariffs of up to 15% on a wide array of U.S. agricultural exports. It also expanded the number of U.S. companies subject to export controls and other restrictions by about two dozen.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would impose tariffs on more than $100 billion of American goods over the course of the next 21 days.

In announcing Canada’s retaliation, Trudeau said, “Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they are talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense,”

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico will respond to the new tariffs with its own retaliatory tariffs, which she will delay announcing until Sunday at a public event in Mexico City’s central plaza. She told the press Mexico has “a plan B, C,and D” to counter Trump’s war.

Here at home in the nation that started this stupidity, Americans are either mildly in favor or decidedly against the measures depending on how pollsters ask the question.

If the question contains the assertion that tariffs will cause prices to rise, only 30% express favor; if the question references bringing back jobs to America, 49% are all for them. Of course, that means 51% are not.

Although there are some who question the imposition of tariffs, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are supportive and believe their constituents would be willing to suffer the pain of higher prices to enable the President to carry out his agenda, whatever that is.

Please forgive me for suggesting these going-along-with-the-program Republicans are going along with the program out of fear of another kind of retaliation — the kind Donald Trump dishes out to anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him.

These tariffs will hurt the American economy and cause prices to rise. Also, because of deeply rooted globalization, the rest of the world will feel the pinch, too.

Michael Klein was Chief Economist in the Office of International Affairs during the Obama Administration.  He is an expert in tariffs and a Professor of Economics at Tufts University. Professor Klein is also Founder and Executive Editor of Econofact,  a web-based publication of the Fletcher School at Tufts that publishes economic analyses by leading economists across the country. I asked him for his thoughts on Trump’s tariffs. He wrote:

“Tariffs are like sales taxes that raise prices for all affected goods but, unlike sales taxes, only earn revenue from some of the goods whose prices have risen (those that are imported).  Tariffs also invite retaliation, as happened in the first Trump administration and as is happening now.  The net effect of these broad-based tariffs is clearly negative and will not bring back jobs – in fact, they imperil jobs in companies that import inputs.”

Is there ever a justification for tariffs?

Maurice Obstfeld is another tariff expert and the former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is also a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. In an Econofact Chat with Professor Klein, Professor Obstfeld answered that question by saying:

There are remedies in which tariffs can be available when there’s a disruptive import surge that swamps certain industries, causing high levels of unemployment and leaving little time for the firms and the workers to adjust. So, in the realm of trade policy, there’s a recognized but limited role for tariffs, but tariffs as an industrial policy to bring back manufacturing, tariffs as a tool to increase our trade surplus, these are all unlikely to work, and likely to be destructive, especially when they’re met with retaliation from our trade partners.

Which is precisely what is happening today.

In tonight’s address to a joint session of Congress, it will be interesting to hear Donald Trump boast about what a wonderful thing he did for America today by creating a trade war with our closest allies, our geographic brother and sister. Among the other things he’ll lie about, he’ll give himself a big pat on the back for showing those loser countries just who’s boss. He might mention there could be a smidgen of sacrifice Americans will have to make to bring our friends to heel. But not to worry. It won’t be long, and it won’t be much. Everything will be just hunky-doree when they bend the knee.

And in just a few minutes, a team of weighty pigs will fly past my second-floor windows on their way to the land of Oz.

A word about Econofact

Although I have absolutely nothing to do with it, I have come to appreciate Econofact. In the new world order, where “alternative facts”¹ are alive and well, it can be hard to find intelligent, non-partisan, factual analysis of major issues facing us all. Econofact does that at a high level. The authors may not tell you things you want to hear, but their facts are true and backed up by solid research.

In addition to publishing noted economist authors, founder Michael Klein conducts what he calls Econofact Chats with leading economic luminaries. They peel the onion of economic issues, as he and Maurice Obstfeld did in their chat about tariffs I cited above.

However, Econofact is a non-profit and depends on donations. In a world of worthy causes, Econofact deserves your consideration, especially now, as the Trump administration obfuscates facts. For example, yesterday, the Atlanta Fed revised its estimate for Q1 2025 GDP growth from an expected +2.9% to –2.8%, after which Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick talked about revising the analytical method of determining growth. He seems to think if the administration doesn’t like the numbers, it should change the way it calculates them.

Right now, Econofact, which is free, is asking for help by creating a Premium subscription for $50 annually.

In addition to other exclusive benefits, Premium Subscribers will have access to monthly “Ask Me Anything” Webinars featuring prominent economists and economic analysts. If you’re an economics nerd, this should appeal.

I strongly urge you to subscribe to Econofact, and, if possible, as a Premium subscriber.

_________________

¹ The term “alternative facts” made its way into the culture when KellyAnne Conway, Senior Policy Advisor in Donald Trump’s first term, coined it while standing on the White House lawn, answering a question with a completely untrue statement, but calling it true as an alternative fact.

September, 1970

Let me tell you a story.

We call it, “going back to the world.” Home in the USA. And I’ve arrived in one piece. My new orders direct me to report to the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. I know the place well. It’s where I was trained and Commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant. Then, it was on to Airborne and Ranger schools, followed by a fun-filled couple of years in the highlands of Vietnam. Now, back in the world, I’m a Captain with a family and a new job, which is to help train the next bunch of happy warriors. So, Marilyn and I make the long drive from Massachusetts to Georgia and settle into the house at 3660 Plantation Road in the sun-baked city of Columbus. It’s a nice neighborhood.

A few months after moving in, a new civilian worker shows up at my office in the Infantry School. His name’s Bob. He’s a GS12 research analyst, and I have no idea why he’s here, but he has a disability that makes it hard for him to walk or move even moderately weighted stuff. He’s rented a house in Columbus and is trying to figure out how to move his junk in. Marilyn and I offer to help.

So, on a sunny Saturday morning in the deep south, we get into Marilyn’s red Corvair Corsa convertible with the turbocharged engine and dual carburetors, show up at Bob’s new place, and find a UHaul truck in his driveway packed with everything he owns. We get to work toting box after box into the house and putting it all where Bob wants it to go. It’s taken us all morning, but around noon, we’re done, and we sit down on Bob’s new furniture to celebrate the end of Bob’s beginning. Marilyn’s never met Bob, whom I’ve charitably described as being “a little strange.”  So, being a curious person, she nicely asks about his life. This goes on for a while until the big moment.

The big moment is when Bob says to Marilyn, “Wanna see my hair-trigger Colt 45s?”

It’s like an E. F. Hutton commercial. Everything stops. I freeze for a second and then say, “Bob, do you really have hair-trigger Colt 45s?” He says, “Sure do. Two of ’em. They’re pearl-handled, too. Want to see?”

He’s asking a guy who’s just finished two years dodging bullets and other bad things in a spot where serious people really wanted to kill him and his men. To say I have developed a healthy respect for any kind of gun is not giving that phrase the value it needs. Having seen up close what they can do, the accidents that can happen, actually did happen, makes me scared to death of them. I’m not scared when they’re in my hands, but in somebody else’s who might not know what he’s doing?

I’m not scared yet, though, because Bob has yet to produce the firepower, but my tension level rises like a Goddard Rocket.

I look Bob dead in the eye and say, “Bob, please don’t get the 45s. Leave em’ right where they are. Marilyn and I have to be going now. Hope you like your new place.” And with that, we leave.

We get back into the red Corvair Corsa convertible with the turbocharged engine and dual carburetors and drive home. When we get to the house on Plantation Road, I pay the babysitter and look at Tammy, the two-year-old daughter I’m just getting to know. And I think about the pearl-handled, hair-trigger Colt 45s in Bob’s house.

February, 2025 

In 1970, slightly more than 50% of Americans, mostly men, owned a firearm. Bob was one of them, and he owned two (that I knew of). Since then, although the population has grown, the percentage of ownership has declined to about 40%. Still, Small Arms Survey researchers conclude there are now more than 400 million handguns and rifles in the country. Three percent of gun owners, super owners, own more than 50% of all firearms in the U.S. For the other 97%, the average ownership is three firearms, mostly handguns.

Femicide, abusive men killing their intimate partners, is five times more likely if the abuser has a handgun and lives with the victim. Research shows the number one contributing factor to femicide is unemployment. Potential femicide victims who do not live with their abuser and own a handgun are significantly less likely to be killed by their abuser.

In 70% of workplace shooting deaths, the perpetrator used a handgun. Despite the nation’s number of handguns doubling since the mid-1990s, workplace shootings have declined significantly since then, but the 70% figure still holds. In the last 50 years, there have been 50 workplace mass shootings with an average death count of six per event. According to Jillian Peterson and James Densley, who study mass shootings for a project funded by the National Institute of Justice: 

The perpetrators were almost exclusively men (94 percent) with an average age of 38 (the youngest was 19, the oldest was 66). More than three-quarters (77 percent) were blue-collar workers, and 53 percent had experienced a recent or traumatic change in work status before the shooting.

A University of Washington 2022 study discovered six million Americans carry a loaded handgun daily; nine million do so at least once a month.

In mass public shootings, the weapon du jour is the assault rifle. The National Shooting Sports Foundation has estimated approximately 5 million to 10 million AR-15-style rifles exist in the U.S.

Regarding assault rifles, I know a thing or two. And I can say with complete certainty and a good deal of experiential credibility that there is not a single reason on God’s lovely earth why anyone other than police and my military brothers and sisters should have one, especially one with automatic fire capability. Anybody who tells you differently is chock full up to their eyeballs with what makes the grass grow green and tall.

The National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, annually publishes National Vital Statistics Reports. One of those reports is about how we die. In Deaths: Final Data for 2019, (most recently analyzed data collection year), we note 38,355 deaths caused by firearms. Of those deaths, 23,941 were by suicide, 14,414 by homicide. Despite comprising 13.7% of the US population, non-Hispanic Black people were homicide victims in 57% of the cases.

Unfortunately, all the CDC can do is report the numbers. Why? Because a 1996 appropriations act contained something that has come to be known as the Dickey Amendment. That amendment prohibits the CDC from doing any research into gun violence. The amendment says federal funding cannot be used to “advocate or promote gun control.”

Until Donald Trump’s re-election, I believed that since more than 38,000 people die by gun violence per year, it wouldn’t be too much to ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spend a few million of its $5 billion budget on research to analyze gun violence. Seemed a modest proposal to me. However, since Trump’s inauguration, that has become fairy-tale thinking. I now believe it likely Trump will prevent his unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from reporting on deaths by firearms even if he wants to. Perhaps, if we ever again have an honest, thoughtful, Democracy-loving, compassionate person occupying the White House, this will change. At this point, a big “if.”

Now, I would not be an unhappy guy to wake up one morning to discover all firearms in the hands of civilians have gone *poof* in the night. We all know that will never happen. But as Peterson and Densley argue:

One step needs to be depriving potential shooters of the means to carry out their plans. Potential shooting sites can be made less accessible with visible security measures such as metal detectors and police officers. And weapons need to be better controlled, through age restrictions, permit-to-purchase licensing, universal background checks, safe storage campaigns, and red-flag laws — measures that help control firearm access for vulnerable individuals or people in crisis.

Regarding Bob and his pearl-handled, hair-trigger Colt 45s? One evening in 1975, a bullet from one of them went straight through his head. Police labeled it an accident.

Knowing Bob, I did not believe that for one second.

Three years ago today, Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked and horrific Blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine. His army failed to reach and capture the capital Kyiv, suffering losses and embarrassment along the way. This is reminiscent of the German invasion of neutral Belgium on 3 August 1914. Germany’s plan called for a 40-day all out sprint through Belgium to capture Paris and defeat France before the French could mobilize their defenses. Although the Germans made it to within 90 miles of Paris, they never got any nearer to the city, and following an August filled with German atrocities, the arrival of the British to join the slaughter, French counterattacks, and the refusal of America to become involved, everyone settled in for four years of trench warfare, where millions of rounds of artillery shelling bracketed wave after wave of soldiers insanely charging across “no man’s land” to capture a few feet of ground they would lose the next day.

It wasn’t until 1917 when the discovery of the Zimmermann Telegram¹ gave President Woodrow Wilson the excuse he needed to bring America into the war that the tide began to turn leading to Germany’s surrender in November, 1918. The Versailles Treaty that followed completely changed the world’s political geography and furnished the political ammunition that led to Adolph Hitler and the Second World War.

Three years following Russia’s failed Blitzkrieg, the battlefields in Ukraine resemble those of World War I. But in this case, Ukrainians, and Ukrainians alone, have been fighting to repel the Russian invaders. The rest of Europe and the U.S. have helped, but, to prevent what many fear would be the impetus for a third World War, no other country has offered to add troops to the Ukrainian defensive effort. Despite this, North Korean troops now fight side by side with Russians.

Since the invasion began, the U.S. Congress has approved five bills to support Ukraine’s government in defending itself. The total budget authority under these bills is $182.8 billion.

Thus far, $83.2 billion of these funds have been disbursed, while funds available, but not yet obligated, total $39.6 billion, and funding obligated, but  not yet disbursed equal $57 billion. The historic sums are helping a broad set of Ukrainian people and institutions, including refugees, law enforcement, independent radio broadcasters, and the legions of maintenance crews trying to keep the lights on and the water flowing after Russian cruise missiles regularly blow things apart. Despite this, most of the aid has been military-related.

Of the total authorization, $69.2 billion has been disbursed for weapons, equipment and other military support. Eighty percent, or about $56 billion, of the military equipment support was made in U.S. factories by U.S. workers, an inconvenient fact never mentioned by Republican politicians wanting to shut off aid at the urging of their MAGA base.

It only took Donald Trump and his new administration three weeks to undo all of this and betray Ukraine. The method of betrayal — the U.S. and Russia carving up Ukraine’s territory and the U.S. giving in to Russia’s primary demands without negotiation —  reminds me of a secret pact made in 1939 between Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Let me explain.

1939

Sometime in early May 1939, at Berghof, Hitler’s holiday home near  Berchtesgaden, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop showed Hitler a film of Josef Stalin viewing his military in a Red Square parade. Hitler became intrigued with the idea of allying with the Soviets, and Ribbentrop recalled Hitler saying that Stalin “looked like a man he could do business with.” Ribbentrop was then given the nod to pursue negotiations toward an alliance with Moscow.

On 24 August 1939, to the astonishment of the rest of the world, Germany and the Soviet Union announced  they had concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

There were two parts to this Treaty, one public, the other secret. The public part was a ten-year non-aggression pact containing provisions that included consultation, arbitration if either party disagreed, neutrality if either went to war against a third power and no membership in a group “which is directly or indirectly aimed at the other.”

The secret part of the Treaty, which was unknown to the world until the Nuremburg Trials of 1945,² carved up the land and countries lying geographically between the parties into “spheres of influence,” much as the U.S. and Russia are about to carve up eastern Ukraine. Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were to be divided between the two. Poland, especially, was important to Hitler, because of his desire for “living space” for German expansion. In the Pact with Stalin, Germany was to get all of western Poland.

The day after Germany and the USSR announced the Treaty’s signing, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, fearing a German invasion of Poland, and unwilling to sell out Poland as he had Czechoslovakia a year earlier, sent a letter to Hitler assuring him Britain would stand by Poland no matter what the pact contained.

One week after the Treaty was signed, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, on 1 September 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began.

Less than two years later, Hitler invaded Russia, shattering the 1939 Treaty. Operation Barbarossa was launched — from Poland.

2025

The Trump Administration’s betrayal comes in two parts, one, economic; the other, capitulation to Russia’s demands.

Ukraine is rich with rare earth minerals, which are a group of heavy metals found in the Earth’s crust used for making electronics and other high-tech devices.

Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy had offered an economic deal to allow the U.S. to assist in developing the country’s vast natural resources. The idea was also part of Ukraine’s “victory plan,” a list of economic and security policies aimed at securing a just peace with Russia, which Zelenskyy presented to the country’s allies last year. It went nowhere at the time.

Last week, Trump demanded that Ukraine give 50% of all its rare earth metals to the U.S as a condition for help in negotiating peace. Not sell, but give — as repayment for all the help the U.S. has given during the last three years. Trump valued the payback at $500 billion, a ridiculous number.

As reported by CNN’s Seb Starcevic:

In the second part of an interview with Fox News that aired late Monday, the Republican [Trump] said the U.S. should get a slice of Ukraine’s vast natural resources as compensation for the hundreds of billions it has spent on helping Kyiv resist Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“I told them [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent like $500B worth of rare earth. And they’ve essentially agreed to do that so at least we don’t feel stupid,” Trump said.

Trump’s demand was absurd, and Zelenskyy promptly rejected it. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, slammed Trump’s transactional foreign policy style as “very egotistic, very self-centered.”

Which brings us to Starlink.

Ukraine is dependent on Elon Musk’s Starlink service. Starlink uses a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit to furnish satellite internet service that provides broadband internet, especially to remote areas. When Russia destroyed Ukraine’s internet early in the war, Musk gave Starlink to the country, a magnanimous and generous gesture. However, as Musk went deeper and deeper down Donald Trump’s rabbit hole, his magnanimity toward Ukraine faded. Now, according to Andrea Shalal and Joey Roulette, writing for Reuters, the Trump team is threatening to pull Starlink access if President Zelenskyy does not accede to Trump’s demand for the rare earth minerals. This would be a massive blow to Ukraine.

In Criminology 101, we call this extortion.

The second part of the U.S. betrayal is capitulation to Putin’s demands, and we are already part way down that road. Brand new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made that clear when he went to Brussels and, on behalf of the art-of-the-deal World’s Greatest Negotiator, pushed all of Ukraine’s negotiation chips into the pot before the cards were dealt. No NATO membership for Ukraine. Russia will keep all the land it stole.³

Then, Hegseth launched into the next chapter of Trump’s years-long critique of defense spending by NATO countries, using Poland as an example of how it should be done. He said,

“We see Poland as the model ally, willing to invest not just in their defense, but in our shared defense and the defense of the continent. Words are cheap, but in deed and in actions, Poland leads by example, on a lot of things, including defense spending, building up Polish military readiness. Poland is spending 5% of GDP on defense already, which is a model for the continent.”

And why has Poland done this? Because, since the 17th century, Poland has been invaded and occupied five times by Russia. This is a fact the newly-minted Defense Secretary chose not to mention in his speech.

Poland was critical to Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, and it is critical to Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Look at this map, and you’ll see what I mean:

Look at the position of Belarus. Led by strongman and President-since-1994 Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus, like Ukraine a former Soviet Republic, is a close ally of Putin’s Russian regime. In 2022, one year after the stalled Russian invasion of Ukraine, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russia had moved nearly 5,000 troops into Belarus, along with short-range ballistic missiles, special forces, and anti-aircraft batteries, with the intention of massing more than 30,000 troops near that country’s border with Ukraine.

Shortly thereafter, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that Moscow’s deployment into Belarus was the biggest since the Cold War, with “an expected 30,000 combat troops, Spetsnaz special operation forces, fighter jets including SU-35, Iskander dual-capable missiles and S-400 air defense systems.”

Belarus is an ideal jumping off point for Russian troops to move into Ukraine — or Poland. The Poles know they could be Russia’s next target — once again — which makes Hegseth’s capitulation on behalf of Trump so disingenuous and worrying.

This was made even more troubling when Vice President Vance made it abundantly clear Europe was no longer a priority for the Trump Administration in a speech in Munich a few days after Hegseth dropped the first shoe.

In response to this sellout, and writing for Foreign Policy, Alexey Kovalev said, “The Kremlin and its media machine have not been this ecstatic since the launch of Putin’s “special military operation.”

 “Trump is now doing our job for us” by “sawing” Europe into pieces, Russian talk show host Evgeny Popov told his viewers. His giddy, smiling co-host, Olga Skabeeva, described the turn of events as having been “unimaginable” and “unthinkable” before. On another show, the pundit Sergey Mikheev was elated by another Hegseth remark that was widely interpreted to mean that Washington was reconsidering its security commitment to Europe. Mikheev concluded that Russia was finally free to strike Brussels, London, and Paris. Some pundits basked in the fact that it was Trump who reached out to Putin. “It’s as if Julius Ceasar himself telephoned a barbarian,” Mosfilm studio chief Karen Shakhnazarov commented on another show.

In addition to angering the Ukrainian government and further demoralizing its battle-weary troops on the front lines, the Trump Administration is delivering Christmas for Vladimir Putin. His stocking is full and shiny presents await opening under the tree. For example, Trump is now talking about lifting sanctions on Russia — and by gutting the parts of the government that enforce them, he has given a massive gift to Putin. What has happened and what is about to happen to Ukraine is immeasurably tragic.

Writing in the Dispatch on Friday, Jonah Goldberg said Trump…

is simply siding with Putin. Trump pretends that he cares—wrongly—that Zelensky is an illegitimate “dictator,” but he doesn’t care an iota that Putin is an actual dictator. He says that Ukraine “started the war” and that since Russia has fought for the Ukrainian territory it stole at gunpoint, it should keep it.

Our national honor is disappearing like soup through a sieve. Our allies see this. They see us becoming unreliable, which means they will find reliability elsewhere.

I’m astonished this is all happening so fast.

Meanwhile, despite Trump’s dishonor, we are faced with the undeniable fact that three years on nearly a fifth of Ukraine is now occupied illegally, immorally, and barbarically by a country led by a tyrannical dictator who targets children’s hospitals and sanctions rape, child abductions, and mass slaughter by his troops.

And Donald Trump admires him.

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¹ In January 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico after the war was won in return for joining the German cause.

² Although The Guardian’s foreign correspondent did scoop the secret part of the Treaty, no one paid any attention.

³ According to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor, Russia currently occupies about 99% of the Luhansk region, 70% of the Donetsk region, roughly 75% of both the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and all of Crimea.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. – Mark Twain

With so much consequential and incompetent lunacy on display, let’s talk about simple pettiness for a moment. There’s a lot of that going around, too, but what I’m referring to is the Trump administration’s war on the Associated Press — over one word.

Donald Trump, of course, is at war with any media outlet that dares criticize him in any way. Most politicians take umbrage when criticized by the media, but Trump is different. He tries to do something about it, something vengeful. He can’t seem to help himself.

In this case, doing something about it means barring AP journalists from attending Oval Office events and from riding on Air Force One with other journalists who cover the president. This, despite the AP being the oldest and largest news organization in the country — and the one Mark Twain loved above all others.

Trump’s war on the AP isn’t about criticism, though. No, it’s about the AP’s style decision regarding the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf of Mexico covers about 600,000 square miles and borders three countries, America, Mexico and Cuba. The name Gulf of Mexico has stood since at least the late 16th century. English geographer Richard Hakluyt referred to the “Gulfe of Mexico” in The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). That same year, Italian cartographer Baptista Boazio produced a map of Sir Francis Drake’s 1585–86 naval campaign against Spanish colonial holdings in the Americas. Boazio depicted Drake’s fleet skirting the edge of the “Baye of Mexico.”

Ever since then, more than 400 years, it has been the Gulf of Mexico.

Until Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14172, entitled, Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness. In it, Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His justification? Here it is, straight from 14172:

“Sec. 4. Gulf of America. (a) The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America. The Gulf was a crucial artery for America’s early trade and global commerce. It is the largest gulf in the world, and the United States coastline along this remarkable body of water spans over 1,700 miles and contains nearly 160 million acres. Its natural resources and wildlife remain central to America’s economy today. The bountiful geology of this basin has made it one of the most prodigious oil and gas regions in the world, providing roughly 14% of our Nation’s crude-oil production and an abundance of natural gas, and consistently driving new and innovative technologies that have allowed us to tap into some of the deepest and richest oil reservoirs in the world. The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species, and it is recognized as one of the most productive fisheries in the world, with the second largest volume of commercial fishing landings by region in the Nation, contributing millions of dollars to local American economies. The Gulf is also a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities. Further, the Gulf is a vital region for the multi-billion-dollar U.S. maritime industry, providing some of the largest and most impressive ports in the world. The Gulf will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy, and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.”

It’s a mouthful, but reducing it to one sentence, you get: The Gulf has oil and gas, fish, and ports, and we drill, fish, and ship from it, so it’s ours.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, U.S. waters extend 12 nautical miles from its coastline (as do Mexico’s and Cuba’s), and the Gulf is recognized as the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite three countries sharing the Gulf’s coastline, Donald Trump has asserted that the US does “the most work” there, and the body of water should bear America’s name because “it’s ours,” adding, “the American name has a beautiful ring.”

Back to the AP.

The Associated Press’s Stylebook contains more than 5,000 writing guidelines. As the Writing Lab at Purdue University puts it:

“Associated Press style provides guidelines for news writing. Many newspapers, magazines and public relations offices across the United States use AP style. Although some publications such as the New York Times have developed their own style guidelines, a basic knowledge of AP style is considered essential to those who want to work in print journalism.”

Now in its 57th edition, the AP Stylebook has become the gold standard for journalists and other writers. Many news outlets and other organizations use it as an arbiter of how to refer to things authoritatively. When a writer is confused about some compositional issue, they open their AP Stylebook and see a consistently reliable answer. And reliable consistency matters. That is why the AP doesn’t make changes to its Stylebook without a lot of thought.

On the day Trump announced the Gulf of America, his executive order also renamed Mount Denali as Mount McKinley. And this change the AP adopted — because all of Denali, now McKinley, is in the U.S., and Trump has the authority to rename it. But because the Gulf of Mexico is a globally referenced, internationally recognized, and United Nations-adopted, name, the AP will stick with its international appellation.¹

For some bizarre reason, this angered Trump, and, because of the monarchical underpinning of this administration, it angered every governmental Trump ring-kisser. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, who, in just three weeks, eclipsed everyone else in the Trump orb in Trump worshipping, said,  “it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that.” At that point, it had been a historical “fact” to Trump loyalists for about six hours.

The Associated Press will continue apace. It has weathered all kinds of blowhards since its founding in 1846. It will weather the pettiness of Donald Trump.

Thinking about Trump, I can’t help but wonder if, for all his bluster and narcissistic sociopathy, there isn’t just barely living, unfathomably deep within him, an anguished sliver of a purgatorial soul despising everything he does.

Nah! Forget that. He’s just an evil old man.

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¹ Here is the AP’s official Stylebook entry regarding Trump’s attempted change:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change.

The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. Refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.

Per the AP Stylebook, you may also use Gulf or Gulf Coast to describe the body of water along the Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coasts.

Kennedy Center Honorees customarily visit the White House for a reception prior to their evening Honors celebrations. But not so eight years ago in 2017. That was the year when Kennedy Center Honorees dancer Carmen de Lavallade, singers Gloria Estefan and Lionel Richie, rapper LL Cool J, and TV writer/producer Norman Lear refused to visit the White House occupied by Donald Trump after Trump had made supportive comments about the tiki-torch-bearing, modern-day Nazis marching in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that August.

Trump, who has never been known to accept even the slightest of slights, was so miffed at this he never went to any of the Honors Ceremonies during the entirety of his first term. In fact, to this day, Trump has never set foot in the Kennedy Center.

The Kennedy Center was the brainchild of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who established a commission for a new public auditorium in the nation’s capital in 1955. Three years later, he signed the National Cultural Center Act.  In signing this act, Eisenhower confirmed the inherent value of the arts to all Americans, and created what would ultimately become the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When promoting the construction of the Kennedy Center, Eisenhower said, “In Washington there should be a Center of culture…an artistic mecca.”

The National Cultural Center Act authorized the Center’s construction, mandated an artistic vision to produce and present a wide variety of both classical and contemporary performances, specified an educational mission for the Center, and declared the Center was to be an independent facility, self-sustaining, and privately funded.

In November, 1962, President Kennedy kicked off a $30 million fundraising campaign by holding special White House luncheons and receptions, appointing his wife Jacqueline and Mrs. Eisenhower as honorary co-chairwomen, and placing the prestige of his office behind the venture.

Two months after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress passed and President Johnson signed into law legislation renaming the National Cultural Center the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Law authorized $23 million to help in construction, which began in December, 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson broke ground, using the same gold shovel used for breaking ground at the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Monument.

The Center opened on 8 September 1971 with a gala performance featuring the world premiere of Mass, a Theatre Requiem honoring President Kennedy, commissioned from legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, conducted by the composer.

In the 54 years since it opened so auspiciously, the Kennedy Center has hosted the best the world has to offer in culture and the arts. And it does so to this day. If you were there last night, you could have seen the American Ballet Theatre perform Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with music by Isobel Waller-Bridge. Or, in another of the Center’s theaters, you could have laughed to the hilarious Shear Madness.

Wednesday of this week was a dark day for the Kennedy Center. That was the day Donald Trump, just to prove there’s a new boss in town, fired all of the Kennedy Center’s Trustees of Democratic persuasion, as well as the Center’s president, the highly respected Deborah Rutter, and the Chair of the Board, David Rubenstein, founder of the Carlisle Group.

Trump then filled the vacant Trustee slots by appointing ardent loyalists, who promptly and unanimously elected him Chair. He now gets to sit in the Chair occupied by the estimable Mr. Rubenstein since 2010. Of the firings of Rubenstein and the other Trustees, Trump said they,  “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”

Trump then appointed Richard Grennell as the center’s interim president. Grennell, a true-believing MAGA Trump loyalist, had been ambassador to Germany during the first Trump administration and Trump’s acting national intelligence director from February to May 2020. In that respect, he replaced Joseph Maguire, whom Trump fired after Maguire advised Congress about Russian interference prior to the 2020 presidential election.

You get on Donald Trump’s bad side at your own peril.

Richard Grennell is utterly devoid of any experience in the arts. He’ll probably have a hard time finding backstage. And he won’t have much help from staff, because Trump also fired a number of people in management.

After appointing Grennell, Trump wrote on his Truth Social network, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”¹ He also wrote he was “honored” to be elected Chair of the Kennedy Center. As if there was ever any doubt.

One of the chapters in the Authoritarian Playbook calls for extensive efforts to control and shape society and culture.

For example, the Third Reich deemed modern art and artists to be sick and immoral. The regime called this art “degenerate.” The Nazis confiscated thousands of modern artworks from German museums. In 1937, they displayed many in what Goebbels called a “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. After that, they destroyed several thousand confiscated works of art. But they saved the best and most valuable works and sold all of them to enrich the regime and prepare for war.

Reaction to Trump’s takeover in the arts world has been quick. Issa Rae and Low Cut Connie immediately cancelled concerts scheduled for the Center. Renowned Soprano Renee Fleming, singer songwriter Ben Folds, and television producer/writer Shonda Rhimes have all resigned their artistic advisor positions.

A word about David Rubenstein. His financial generosity to the Kennedy Center is unsurpassed. At $111 million, he is the largest individual contributor to the Center in its 54-year history. Rubenstein had planned to step down from his leadership role at the end of this year, but agreed to stay on through 2026, because a national search for a new Chair was taking longer than the Board had anticipated. The Board no longer has that problem.

I wonder what Trump will do next at the Center built by Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson? Maybe change its name to the Trump Center for the Performing Arts?

Why not? He puts his name on everything else he touches.

One thing I’m pretty sure he won’t do — write a check.

______________________

¹ As NPR  has noted, the Kennedy Center hosted several drag brunches at its rooftop restaurant last year as well as a free Drag Salute to Divas event at its Millennium stage and a production of drag performer Kris Andersson’s solo show Dixie’s Tupperware Party — all of which were aimed at adults and none of which were anti-American or propaganda.

On the evening of 8 November 1923, Adolph Hitler and a body of heavily armed stormtroopers broke into a meeting of Bavarian leaders at the Bürgerbräukelle, a beer cellar just outside Munich, and began a serious attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government and then march to Berlin to take over the country, as the Italian Benito Mussolini had done a year earlier in capturing Rome. Known as the Beer Hall Putsch, the coup attempt had not been thought out well and did not reckon with organized police who would counter it.

Overnight Hitler’s allies gathered about 2,000 armed supporters, to each of whom the Nazis paid 2 billion marks for signing up to revolt (because of Germany’s hyper-inflation, this was worth just over $3 on that day).

Early the next morning, Hitler and his rabble set off to capture the Ministry of War, but were met by a strong cordon of police. Nobody knows who fired first, but someone did, and for the next minute the air was full of smoke from all the bullets. Herman Göring was shot in the leg and fell.¹ Hitler was pushed down and dislocated his shoulder. When the fighting stopped, 14 of Hitler’s marchers were killed, along with four policemen.

The German government put Hitler on trial in early 1924, but, because everyone knew the Nazi leader could implicate many Bavarian politicians in the Putsch attempt, he was allowed wide latitude to bully and insult prosecution witnesses, as well as to speechify, which he did incessantly. He said he was “serving the interests of Germany,” which could never be judged treasonous. “The eternal court of history,” he declared, “will judge us as Germans who wanted the best for their people and their fatherland.”

Despite the undeniable fact that members of the putsch had killed four policemen and staged an armed and treasonable revolt, both offenses punishable by death, the court sentenced Hitler to five years in prison, and a cushy prison, at that — Landsberg am Lech, just west of Munich. This was a place that doled out “fortress incarceration,” a mild form of imprisonment for offenders thought to have acted from “honorable motives.” This is where Adolph Hitler and his factotum Rudolph Hess settled in to while away some time. And this is where Adolph Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

In My Struggle, Hitler wrote he’d learned from the failed Putsch. He now realized a violent attempt to take over the government would fail. Consequently, the Nazi Party would become political and would achieve its aims legally. Yes, there would be violence (and there certainly was), but the Party would act according to the law.

After 264 days of a five-year sentence, the German government freed Hitler.

The reason I bring up this history is because in My Struggle, written ten years before Hitler and the Nazis came to power, Hitler told everyone who could read exactly what he and the Nazis would do when they ultimately took control. A poorly written book (although, after 1933, if you didn’t have a copy prominently displayed in your home, a few Brownshirts might pay you a visit with unwelcome consequences), My Struggle lays out with precision the entire Nazi blueprint once in power, including the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables, the creation of the Concentration Camp society, and the invasion of the East to acquire Lebensraum, or the “Living Space” Hitler decided the German nation required to expand.

On 30 January 1933, the day Hitler took power, he began keeping every one of his promises first laid out ten years before. In late March of that year, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp — at Dachau, 12 miles northwest of Munich. They sent four busloads of political opponents and, yes, Jews, to the new facility while the citizens of Dachau, lining the streets, watched the parade go by. In early April, just to make sure everyone got the message, they walked four of the Jews outside and shot them each through the head.

Fanatical megalomaniacs tell you what they’re going to do, and if you let them, they do it. Adolph Hitler is not the only example I could cite.

Moving ahead 92 years, we see another megalomaniac who told us repeatedly what he intended to do if restored to power. Like Hitler before him, Donald Trump told all of us just what we could expect if he won the 2024 presidential election. It should have scared everyone. No one should have thought he was simply hyperbolizing and ,exaggerating to feed his MAGA base. The man is not that subtle. The nation yawned.

In the last three weeks, we have learned much we should have already known. We have watched Trump’s sycophantish acolytes, his Görings and Hesses, implement Project 2025 chapter and verse. This is the document Donald Trump disavowed during the campaign, claiming he didn’t even know the authors.

In 2023, on Veterans Day, the former president (at the time), in an authoritarian rant, wrote on his Truth Social platform, “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”

Adolph Hitler could have written those words about his Germany.

The Nazis did all they could to dehumanize Jews, Gypsies, and other groups they deemed inferior. Hitler and Goebbels, especially, called Jews and other undesirables “vermin.” In addition to Jews, Hitler’s bête noire were Communists and Bolsheviks. He went after them with nearly the same ferocity as he did the Jews. They were all in the Nazi crosshairs. They were all “vermin.”

History is rhyming now.

Donald Trump’s “vermin” is different. Trump’s vermin barrel is full of all those who have opposed or criticized him, particularly law enforcement, the judiciary, military officers who refused to do his bidding, and politicians, such as Liz Cheney, whom he has said should be tried for treason, which is punishable by death. No Republican will publicly criticize him. He has cowed them all.

In his first term, Donald Trump, the reality TV star and New York real estate developer, was new to the job and had no idea what he was doing. Frankly, he was surprised he’d won the election.

He was urged to appoint a number of people to his administration who were qualified to do the work required. But they kept pushing back on his wilder demands and kept him relatively tethered on many issues. He was inhibited by the likes of Reince Priebus and General John Kelly, his first two Chiefs of Staff, General James Mattis, his first Secretary of Defense, and Rex Tillerson, his first Secretary of State.

That tether, fragile as it was, is absent in his second term. We are now experiencing the complete and unhinged Trump, and only those fiercely loyal are allowed to serve. All others, he will kick aside, regardless of expertise or experience. That includes about 4,000 top-level federal service civilian employees who keep the federal machine running relatively smoothly.

Our nation has withstood many deeply troubling challenges, most notably a civil war and two World Wars, but those were long ago. We are now complacent and are demonstrating how completely unprepared we were for the second coming of Donald Trump. We have put on size-12 blinkers and no longer see, much less appreciate, the evil around us.

Witness the collective national shrug as we watched him stroll through 91 criminal charges and mock our judicial system in the process.

Witness his fond embrace of slash-and-burn Elon Musk and the ease with which he got America’s oligarchs to kneel and kiss the ring. Who saw that coming?

Witness his 24 January, Friday night purge of 17 Inspectors General, whose job it is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the agencies they represent. Congress passed the Inspector General Act long ago and strengthened it three years ago after Trump tried to dismantle the program in his first term. The Act requires a president to give a 30-day notification to Congress and provide specific reasons for terminations of an inspector general. That did not happen, and the IGs were fired by email in the Friday night purge. This is like getting rid of bank security and leaving the vault door open.

Witness his casual rejection of court rulings over the last two weeks. Yesterday, he said he would abide by the courts’ rulings, but, ominously, also said, “It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges because that’s very serious, I think it’s a very serious violation.”

Witness the ease with which his unqualified and dangerous nominees for cabinet positions are sailing through to confirmation with no Republican pushback.

Witness the nonchalant manner in which he destroyed the 64-year-old USAID and cut off food and medical funding to the world’s neediest people with no more care than it would take to brush a piece of lint off his jacket. He and Musk are proud of that. They say it will save money.

Witness his cavalier decision to significantly reduce indirect payments to grantees of the National Institutes of Health. He tried exactly the same thing in 2018, which angered a more stouthearted Congress, which passed a law prohibiting such action. Yesterday, Judd Legum, of Popular Information scooped that yesterday morning NIH had written a memo to all grantees acknowledging that its funding freeze was illegal and directing staff to resume issuing grants.

And witness the hatred and bigotry he and his followers have shown to our fellow citizens who are outside the mainstream. Trump went out of his way to terrorize the transgender community in order to make his MAGA Christian nationalists happy. Well, he got trans women out of college sports, despite the NCAA reporting that out of 530,000 student-athletes, fewer than ten are transgender.

I can sum up the threat of Donald Trump by saying it is a short step from rounding up all undocumented aliens to rounding up legal immigrants you don’t like to rounding up political opponents who become a nuisance, to rounding up judges who don’t rule in your favor to rounding up…anyone.

Authoritarianism is alive and well at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

________________

¹ The pain from this wound would bother Göring for the rest of his life and is the reason he became a lifelong opioid addict.

The illegal buyout fiasco

According to 2024 data, 375,000 federal employees, not counting the armed services or the Postal Service, live in the Washington, DC, northern Virginia, and southern Maryland area. They make up sixteen percent of the total federal workforce. Of that group, 200,000 live in DC.

Of the top-level managerial and supervisory federal workforce — at the GS13, 14, and 15 levels, all making over $100,000 per year — 40% work in DC.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has taken over the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM),  according to reporting in Wired, sent an employment buyout offer in an email to all federal service civilian employees  two weeks ago with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It gave federal employees just nine days to decide their fates. They could either accept the buyout with a promise of seven months severance through September, or risk immediate layoffs.

The Musk/Trump buyout plan aims to reduce the federal workforce by at least 10%. If this were to occur, 37,500 employees in the nation’s capital would be out of a job. This would be more than 1% of the entire three-state population.

Nationally, if Trump and Musk reach their goal, the federal workforce would be reduced by about 230,000 people. But yesterday, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, for the second time, threw sand in the gears of the plan. His order puts the plan on hold again “until further order of the Court.”

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen shows how the the DOGE, excuse me, make that OPM, email paints a miserable future for employees who refuse the buyout offer.

The Trump administration is requiring a return to the office, and stripping thousands of employees in policymaking roles of civil service protections. Because of expected divestitures of physical office space, many workers would have to relocate into new offices or maybe even new cities. Because of promised reductions in force, many workers who choose to stay could be furloughed anyway: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” the email reads. Moreover, there are statements about higher performance standards and an emphasis on being “loyal” and “trustworthy.”

Putting aside the possible consequences of what the loss of 37,500 jobs in DC and another 230,000 around the country might do to governmental functioning, just for a moment imagine the effect such a loss might have on our economy, not to mention the lives of the workers cast out into the darkness.

This becomes even more sobering when one considers that neither Trump nor Musk seems to have any kind of a plan for what happens to those folks on the day after.

Finally, it does not appear any of this is legal, not even a little bit. According to the Constitution, Congress establishes funding, and it has set not a penny aside for any of this. In fact, the OPM website clearly states that the limit for incentive packages for voluntary resignations is $25,000, far less than seven months’ pay for the average federal worker.

The freeze that isn’t

Immediately after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Office of Personnel and Management issued an order appearing to halt all federal grant spending. That order was rescinded amid a political backlash, and a federal court blocked a broader funding aid freeze, too.

In a five-page ruling yesterday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell, Chief Judge of the Rhode Island District Court, said the administration is violating the “plain text” of his initial restraining order.

Judge McConnell issued his ruling after reviewing complaints from several Democratic state attorneys general that the Trump administration has continued to withhold funds anyway.

The continued violations of the restraining order are manifesting in several areas, such as the Department of Agricultural, where farmers have had funds for energy improvements cut off. Also, the National Institutes of Health has slashed billions of dollars in “indirect” costs for biomedical research, funding which was to go to studies into disease prevention and treatment. Last night, another federal judge, this one from Massachusetts, blocked the halt in biotech spending hours after it went into effect.

This could become even more serious, because it is setting up a war between the Judiciary and Executive branches. One need only consider Vice President JD Vance’s reaction to US district court judge Paul Engelmayer’s injunction stopping Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing the treasury department’s central payment system in search of supposed corruption and waste.

Following Engelmayer’s ruling, Vance wrote that judges “aren’t allowed” to control the president’s “legitimate power.”

“If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote.

But this is simply not true, and JD Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, should, and does, know better. In fact, Article III of the US constitution confers a power known as judicial review, which gives federal judges the authority to rule on cases involving the president, as well as other branches of government.

My friends, we are entering a constitutional crisis, and the sooner everyday citizens and members of Congress recognize it for what it is, the better.

So, who’s in Musk’s Mafia?

The oldest person in Elon Musk DOGE rat-pack is reported to be 25 years old; the youngest, 19.

The 19-year-old goes by the online soubriquet, “Big Balls.” If you can believe it, Big Balls has reportedly been appointed senior adviser both at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns among diplomats and others about his potential access to sensitive information. He also works out of the Office of Management and Budget. The young man gets around.

Big Balls has a real name, and it is Edward Coristine. Coristine  briefly worked for Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink and must have distinguished himself to the boss, because he’s now wormed his way into the sinews and synapses of government.

Coristine was fired from an internship at Path Network, Bloomberg News reports, because of leaking information to a competitor.

Former FBI agent EJ Hilbert told Wired last Thursday: “If I was doing the background investigation on him, I would probably have recommended against hiring him for the work he’s doing.”

“Probably?”

The oldest member of Musk’s DOGE team, 25-year-old Marko Elez, resigned last week after a report from the Wall Street Journal linked him to a now-deleted social media account that shared racist content and advocated for eugenics.

According to the Journal’s review of archived social media posts, Elez posted on X in July: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

The account also reportedly shared a post calling to normalize “Indian hate,” suggested Gaza and Israel be “wiped off the face of the Earth,” and said: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”

Following the Elez resignation, JD Vance urged Musk to rehire him, saying, “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”

Musk then polled his Twitter followers on rehiring Elez, which seems to me a rather interesting, if weird, way to make personnel decisions. At any rate, Must rehired Elez last Friday despite his social media baggage.

If it weren’t so serious, one could be forgiven for thinking Musk’s DOGE adventure looks like a frat house project gone wrong.

Final thought

Some important questions facing America are: What will the Trump Administration do in the face of the Judiciary getting in its way? What will happen if the answer is: Ignore the rulings. In that case, what will all those judges do? Issue Contempt of Court rulings? Try to have somebody arrested?

What?

And what happens after that, whatever “that” is?

We’re about to discover whether Donald Trump has made the Constitution irrelevant. If so, it only took him three weeks to do it.