In his desire to control every aspect of the federal government, Trump has fired Democrats whose term has not expired on independent boards; terminated nonpartisan Departmental Inspectors General whose job is to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse; fired the Ethics Officer (Hampton Dillinger) who receives whistleblower complaints; and tried to dominate every independent agency.
Our government was designed with many checks and balances to assure that no president has total control. Trump, or the people who think for him, are deliberately tearing down every such check or balance.
Currently, Trump is waging a battle to take full control of the Merit Systems Protection Board y firing one Democratic member, leaving it without a quorum and unable to function.
The Trump administration on Tuesday asked a three-judge circuit court panel to suspend rulings from district judges that reinstated ousted Biden appointees to the Merit Systems Protection Board and National Labor Relations Board in a case that ultimately seems likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
The judges were respectively appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Earlier this month, the trio allowed for Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger to be removed while the court heard the Trump administration’s appeal of a similar district judge ruling that blocked Trump’s firing of the special counsel. Following that decision, Dellinger decided to drop his lawsuit.
Trump on Feb. 10 attempted to fire MSPB board member Cathy Harris, whose term expires in 2028. Harris represents one-third of the federal employee appeals board that has experienced a surge in cases as a result of the president’s mass firings and layoffs of civil servants.
A district judge on March 4 stopped the removal, agreeing that the president can only remove an MSPB member for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Harris on March 5 ordered the temporary reinstatement of thousands of Agriculture Department probationary employees who were fired by the Trump administration.
“Congress, which is the people’s representatives, have enacted a law…to say that these types of neutral arbiters have a measure of protection [from removal] because otherwise they can’t decide cases free of fear or favor,” Harris’ lawyer argued on Tuesday.
If Harris is removed, that would leave MSPB without a quorum. From 2017 to 2022, the board also lacked a quorum, which created a 3,500-case backlog that was only virtually eliminated at the end of 2024. Due to an interim final rule established that same year, MSPB can conduct some actions without a quorum.
Likewise, a district judge on March 6 reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB. Trump in late January fired Wilcox ahead of the end of her term in 2028, leaving the agency that resolves unfair labor practices in the private sector without a quorum to hear and decide cases.
“The president has no legitimate interest in disabling this body created by Congress from performing its functions. He does have a legitimate interest in, [as] a new president elected by the people, putting his stamp on the agency,” Wilcox’s attorney said. “He does that by naming a new general counsel [and] he does that by naming the chair, which he has done. And he could do that, hasn’t done so yet, by naming people to the two vacancies. All of that would put his stamp on the agency and allow it to function in the way that he would like.”
The Trump administration, on the other hand, contended that the president should be able to remove members of the MSPB and NLRB at will.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Trump seems to think that no one can think beyond their personal political views to consciously adhere to the rule of law and their oath of office.
If so, then for him, it’s only a zero-sum game–EITHER democratic OR republican and neither has the ability or the desire to think beyond their political horizon. Trump can only win or lose–he cannot change his view or even tolerate the idea that others whom he governs might think differently; and he will not lose, if to lose means he is found to be mistaken by some evidence that, indeed, points beyond his or anyone’s political views. In his view, that is only cause to “double down” even if it becomes laughably false.
No wonder he hates the Constitution and the rule of law, because both ASSUME an intelligent but also reflective-enough president, at least, who CAN think beyond his own or others’ political views to understand a higher truth–as in scientific or commonly understood evidence which, again, he hates. (Enter: the famed sharpie. Psychologically, he must be sitting on a very large and rotting BLOCKING mechanism–“go with my view or die.” Do not expect humility or empathy.)
The whole of civilized discourse, however, is based on the higher thinking that takes us to moderate or to move beyond our tribal and totalitarian tendencies. Somewhere along the line, Trump missed that boat.
With that thinking, however, there is no such thing as clear-headed judicial review or bipartisanship. To think so one MUST BE involved in an anti-Trump ruse–as he often is involved with anti-whatever ruse. From that view, there can be no other way.
And then, as a power broker, he makes things worse by projecting his truncated view onto others and closes every door to creative change.
Kiss my . . . er . . . ring or “you’re fired.” CBK
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After Dangerous Dictator Diaper Don the Porn Star’s John and Nazi Ketamine Addict Maniac Musk get done with the federal government, they will come after the states they do not control until there is only one source of power in the country, and the democratic power divided between three branches in the federal and state governments will only do what the one power wants.
Judges will not make rulings unless they are on the approved list, which may change daily. Juries, fearing for their lives, will also be rubber stamps.
Governors the same
Congress the same
State legislatures the same
Instead of a Constitution establishing laws, the US will be ruled by Executive Orders from Mar-a-Lago or the White House.
Everyone will live in fear of those executive orders built on a foundation of chaos and change, constant change. Never ending change based on the moods of a malignant narcissist, who is a convicted rapist, fraud, felon, and a lifelong cheater and liar.
The people will not trust anything they read in the news from the traditional media because what they report must be approved from the sociopaths’ regime first.
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This blog is 24/7 hysteria about Trump, much of it justified. But will Diane Ravitch admit that some people she publicly supported deliberately misled the public about the origins of Covid? Will she finally admit that there is justified concern about the conduct of Dr. Fauci, as a recent NYT article described in detail? Here’s a detailed commentary today from Andrew Sullivan, a longtime admirer of Fauci who is now deeply dismayed by the corruption of science by political ideology.
“I was never a Covid nutter, on either side. I had my paranoid moments early on, but I never expected the government to get everything right. Anyone passingly aware of the history of plagues knows that failure is just par for the course. Misinformation? Always and everywhere, the record shows. But I did have faith in cutting-edge modern science and the expertise at the NIH. I knew NIAID’s Tony Fauci from the AIDS days and remembered him very fondly. Most of the time he was being yelled at by Larry Kramer, I was on Fauci’s side. I trusted him.
I don’t anymore. Over the last five years, we have slowly found out that, on Covid-19, we were all misled and misdirected a lot. And nowhere is this more evident than in the debate over where the virus came from. From the very start, it seemed, every authoritative figure assured us that it came from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, where many bats, raccoons, and pangolins (mmm) tended to hang out in close proximity.
It was simply a hugely massive coincidence that there was also a laboratory in Wuhan … researching coronaviruses in bats by engineering more dangerous viruses in order to make vaccines for them. In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, appearing on Stephen Colbert’s show: “Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?”
The question, in fact, had been famously and definitively answered by a scientific paper on the “Proximal Origin” of Covid published in March 2020 in Nature Medicine. It told us that the consensus of the scientific authorities was that the virus almost certainly came from nature: “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Anything else was dismissed as a meritless conspiracy story. When Trump started calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and “kung flu,” it just seemed to confirm the media’s view that the lab leak was not just rightist bonkers, but even worse: racist.
But Trump wasn’t wrong, and we know now that the “Proximal Origin” paper was an act of conscious scientific deception.
How do we know this? One clue is that, five years later, all the major intelligence services in the West believe that a lab leak is indeed the likeliest reason for an epidemic that killed seven million people. The US Energy Department and FBI came to that conclusion in 2023, with the CIA finally agreeing this January, with “low confidence.” More striking is the news from Germany, where newspapers just reported that the German spy agency, the BND, had believed Covid was a lab leak as far back as March 2020. And not just likely with “low confidence” — but 80-95 percent likely.
Chancellor Angela Merkel had asked for the assessment, and then never said a word in public about it. Ditto Boris in the UK. MI6 gave him a report in March 2020 that said: “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Not likely with “low confidence,” not even 80-95 percent, but “beyond reasonable doubt.” In his memoir, Johnson explains Covid thus: “Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth — eye of bat and toe of frog — and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.” And yet at the time, he said nothing about this in public at all.
The MI6 report homed in on the critical “Proximal Origin” of early Covid that “debunked” the lab leak theory. MI6 believed the paper was part of a disinformation project by the People’s Republic of China “to embed the natural causation narrative and, by misdirection, to conceal true origin and responsibility.” In their new, essential, and revelatory book, In Covid’s Wake, Princeton professors Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee also take a scathing look at the provenance of that paper.
They trace the history of the “gain-of-function” (GOF) research in viruses and remind us that lab leaks had always been a worry: “multiple cases of SARS in Beijing in 2004, a 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the [UK], an anthrax escape that killed sixty in Russia, a 2019 lab leak of Brucella that infected more than ten thousand people in China.” Such fears spiked in 2014, when two mishaps in US labs involving anthrax and bird flu spurred the Obama administration to put a moratorium on GOF research.
Tony Fauci, on the other hand, had always been a big fan of GOF. Go read his 2011 op-ed with the prescient headline: “A flu virus risk worth taking.” In that piece, Fauci reassured us that “the engineered viruses … are maintained in high-security laboratories.” (My italics.) You might imagine, then, that when he discovered that the Wuhan Institute had been experimenting with GOF research into bat coronaviruses in a very low-security lab, he’d jump to raise the alarm. But he didn’t. In fact, he helped orchestrate and read drafts of the “Proximal Origin” paper that dismissed the lab leak theory entirely.
The Wuhan Institute in particular had long been identified as a serious lab leak danger. The authors of Covid’s Wake note, “At a November 2015 joint meeting of the Royal Society and the National Academies of Science … on [GOF], the research project that was ‘singled out as the project most likely — of all projects in the world — to trigger a pandemic’ was the research on ‘SARS-related coronaviruses then being carried out jointly by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and [UNC] at Chapel Hill.”
And there we have the US connection. In 2017, Fauci and others quietly lifted the GOF moratorium. How? The WaPo’s Josh Rogin explains:
One of the beneficiaries was Peter Daszak’s company, EcoHealth Alliance, which then got major funds from Fauci’s NIAID for GOF research in bat coronaviruses in collaboration with, yes, the Wuhan Institute. In private emails, Daszak recognized the low safety standards at Wuhan but said they made “our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems.” In other words: deadly viral manipulation on the cheap. What could go wrong?
When American scientists took a first look at Covid-19, it immediately appeared man-made to them. As early as January 31, 2020, Kristian Andersen — one of the “Proximal Origin” authors — emailed Fauci that “some of the features [of Covid-19] (potentially) look engineered” and that two of his co-authors agreed with him that the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” — i.e. not from nature. (The emails cited here were FOIAed, and we owe US Right To Know for the info.)
Andersen’s other emails at the time are quite something. Here’s one on February 2, as he was wrestling with writing the paper: “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely … the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain [without it] — it’s not some fringe theory.” Two days later: “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
Nonetheless, the paper Andersen and others produced, as he acknowledged privately, focused “on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.” And so it did: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Notice the definitive nature of that sentence. (Deeper in the text, where it was unlikely to be found by rushed journalists, there is a less categorical statement.)
Fauci hailed the paper without noting that he had helped generate it and seen drafts of it. For good measure, 27 public health experts then wrote an open letter to The Lancet, backing the paper and asserting, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” One of them was — tada! — Peter Daszak, who was part of this collective statement: “We declare no competing interests.” The Lancet subsequently disclosed his competing interest, which it didn’t condemn.
Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint. Instead of helping to save millions of people, he may have inadvertently helped kill them, even though he knew the risks very well. So he let it appear that he was impartial — his schmoozing of media flunkies is legendary — while tilting everything to protect GOF.
One way of doing this was to label lab leak a national security problem, rather than a scientific one. From Covid’s Wake:
The implications of a lab leak was beyond their remit, Fauci seemed to argue. I would think that was exactly their remit — because only they had the expertise to figure out if it was a lab leak in the first place. Then Fauci makes two demands: this should be done “very quickly” and only if everyone agreed. Andersen got the message — as did all the scientists on a famous February 1 conference call where Fauci and Francis Collins presided, two men with near complete control of all the research funding the scientists on the call depended on. No pressure to please the bosses there.
Were the scientists perhaps fearful that they could be deemed racist for believing in a lab leak? This was 2020, after all. Peak left insanity. For a thorough accounting of the MSM race-baiting, which helped keep the lab leak radioactive to media, check out Ashley Rindsberg in Tablet:
The immortal tweet of the New York Times’ Covid reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, summed up the elite view in May 2021: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”
More persuasive to me is the idea that no Western politician wanted to start a massive fight with China when their cooperation was so essential. The lab leak theory terrified them — because it could mean serious conflict. And so they downplayed it. Appeasement of China is the subtext of all of it. You see this in the scientists’ emails at the very start of the epidemic. They’re worried about “the shit show” if China were accused of deadly incompetence. Andersen’s money quote on the “Proximal Origin” paper in a contemporaneous email is pretty definitive about what happened: “I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”
That is indeed what happened, and we have to come to terms with it far more thoroughly than we have. The MSM have never fully copped to their failure. The NYT, as late as October 2023, was publishing sentences like this: “No public evidence indicates that the institute was storing any pathogen that could have become the coronavirus. Still, President Donald J Trump and the Republicans on Capitol Hill amplified the concerns.” Notice that even then, the NYT was casting one view as inherently right-wing and thereby problematic. It reminds me of the way in which the MSM have ducked basic reporting on sex reassignment for children — because Republicans are against it, so of course it must be legit.
A few weeks ago, we had a podcast on Spinoza, a pioneering scientist in a tribal religious age. His record and that of thousands of other committed empiricists — who risked death to understand the world better — show that, pace Andersen, it is always possible for science to spurn political contamination — if scientists have actual integrity.
And without that integrity, science will lose public trust and simply become politics — which is why it now finds itself in such a crisis. When gender scientists refuse to release publicly-funded studies on child sex reassignment because they don’t like the results, and when virologists consciously obscure the scientific truth to protect their own asses and play global politics, we are right not to trust them.
But I want to trust them again. Science matters. We are in an epistemological crisis right now, where left and right have launched a postmodern assault on the search for objective truth to shore up Trump or to enact “social justice.” We actually need scientists right now more than ever to join those of us trying to rescue liberal democracy from its decadent collapse. We need clear, reasoned, rigorous, replicated, open, and transparent science. We need reason, not politics.
When we needed that in a plague, it just wasn’t there. People remember. And scientists have to grasp how hard it will be for some of us to forget.”
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Betsy Kinney,
Your outrage is misguided. I am not a scientist. I have never expressed a view about the origin of the COVID virus because I have no clue where it originated.
Yes, I admire Dr. Fauci. He was the voice of sanity during a period of time when Trump was urging people to drink bleach or to irradiate their bodies or to take a drug used for deworming horses, in order to ward off COVID. Other scientists in the federal government were afraid to contradict Trump’s nutty recommendations; Fauci was not.
At a time when MAGA opposed masks and later when they opposed vaccines, Dr. Fauci supported masks and vaccines. Trump got vaccinated, along with his family, but pandered to the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers in the MAGA base.
Whether Andrew Sullivan likes Dr. Fauci or not is of no consequence. Andrew Sullivan is a political pundit, not a scientist.
Your digs at trans people shows your hand. Apparently, you don’t believe in decisions that parents and young people make with their medical doctors. My view is that what they decide is not my business. It’s not yours either.
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Exactly where are my digs at trans people? Are you suffering from dementia like your hero Joe Biden? And a recent NYT essay by a liberal reporter said the same things about the Covid coverup that Andrew Sullivan did.
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Perhaps you failed to read your own comment.
In your umpteenth paragraph, you wrote:
“It reminds me of the way in which the MSM have ducked basic reporting on sex reassignment for children — because Republicans are against it, so of course it must be legit.”
As I said in my comment, I have no view about where the virus originated. I have never said that it was a lab leak, or came from a wet market, or anything else. I have no view because I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t care.
What I do care about is that for no apparent reason you have twice written comments insulting me. Please don’t bother to respond, as I’m sure you will insult me again. The first rule of this blog is that personal insults directed at me are not allowed. This is not a public square. It is my living room, and you are not welcome. Two strikes and you are out.
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Betsy Kinney is one piece of expletive deleted. Oh, excuse me, was that an ad hominem attack? Just another right wing concern troll.
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I am accustomed to getting these faux-concern comments. “I am no fan of Trump but…Biden is a Satanic, senile, accursed person..,” or “but Kamala is….” fill in the vile slanders.
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If you boil down everything Betsy Kinney says, it can be reduced to “I believe it was a lab leak because I trust right wing intelligence agencies with an agenda who say so (without offering a bit of evidence except “the lab was in Wuhan so it must be leak”) over SCIENCE.
The ONLY reason that scientists and Fauci believed it LESS likely that it was a lab leak was because of the SCIENCE!
They always quote the speculation about a lab leak from a few scientists EARLY ON, and leave out the very important information that the theory of a lab leak got shut down because of an ANALYSIS OF THE VIRUS ITSELF.
NATURE is one of the most respected science journals. They aren’t perfect, but they follow the EVIDENCE and publish revised findings WHEN THE EVIDENCE supports that.
Nature, September 20, 2024:
“COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market animals after all, suggests latest study
The finding comes from a reanalysis of genomic data.”
Both Andrew Sullivan and Betsy Kinney and many of their ilk substitute “people at intelligence agencies say” “RFK Jr. says” as having equal or even more weight as what scientists actually find.
They are no different than the anti-vaxxers who believe measles kills no children because someone told them it was true, and they don’t care about scientific evidence. They believe the MMR definitely causes autism because someone said it did, not because there is science that supports it.
The SCIENCE simply does not support a lab leak theory YET. There is MORE scientific evidence – so far – support the virus coming from the Wuhan market.
There was no pressure on scientists years out to do anything but FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE. Which is what they have been doing. But there are always a couple self-promoting “helpers” of right wingers like Emily Oster who claim the evidence supports something she wants to promote when it most certainly does not.
What is always left out of these articles is the fact that for years, there have been scientists ALL OVER THE WORLD, including the US, who were examining the lab leak theory because Biden was NOT pressuring anyone to make a finding one way or the other. The SCIENCE still doesn’t support the theory – although it’s possible that it could in the future. It’s appalling that people keep citing what non-scientists at intelligence agencies “think” – which amounts in total to this: There weren’t proper safeguards in place so that meant it could have been a lab leak, so therefore it WAS a lab leak. That’s not science. It’s politics.
People citing that as evidence are doing the same thing that the anti-vax people are doing. They are 100% certain that the MMR vaccine causes autism because people who have no scientific evidence to support their theory say that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
They say we should trust RFK Jr. DESPITE the anti-vax people having NO EVIDENCE that the MMR causes autism, because – well because drug companies can’t be trusted. Thus science can’t be trusted, and the only reason that there isn’t overwhelming proof that the MMR vaccine causes autism is because there is a vast conspiracy among scientists to suppress all the evidence that the MMR vaccine definitely causes autism.
It is impossible to argue with anti-vaxers and folks like Betsy Kinney who don’t have an iota of actual SCIENCE evidence that supports their theory – and the fact that there is a lot of scientific evidence to support a DIFFERENT theory is dismissed as irrelevant.
But Andrew Sullivan and his ilk assume that there hasn’t been lots of research going on to prove the lab leak theory. But there has been! No one is coming up with any scientific evidence to support the lab leak theory – on the contrary, they are coming up with the OPPOSITE! But some folks now apparently believe that “there weren’t good enough safety protocols” means that it came from a lab leak.
The US didn’t have good enough safety protocols for the MMR vaccine, so that means it ius 100% certain that the MMR is the cause of autism.
The US didn’t have good enough safety protocols to protect kids riding school buses (the school buses I rode in the 1970s didn’t even have seat belts), so that makes it 100% certain that riding school buses in the 1970s caused dementia later in life. Who cares about having credible scientific evidence when we already know with certainty that there were no seat belts, so any scientist who doesn’t support that truth that riding school buses caused dementia is suppressing evidence to help school bus companies. At least according to the logic of the esteemed Betsy Kinney.
Absence of scientific evidence to support one of their theories is irrelevant when they have the evidence that kids didn’t wear seatbelts in the 1970s and that lab safety protocols in Wuhan were problematic.
What Kinney and her ilk miss is that science hasn’t been “protecting” Wuhan (even if we concede that could have happened in the very first months) – but 5 years later they have simply been unwilling to promote an origin theory of covid that they can find no scientific evidence to support, especially when there is more evidence supporting an alternative origin theory.
I support doing more research, but the people who are promoting a theory that has no evidence to support it are either useful idiots who know nothing about science, or shameful right wing liars.
And it all starts with the lie that for 5 years, all research into the lab leak origin of covid has been either suppressed or intentionally manipulated because of political pressure on scientists by the evil Biden administration and the evil Fauci. Because it can NEVER be that scientists couldn’t find any evidence to support the lab leak theory.
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Betsy Kinney had two sources: 1) Andrew Sullivan said so; 2) an article in The New York Times said so. Neither is science-based. I never gave it much thought. What worried me was the very high death rate in this country because Trump refused to support the advice of scientists.
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Betsy Kinney– Your post seems biased to me, and naive.
You rest your case on an opinion piece by a conservative political pundit (as noted by Diane), which draws its main scientific points from articles published very early on– which need to be considered in the context of subsequent scientific articles (as noted by nycpsp). Also because Sullivan depends heavily on conclusions reached by intelligence agencies here and abroad (which are by nature political) rather than, again, on continued scientific research.
I’ve read up on both sides of the argument extensively over the years. It seems to me the case for Wuhan market spread is stronger than Wuhan Labs spread, although either is arguably feasible; one just seems more likely given the evidence. But early on I decided we would probably never know the truth, because of (a)the political ramifications of blaming a global pandemic on one nation, and (b)the tie-in back to US on GOF [there are even suggestions that US scientists raised issues on WL’s safety stds & were ignored by higher-ups].
In this, I agree with Sullivan: “More persuasive to me is the idea that no Western politician wanted to start a massive fight with China when their cooperation was so essential. The lab leak theory terrified them — because it could mean serious conflict. And so they downplayed it. Appeasement of China is the subtext of all of it. You see this in the scientists’ emails at the very start of the epidemic. They’re worried about “the shit show” if China were accused of deadly incompetence.” These seem to me smart political decisions.
Whether liberal MSM or others played the racist card just illustrates another politically opportunistic game clouding the facts, and is immaterial.
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Will someone please hire Kamala Harris and the Obamas to sue 47?????
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Or, as the NYT would report, in order to achieve his goal of making boards independent, Trump has fired board members whom he believes are not independent enough.
(It’s too “biased” to mention that Trump is firing board members who don’t do what he says, because Trump SAYS he is firing board members because his goal is an independent board, which requires the firing of board members biased against him.)
Sometimes the NYT writes what they consider an extremely anti-Trump report like: “In order to achieve his goal of making boards independent, Trump has fired board members who he believes are not independent enough. Some partisan Democrats disagree. And many people feel sad that some good people were fired because of Trump’s dedication to having an independent board.”
As long as every article begins with the non-debatable “truth” that Trump’s goal is to have an independent board, and Trump’s goal is to root out fraud and waste, the NYT will “bravely” be very anti-Trump and write about the bad outcome of a Trump firing that is always because of Trump motivated by doing good.
Because Trump values science and independence and wants to root out bias, Trump is firing every “biased” scientist. The liberal media always leaves out that Trump’s definition of “bias” is a scientist who won’t say vaccines are evil. They leave out that Trump’s definition of “independence” means a board member that follows Trump’s orders immediately.
Because it would be too “biased” to include that information. The only allowable truth is that Trump is motivated by wanting an independent board and is motivated by wanted to root out fraud and waste. Now that we all agree on that, it is okay to debate whether some of Trump’s efforts to root out bias may not be working as well as they should.
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I have not seen articles in the New York Times defending Trump’s evisceration of independent agencies.
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You are correct and I agree. The NYT doesn’t defend Trump’s evisceration of independent agencies.
They simply report Trump’s evisceration “in context” – by alluding – either via innuendo or straight out stating it as fact – that the firings are in service to his goal of making agencies more independent.
Just like their heartbreaking articles about the effects of Trump’s firings in USAID and other agencies always, always refer to Trump’s actions as being done in service to his (very popular) goal of making government more efficient by getting rid of waste and fraud. There are no stories about Trump’s goal and motivation being to “eviscerate” the government. Because Trump’s motives are whatever he says, no mater how absurd or the lack of ANY credible evidence to support that his motives are good. Any bad outcomes are accidental byproducts of Trump’s good motives.
In Friday’s NYT “anti-Trump” story “Pentagon Set up Briefing for Musk on Potential War With China”- notice this framing:
“It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.
BUT THERE IS A POSSIBLE REASON MR. MUSK MIGHT HAVE NEEDED TO KNOW ASPECTS OF THE WAR PLAN. IF MR. MUSK AND HIS TEAM OF COST CUTTERS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY, OR DOGE, WANT TO TRIM THE PENTAGON BUDGET IN A RESPONSIBLE WAY, THEY MAY NEED TO KNOW WHAT WEAPONS SYSTEMS THE PENTAGON PLANS TO USE IN A FIGHT WITH CHINA.
….BUT FOR MR. MUSK TO EVALUATE HOW TO REORIENT PENTAGON SPENDING, HE WOULD WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE MILITARY INTENDS TO USE AND FOR WHAT PURPOSE.”
The NYT continues on with their stenography of Trump talking points, but the NYT does not even bother to present them as a “Trump source says”, because that would undermine their credibility, but simply offers as a non-debatable fact that Musk and Trump’s goal with Doge is “reorienting” spending.
The one truth that is never questioned is that the goal of Doge is a good one. Even though every bit of evidence in front of us – starting with the obvious fact that you don’t hire inexperienced computer programmers to do the job of weeding out waste and fraud – tells us it isn’t.
It’s dangerous and Orwellian. Trump and Musk can simply say that they are doing anything for xxx reason, and the NYT will vigorously shake their finger and write about the damage done to the agency but never question the very large elephant in the room – that Trump is lying about his motives and there is NO ultimate benefit to America, period.
“President Trump, in his efforts to make America safer, shot a political rival on Fifth Avenue and another 8 people were killed. Some Democrats were outraged and shocked at the deaths.
It was unclear what the impetus was for President Trump to shoot a political rival. But there is a possible reason that President Trump might have needed to shoot a political rival – if President Trump and his team of cost-cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency wanted to make America safer in a responsible way, they have may have needed to shoot Trump’s political rival.”
When this is the “anti-Trump” reporting in the NYT, they are simply reinforcing the Orwellian lie that Trump’s motives are good (in contrast to the Dems, whose motives are only to “defeat Trump” and not do anything good for anyone!)
Until Americans cease to believe the big lie that Trump’s motives are unquestionably good – to make America great and their lives better – there is little chance to fight fascism. But why would most Americans ever doubt that when even the “liberal” NYT never doubts that? The truism in every NYT story is that Dems are motivated by either their hatred for Trump, their wanting to do the bidding of their corporate overlords, their obsession with identity politics and wokeness, their disdain for regular Americans. But Trump is motivated by his desire to make America great again, or his desire to root out fraud, waste and inefficiency, or his desire to save Americans from dangerous violent undocumented immigrants.
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Trump’s motives are always performative. To give his base the impression that he cares about anything but his inflated ego.
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I really don’t understand where you get this idea that New York Times reporters “never doubt” that “Trump’s motives are unquestionably good.” I just don’t understand at all where this comes from. This seems like a massive waste of intellectual energy.
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flerp!,
I have explained this multiple times and you seem to be willfully confused. Perhaps because you agree with the NYT that Trump’s and Musk’s motives are always the best – they want to make America Great Again, they want to root out waste and fraud and make government more efficient, and they want to protect Americans from violent undocumented criminals. That’s fair – if you believe that those are Trump’s motives, you would definitely expect the NYT to frame every news article to reinforce that “truth”.
Sometimes when the NYT is writing an article they consider to be extremely “anti-Trump”, an article might present Trump/Musk’s motives as “unknown, but possibly to root out fraud and waste responsibly.”
We will have to agree to disagree about why the NYT ALWAYS goes out of its way to give context to any negative or unpopular effects of Trump policies by NYT-splaining that whatever mistakes or harm is done, those mistakes were accidental byproducts of Trump’s commitment to rooting out waste and fraud, keeping Americans safe, and making America Great.
“There is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.”
If you agree with the NYT that it is even remotely plausible that Musk hired young computer programmers who understand nothing about the functions of government or trimming budgets to RESPONSIBLY trim government budgets, then I definitely understand why you think it’s great that the NYT spent so many paragraphs to give credibility ONLY to that motive and no other motive. I guess if you think that absurd motive fits the evidence that is before us, you would be glad that the NYT didn’t speculate on other motives and write something like:
“There is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his inexperienced team of computer programmers from the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, wanted to weaken the Pentagon the way they have destroyed other agencies, Musk might want to know which cuts would cause the most damage to US interests.”
Or: “While no one knows whether Doge’s irresponsible cuts were made to intentionally sabotage the most important and popular government programs, or to allow Musk to financially benefit from a non-functioning government, the one non-debatable fact is that Musk intentionally hired young, inexperienced computer tech people with no qualifications to make cost-cutting decisions, and as a result, serious errors and wholesale firings of vital federal employees did grave harm to our country. Whether Musk’s inexperienced Doge staff will wreak the same havoc in the Pentagon to intentionally sabotage our defense, or simply because of their own extreme incompetence, is not yet known.”
Or: “Mr. Musk’s Doge has already made many irresponsible, costly and harmful errors – either intentionally to undermine the functioning of the US government or because of their lack of experience and general incompetence.”
flerp!, I have no idea exactly what Trump’s and Musk’s motives are. But I do know that there is zero evidence that their motives are responsibly cutting out waste and fraud and protecting Americans from dangerous undocumented violent criminals, and there is a preponderance of very credible evidence that those are NOT their motives.
The NYT seems to believe that credible evidence to support Trump’s motivations is “Trump says so”. Unlike the NYT, I am “very biased” so I need a little more than “Trump says so” before I agree with the NYT’s view that they are obligated in the name of being fair and balanced to report what Trump’s (good) motives are in every news story without including the many credible facts and evidence that makes it clear that Trump’s stated motivation is ABSURDLY FALSE.
The NYT reported that the Paul Weiss law firm “agreed to pledge $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues the president has championed, including a task force being run by the Justice Department aimed at combating antisemitism “and other mutually agreed projects.”
Brad Karp said that the agreement was in line with the firm’s principles: “The commitments reaffirmed today are consistent with Judge Simon H. Rifkind’s 1963 Statement of Firm Principles,” which states, among other things, that “we believe in maintaining, by affirmative efforts, a membership of partners and associates reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic and social backgrounds'”
Karp is a Dem, so the NYT reporters go to great lengths to demonstrate that the motives he stated for why he made the agreement are obviously not his motives and only someone really stupid would ever believe they were his motives after reading the NYT coverage of what he did.
It’s a shame that at the NYT, it is absolutely verboten to question whatever utterly absurd motives the Republicans give for their most reprehensible actions. But I guess we are supposed to be happy that at least they will question motives when they report on Dems?
Imagine if the NYT had written the Paul Weiss story the way they write every story about Trump/Musk:
“Today the law firm Paul Weiss agreed to pledge $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues the president has championed, including a task force being run by the Justice Department aimed at combating antisemitism “and other mutually agreed projects.”
“There is a possible reason Brad Karp might have needed to make that arrangement with President Trump. If Mr. Karp and his team of attorneys from Paul Weiss want to fulfill Judge Simon H. Rifkind’s 1963 Statement of Firm Principles in a responsible way, they may need to demonstrate that they maintain a membership of partners and associates reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic and social backgrounds'”
End of story. What’s the big deal? Just like what’s the big deal with what Musk/Trump is doing? Conveniently offer up the self-described motives and leave out all information that demonstrates how absurd those stated motives are, and nothing Trump or Musk or Paul Weiss does is more than a one day story.
The NYT is absolutely right to doubt the motives of Brad Karp, and dangerously wrong to exclude from all news stories anything that would challenge the self-stated motives of Trump and Musk.
The Paul Weiss story proves it is very easy to write a story that INCLUDES the facts that disprove the self-serving motives that someone offers to justify a bad action. So why does the NYT twist themselves into knots to exclude the facts that make the self-stated “motives” of Musk and Trump as absurd as Brad Karp’s.
I think it is a massive waste of intellectual energy to fight for democracy while at the same time undermining your own cause by defending authoritarian-normalizing reporting in the newspaper that most influences the reporting of the supposedly liberal, mainstream media.
It won’t surprise me if the Paul Weiss story gets massive coverage for weeks, with the narrative being “Dems cave, whatever they say their motives are is a lie and they can’t be trusted”. The story won’t be about a Republican White House extorting law firms for profit. Because who knows, Trump says his motives in making the agreement with Paul Weiss are the very best.
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Betsy Kinney managed to sideline this discussion majorly. For the record, I appreciate these recent cites from Government Executive. “Media bias check” rates them only slightly to the left [halfway between “Least Biased” and “Left Center”], and “HIGH” on Factual Reporting. And I applaud District Judge Rudolph Conteras (Obama appointee), who required the reinstatement of Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board, and District Judge Beryl A. Howel (Obama appointee)’s reinstatement of Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB. Howel had numerous user-friendly quotes in the ruling, including Diane’s cite, as well as “That Congress can exert a check on the President by imposing for-cause restrictions on the removal of leaders of multimember boards or commissions is a stalwart principle in our separation of powers jurisprudence.”
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Ginny, I am happy to have discovered “Government Executive” asa source during these chaotic times. Their reporting is focused on the federal workplace. It’s factual and typically opinion-free. Their reporters are focused on the federal government so they are well-informed about what they are covering.
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