Ezra Klein is a columnist for The New York Times. His podcast is wildly popular. He synthesizes events that seem disparate.
He explains succinctly the moment we are in.
Archives for category: Ethics
An aging, angry, vengeful man is re-elected President. That would be Trump. He is surrounded by people with an agenda, like JD Vance, who is an acolyte of a radical anarchist, Curtis Yarvin. The primary financier for the President is the richest man in the world. That man, of course, is Elon Musk. He gave Trump almost $300 million for his campaign, and that gift buys a lot of gratitude.
Until recently, the public was not aware of Musk’s political views. But now we know. He is a far-right extremist.
Trump gave Musk a mission: Cut the budget. Do the hard things that Congress won’t do because they fear doing anything too unpopular, like cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Right off the bat, Musk sends an email to two million civil servants: retire. Make a decision by February 5. Retire or risk being laid off.
Trump gives Musk carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Musk brings in a team led by inexperienced 20-somethings. They go from department, copying private and personal data.
Musk has billions of dollars in contracts with the government. He can, if he chooses, learn about his competitors’ contracts and personal tax returns. He has the personal information of hundreds of millions of people.
He begins making recommendations for slashing agencies. He hates foreign aid, which he considers “wicked,” even though a large part of it feeds hungry people and cures deadly diseases. Every foreign aid worker is called home. He hates NPR and PBS, and it seems likely that he will terminate their funding. He has many other personal grudges, which are sure to influence his recommendations.
Why are Republicans supporting this handover of responsibility from Trump to Musk? Why are they willingly defending the removal of their own Constitutional responsibilities?
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Republicans sit back and watch as Musk takes that power. The Constitutiin gives Congress the authority to create and close departments. Why are Republicans silently giving him permission to close down the USAID?
Why are they so enthusiastic about one-man rule? Why have they abandoned the Constitution? Didn’t they take an oath to defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic?
I am attaching a good article on this subject by David Wallace-Wells.
It is, so far, worse than I feared. Last Friday, at the end of a week in which a vaccine skeptic and sometime conspiracy theorist auditioned to lead the country’s nearly $2 trillion, 80,000-person public health apparatus, much of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website went dark — its weekly mortality reports, its data sets, certain guidance for clinicians and patients, all taken offline. C.D.C. researchers were ordered to retract a huge raft of their own, already-submitted research. Next to go dark was the website of U.S.A.I.D., which Elon Musk announced that he would be working to shut down entirely, after several staffers resisting agency takeover by the billionaire were abruptly put on leave. (When the agency website later popped back online, it featured an announcement that all overseas personnel would be placed on leave and ordered to return.).
This is after the new administration had already suspended the country’s most successful global-health initiative, PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives globally. The State Department later issued a PEPFAR waiver, but the program appears to have been rendered effectively inoperative by staff cuts; if the pause holds for even 90 days, it would result in over 135,000 additional children being born with H.I.V. The Famine Early Warning System Network was shut down, too.
Sometime between Jan. 6, 2021 and Nov. 5, 2024, many American liberals came to feel that “the resistance” — the reflexive mobilization against President Trump, after his first victory, on behalf of American institutions — had been embarrassing, pointless or even counterproductive, and that it might have been a touch hysterical to worry in grandiose terms about the threat posed by Trump rule. At the moment, it is hard to see it but hysterically: a blitzkrieg against core functions of the state, operating largely outside the boundaries set by history, precedent, and constitutional law, and designed to reduce the shape and purpose of government power to the whims, and spite, of a single man.
Or perhaps two men. The news about U.S.A.I.D. wasn’t delivered by President Trump, for instance. Instead the case against the agency was mounted on X by Musk, who this weekend called it a “criminal organization” saying that it’s “time for it to die”; the email telling staff that the agency’s headquarters would be closed appeared to come from one of Musk’s 20-something government “efficiency” groupies, who had somehow acquired a U.S.A.I.D. email address. Both the manner and the target of the attack offered the same lesson: that soft power was not real power, at all, and that only the hard kind truly counted.
Musk eventually won access to payment systems at the Treasury Department after a similar fight — after an official protesting the move was seemingly pushed out of the agency. “There are many disturbing aspects of this,” the political scientist Seth Masket wrote over the weekend. “But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the president nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government.” Indeed, to the extent he enjoys any formal authority, at the moment, it is through a loose executive order broadly understood to authorize the initiative only to upgrade government I.T. systems and protocols. “Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices,” Masket went on. “That is not efficiency; that is a coup.” Other relatively sober-minded commentators have called it “ripping out the guts of government.” Still others a “Caesarist assault on the separation of powers” and a “constitutional crisis.”
Is it? Well, T.B.D. Much or all of this will be adjudicated in court, in the coming weeks and months, and maybe, ultimately, overturned or undone. Some initiatives have already been halted in the courts, though it’s nevertheless grim to see researchers celebrating that their ability to gain access to data on respiratory illness has been restored. (Even more so to scroll through the long list of “forbidden words” now being purged from C.D.C. research) And trusting that there remain checks and balances sufficient to block what my colleague Ezra Klein called the president’s longstanding desire to be king — or to block Musk’s effort to rip apart the government of the world’s most powerful country, as he did to Twitter — invests a lot of hope in state attorneys general, federal judges and the Supreme Court, not to mention advocacy groups like the A.C.L.U.
Already, it seems absurd to base expectations for Trump’s second term on the ultimate outcomes of the first, and perhaps unfortunate that so many commentators have spent the last year eye-rolling about “resistance historians” and their hyperbolic warnings. When JD Vance talked about the need to reconstitute the federal government with a program of “de-Baathification,” it sounded extreme enough. But in barely two weeks the “anti-woke” ideological agenda has already become a flimsy pretext for a much more sweeping evisceration of state function.
“This is a five-alarm fire,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote this weekend, and on Monday she called on her colleagues to block Trump’s nominations in the Senate in protest. In the days that followed, many of her colleagues in the Democratic coalition found their rhetorical footing somewhat, at least calling out the initiative’s overreach — some of them coalescing around a message of “Fire Elon Musk” — rather than treating it with a mix of soft skepticism and performative sympathy.
But many had spent the transition developing a line of rhetorical attack based on food prices rather than the language of fascism, treating the return of Trumpism as an episode of normal politics rather than exceptional or existential ones, and trying so hard to learn the lessons of the so-called “vibe-shift” that they often sounded less like they were preparing for a fight than for a listening tour. Over the weekend, many appeared genuinely shellshocked.
Who isn’t? Perhaps it is even true that Trump won re-election thanks simply to frustration with immigration and the cost of living, however much that talk of vibes helped inflate the importance of a thin quotidian victory and lend credibility to what might otherwise look more like a hostile takeover of government by a marauding few. But where does all that leave the work of opposition? This is one demoralizing effect of staking a presidential campaign on themes of status-quo continuity, while conceding to many of the other side’s critiques (on immigration, on energy, on crime). You end up, after the election, looking a bit lost.
The war on public health is just one facet of this ugly diamond, but through it you can see both the breadth and the cruelty of the whole assault — and how it often hides behind an alibi of “reform.”
All of a sudden, last Friday, you could not view C.D.C. data about H.I.V., or its guidelines for PrEP, the prophylactic treatment to prevent H.I.V. transmission, or guidelines for other sexually-transmitted diseases. You couldn’t find surveillance data on hepatitis or tuberculosis, either, or the youth-risk behavior survey, or any of the agency’s domestic violence data. If you were a doctor hoping to consult federal guidance about postpartum birth control, that was down too. As was the page devoted to “Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People,” presumably because that last word wasn’t “Women.” Throughout the pandemic, conservative critics of these institutions complained that their messaging was unequivocal and heavy-handed. The new message seems to be: You are on your own.
In the end, this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s message, too — beyond his claims about vaccines and G.M.O.s. The man who will almost certainly assume control of the country’s entire public health apparatus is often described as a late arrival to MAGA, and an unlikely ally — a longtime environmental lawyer and anti-corporate activist who was even considered a potential E.P.A. administrator by Barack Obama. But he nevertheless embodies the broader program, as does the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement for which he serves now as a hood ornament.
In the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, Americans grew increasingly distrustful of many of the country’s institutions of health — it wasn’t just faith in organizations like the C.D.C. and F.D.A. which fell, but trust in nurses, doctors and pharmacists, too. But the administration isn’t proposing reform. Kennedy’s core focus is asking sweeping questions about vaccines and about the food system and environmental contamination. This emphasis represents a paradigm shift, from a social and epidemiological view of illness and disease, emphasizing collective responsibility and mutual aid, to one focused on behavior, diet and lifestyle. Which is to say, personal responsibility — in place of public health, health libertarianism.
This shift is not just the work of Trumpist right, as left-wing critics of Joe Biden’s pandemic policy have long argued. But you could see the dynamic quite clearly at Kennedy’s confirmation hearings. Senator Rand Paul, rather than asking any serious questions of the nominee, instead delivered a long and passionate monologue about the need to question medical orthodoxy and the oppressive weight of that consensus, as he felt it, during the pandemic.
His rant was not without merit: Hepatitis-negative mothers probably wouldn’t need to vaccinate their children against the disease on Day 1 of their lives, as the committee chairman, Bill Cassidy, seemed to acknowledge, and early in the pandemic it might have been useful to communicate a bit more clearly about the striking difference in risk faced by the old and the young, as I was writing as far back as the spring of 2020, too.
But these were not the questions that Kennedy was asking most conspicuously at the height of the Covid emergency — about how we might do better with guidance and communication and trust, or whether we had done enough to communicate the age skew of the disease or the strength of “natural” immunity. Instead, he was focusing on the horrors of the new vaccines. Indeed, fighting to stop their authorization, and any future authorization for any future Covid vaccine, not just for little children or those who’d already survived infection, but for any American of any age and suffering any health condition.
This was in May 2021. The rollout had begun just six months before, but vaccines had already saved, it was estimated, nearly 140,000 American lives. In the years that followed, they would save perhaps three million more. That is to say, if Kennedy had been successful, the pandemic death toll in this country could have been about three times as high.
This attempt at public-health sabotage towers over the new secretary’s meddling in Samoa, which may have contributed to the deaths of dozens by measles in 2019, and it came more recently, concerning millions of American lives. It was also what earned him a spot in the Trump coalition — indeed a starring role. The Covid vaccines were a medical miracle, probably the most consequential American one in several generations. Kennedy did what he could to stop that miracle, which he later called “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” When the country encountered a rampaging novel disease, he told us very clearly, he would have preferred we all faced it naked and alone.
This should be disqualifying. Instead, it proved the opposite. In the name of reform and government overhaul, the new administration is approving and ushering in something much more like destruction, with the president imploring his new health secretary to “go wild” in the role. The admonition does not apply just to Kennedy and public health, or even just to Musk and his initiative. A new generation of libertarians is not letting the country’s crisis of confidence go to waste. On Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, “Abolish the IRS.” Up first, apparently: the Department of Education.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is holding hostage the more than five million students in public schools while he demands vouchers for kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. Abbott has refused to increase funding for the state’s public schools unless the legislature approves vouchers, most of which will subsidize the affluent.
Last year, the legislature refused to approve vouchers. Since then, Abbott engineered the defeat of several anti-voucher Republicans. He’s hoping to win approval in the current session. Vouchers will pass easily in the state senate. We will see what happens in the House, where rural Republicans stood against vouchers in the past, before Abbott’s purge.
Abbott is playing Reverse Robin Hood. He is stealing from the poor to pay for the rich. Billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man jnnOennstlvsnia, and Betsy DeVos of Michigan, are funding his intransigence with millions in campaign contributions.
The Texas Monthly reports that school superintendents are increasing class sizes, laying off teachers, eliminating electives, and doing whatever they can to keep their doors open.
The article says:
Two years ago, during the 2023 legislative session, superintendents of Texas schools were optimistic that state lawmakers would boost public-education funding. After all, soaring inflation was straining the already meager finances of districts across the state, and lawmakers had at their disposal a $32.7 billion budget surplus. Spending some of that money on the urgent educational needs of the state’s children might have seemed like an uncontroversial proposal.
Instead, the unthinkable happened: Legislators left Austin without putting any significant new money into schools or giving teachers a raise. The consequences have been dire.
Texas’s public schools were already among the most poorly resourced in the country: Our per-student funding is about 27 percent less than the national average. The basic allotment—the minimum amount of funding per student that school districts receive from the state—has been stuck at $6,160 since 2019. That would need to be upped by about $1,400 just to keep pace with rising costs. Public education advocates worry that lawmakers will provide only face-saving increases to the basic allotment in 2025 while diverting billions to private schools.
Many school leaders have had to undertake draconian austerity measures. Nearly 80 percent of districts have reported challenges with budget deficits. Given the stakes, 2025 could be a pivotal year for Texas’s public-education system….
Texas Monthly spoke to a group of superintendents to ask about how they were coping. They all spoke about the budget cuts and unfunded mandates (like requiring the hiring of police officers without providing funding). One superintendent, Jennifer Blaine of Spring Branch, said:
JB, Spring Branch: We don’t have anywhere else to cut. We are cut to the bone. I consolidated everything I could, and I cut everything that I could. If we have to cut further, you’re talking about severely impacting academics in the classroom and, quite frankly, safety and security. Five and a half million kids are in Texas public schools, and I don’t understand how our legislators and our governor don’t see this as a crisis. If we don’t educate these kids to the highest levels and prepare them for postsecondary success, we’re going to crumble as a state. I don’t know where the disconnect is. Education is the great equalizer. But nobody is talking about that, and I think it’s a missed opportunity because this is not going to end well.
The title of the article in the print edition was “A Legislature That Will Spend at Least as Much Per Pupil as Louisiana.”
Katherine Long reported in the Wall Street Journal today that a member of Elon Musk’s elite tech squad resigned after some of his deleted tweets surfaced. The tweets portrayed their author as an enthusiast for racism and eugenics.
The 25-year-old employee, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
The deleted profile associated with Elez, who was embedded in the Treasury Department to carry out efficiency measures, advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September, according to a Wall Street Journal review of archived posts. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.
Elez is a graduate of Rutgers, where he majored in computer science. After college, he worked for Musk at Space X, Starlink, and X.
Musk personally urged people to apply to DOGE on X in December, promising long hours and little pay in exchange for the chance to fundamentally remake the federal government. Some of those who answered the call appear to be young Musk loyalists, steeped in internet culture, who share his worldview.
The account, @nullllptr—a misspelling of a keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived.
The user appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers. “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys,” the user posted in December.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” @nullllptr posted in July.
In June, the user weighed in on the conflict in the Middle East, offering some sympathy for Israel but also posting, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
We keep hearing how brilliant Musk’s team is, but this guy doesn’t sound brilliant. He sounds like a jerk.
As part of the radical overhaul of the federal government, some 2 million employees were asked to resign and accept a leave with pay if they did. But there is no money appropriated to pay for the offer, and there are multiple lawsuits opposing it. Nor was there any consideration of the value of the employee’s work.
When Elon Musk took charge of Twitter, he made a similar offer and fired 80% of the workforce. He got rid of content moderation teams and opened the platform to Nazis and misinformation. The downside was that he lost every major advertiser, and he’s now suing them for conspiring to hurt Twitter.
The New York Times reported on the final day of the offer:
Some federal employees have a new symbol for their resistance to President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s radical overhaul of the U.S. government: a spoon.
Last week, in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” the administration urged federal workers to consider resigning from their posts and said they would be paid through September — a bid to rapidly shrink the size of the work force.
Union leaders have urged employees not to accept the offer, questioning its legality and legitimacy. And on Wednesday, workers at the Technology Transformation Services, the tech-focused arm of the General Services Administration, made their displeasure with the offer known during an organization-wide meeting with their new leader, a former employee at Mr. Musk’s automaker Tesla, by sharing spoon emojis in an online chat, according to people familiar with the response.
In the meeting, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was appointed to lead technology efforts at the G.S.A., attempted to assuage worries about the deferred resignation plan and told workers to “read as much as you can” about the offer, according to an audio recording provided to The New York Times. He also urged federal workers to review information posted on the website of the Office of Personnel Management.
“Have that context in mind as you think through the decision you have to make in the next 24 to 30 hours,” Mr. Shedd added. “The deferred resignation is the first step in streamlining the federal work force. In-person work will be the next step.”
His assurances did not appear to work. Employees in the tech division rained down spoon emojis in the chat that accompanied the video meeting, which was watched by more than 600 people, according to photos of the chat screen provided to The Times and three people familiar with the reaction. Some employees also added spoon emojis to their statuses on Slack, a workplace communication app.
“Thomas: Whether you mean to or not, you’re playing a role in destroying TTS,” one worker wrote in the chat.
“The culture is the people,” another employee wrote. “Without the people, TTS is NOTHING.”
After Mr. Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, he sent an email with the same subject line — “Fork in the Road” — to the company’s employees, offering them a buyout to leave the company if they didn’t want to participate in his “extremely hardcore” vision.
During the Twitter takeover, employees used the salute emoji as a sign of solidarity with their co-workers and as a goodbye during mass layoffs.
After renaming the social media service as X, Mr. Musk has pushed for severe cuts to the federal government. He shared a post that estimated 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force would take the deferred resignation offer, potentially saving the government $100 billion.
The last date to accept the offer is Feb. 6, according to the email to government workers.
Trump shocked almost everyone when he said in a press conference, alongside Israeli Prime minister Netanyahu, that he wanted to take control of Gaza, move out the Gazan population, clear the rubble, and turn the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
In response to worldwide condemnation, his aides tried to “walk back” what he said, but he said out loud what he believes. He is dangerous at all times, because no one knows for sure what he will say or do. His press secretary said that the U.S. would not pay for what Trump wants to do, nor would it send troops. In that case, Trump’s bold statement was a nothing burger. But anyone who saw the news conference heard what he said. Since he lies the way other people breathe, everyone is left to believe whatever they want.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had been thinking about this idea for a while and discussing it with aides. Some analysts thought his proposal was a negotiating ploy, meant for shock value. Others think he’s serious.
WASHINGTON—President Trump campaigned on shrinking America’s role abroad. But since taking office, he has articulated a worldview that is at times closer to expansionism than isolationism.
Trump generated global shock waves Tuesday when he said the U.S. should take long-term control of Gaza, suggesting that Palestinians should be relocated while the enclave is rebuilt into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on social media that Trump would “Make Gaza Beautiful Again.”
Taking control of the hotly contested territory would put the U.S. at the center of the world’s most complicated diplomatic and national-security conflicts, raising the prospect that Trump is signing the country up for exactly the kind of foreign entanglement he told voters he would avoid. Trump didn’t rule out sending American troops to Gaza to accomplish his goals.
“The old Republican Party of RINOs, neocons and globalists is gone. And it is never coming back,” Trump said at a 2023 GOP dinner in Florida. As he prepared to take office, Trump made clear that he wouldn’t hire national security officials that he deemed to be too closely associated with traditional neoconservative values.
Tuesday’s announcement marked a striking shift for Trump, who described the Middle East as “blood and sand” in his first term, according to a longtime adviser. Trump is now proposing to rebuild Gaza, which his own aides say could take 10 to 15 years.
Two Trump administration officials said the idea of the Gaza takeover was formed recently, with the president running it by aides and allies in recent days. The proposal was closely held, other administration officials who work on Middle East issues said. Officials outside of Trump’s inner circle weren’t aware the idea was on the table during days of planning for the meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump’s proposal stunned even some of his most ardent and influential supporters in the Jewish community. A longtime pro-Israel Trump fundraiser who has raised money for the president for years called the idea “insane” and questioned how it could be executed, noting this type of policy would likely take well over a year to complete with too many unknown variables for it to be done smoothly.
Netanyahu said during the press conference that one of his key goals was to ensure Gaza wouldn’t host terrorists again. Trump, he continued, took that concept “to a much higher level.”
“It is something that could change history, and it is worthwhile really pursuing this avenue….”
Trump’s Gaza proposal also shows that the president is leaning on his long history as a businessman and real-estate developer, viewing the world as a canvas in which to expand America’s influence—and cement his legacy…
Glimmers of Trump’s thinking on Gaza have surfaced in public and in private.
“You know, Gaza’s interesting, it’s a phenomenal location, on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things could be done with it,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 20, after being sworn in. A reporter asked if he would help with rebuilding. “I might,” Trump said….
In late summer, Trump told Netanyahu in a phone call that the Gaza Strip was a prime piece of real estate and asked him to think about what kinds of hotels could be built there, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation. But he didn’t mention the U.S. taking it over. He also told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this fall that Ukraine would be a good spot for real-estate development, particularly mentioning the city of Odesa, a person present during the discussion said….
Trump made a similar case to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term, hoping the allure of hotels and development along the country’s coastlines would encourage Kim to dismantle his nuclear arsenal.
There have always been reasons to worry about Trump’s mental acuity–his sense of grandiosity, his constant boasting, his memory lapses, his serial lies, his frequent confusion of names–but now there is more reason to worry.
Yesterday he said in a press conference that he wants all the people who live in the Gaza Strip to move somewhere else, leaving their land to be cleared and developed by Americans. Trump wants to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” A few years back, his son-in-law Jared Kushner speculated that Gaza’s beachfront made it ideal as a setting for luxury resorts.
Jared has since moved on to other promising spots, like Albania, where he plans to build a $1.4 billion luxury mega-resort on an island, investing some of the billions that the Saudis gave him.
Apparently, Trump’s basic instincts as a developer have come to the fore. Aside from the fact that Arab nations are opposed to Trump’s plan, there is one obvious problem: What to do with the Gazans who live there? He hasn’t figured that out yet, and to date the other Arab nations have loudly said that they don’t want the Gazans.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu stood with Trump and loved what he heard. It bolsters him with his rightwing coalition partners, according to the Israeli publication Ha’aretz, and bolsters his intransigence. How he would love to have an American-owned strip of land on his borders.
Trump doesn’t want to help rebuild Gaza; he wants to own it.
Milbank wrote:
“Genocide Joe” never looked so good.
Gaza peace protesters rallied Americans by the hundreds of thousands to oppose President Joe Biden and vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries. They heckled Vice President Kamala Harris and disrupted her events.
On Election Day, Donald Trump prevailed in the majority-Arab town of Dearborn, Michigan. And across the country, many young voters stayed home or even voted for Trump — likely because, in part, they were disenchanted that the Biden administration had been insufficiently tough on Israel.
How’s that working out now?
Trump, hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday, made the stunning declaration that he wants all Palestinians removed from Gaza — permanently.
“All of them,” Trump said. “I mean, we’re talking about probably a million-seven people, a million-seven, maybe a million-eight. But I think all of them. I think they’ll be resettled in areas where they can live a beautiful life and not be worried about dying every day.”
And what would become of Gaza after all Palestinians were evicted? At a formal news conference with Netanyahu in the East Room a couple of hours later, Trump unveiled his next proposal: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip. … We’ll own it.”
Huh?
“You are talking tonight about the U.S. taking over a sovereign territory. What authority would allow you to do that?” an incredulous Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News asked. “Are you talking about a permanent occupation?”
“I do see a long-term ownership position,” Trump answered, as though the Palestinian enclave were a hotel property on the market. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”
Greenland, Panama, Canada and now Gaza: The sun will never set on Trump’s colonial empire.
A moment later, the president said he was also considering evicting the Palestinians from the West Bank and awarding that territory to Israel.
“We’re discussing that,” Trump said when asked about giving Israel control over biblical “Judea and Samaria,” which includes the West Bank. “And people do like the idea.” He promised an announcement “on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”
From the river to the sea, Palestine will cease to exist. As those uncommitted voters now know: Elections have consequences.
Trump’s elimination of all Palestinian land went even farther than Netanyahu’s expansionist designs — but the prime minister liked what he heard. “President Trump is taking it to a much higher level,” he said at Tuesday’s news conference. “I think it’s something that could change history and it’s worth us really pursuing this.” Netanyahu took multiple opportunities to bash Biden and to gush over Trump for sending him weapons that Biden had withheld, and for lifting Biden’s sanctions against Israeli settlers accused of violence in the West Bank.
Trump was proposing an act of towering cruelty. The world still hasn’t figured out what to do about the existing Palestinian refugees — 1.5 million of whom live in refugee camps in the region. Now, Trump plans to make refugees of some 2 million additional Palestinians. Or perhaps 5 million more, if he’s also planning to evict them from the West Bank.
But Trump presented his plans to remove Palestinians from their homeland as a humanitarian gesture. “Gaza is not a place for people to be living,” he reasoned during his Oval Office session. Though he hasn’t actually visited the place, “I’ve seen every picture from every angle, better than if I were there. And nobody can live there.”
Journalists reported the story as if this was a realistic proposal by the American President. But it is not. It’s madness. It violates international laws (but we know by now that Trump thinks he is not constrained by law.) It is raw imperialism and colonialism. It is wildly impractical. It is the proposal of a man who is unhinged, out of touch with reality: a madman. We always have known that Trump creates chaos wherever he goes. The only thing more absurd that he neglected to mention is that the Trump Organization would get the contract to clear and rebuild the Riviera of the Middle East.
A few days ago, I suggested in a post that every FBI agent should defeat Trump’s purge if every one said that he or she was involved in the arrest or investigation of the January 6 insurrectionists or the search of Mar-a-Lago. This is a good tactic of resistance.
But wiser heads at the FBI and its branch offices have another plan, which may also be effective. Basically, it is non-compliance.
Trump wants to fire every FBI agent who obeyed lawful orders.
Benjamin Wittes wrote about this strategy in Lawfare, a Brookings Institution blog:
He writes:
The Situation on Friday was too fluid to write responsibly on the ongoing purge at the FBI.
Things have clarified enough today to say one thing clearly: A lot of people at the bureau—leadership and street agents, analysts and staff alike—are flirting with heroism right now.
Here is my best understanding of what is going on from a combination of press reporting and my own poking around.
Last week, as has been widely reported, the Justice Department leadership sought to force into retirement a variety of senior leaders at FBI headquarters. In addition, the FBI’s interim leadership was pressured to identify agents and other personnel who had worked on the Jan. 6 investigations. And special agents in charge around the country were told to help identify such personnel. Specifically, they were told to administer a questionnaire to staff—a questionnaire that was due at 3:00 pm today—in which agents and others are asked to self-report on their own Jan. 6-related activities.
From what I gather, the pushback has been remarkable. A large number of agents are refusing to fill out the questionnaire. The FBI Agents Association has sent around model language for agents who refuse to cooperate. At the management level, the leadership of a number of field offices has made clear that they will not take administrative action against those who do not self-report. And the bureau’s acting leadership itself is clearly pushing back against the demands for this information.
In his email to the workforce, Acting Director Brian J. Driscoll, Jr. made clear that the demand for information “encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts. I am one of those employees, as is acting Deputy Director Kissane.”
How widespread is the internal resistance? I don’t know. But we are going to find out soon.
The results of the questionnaire, over the next day or so, will be sent to the deputy attorney general’s office which—as Driscoll quotes a memo sent to him, “will commence a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
Will the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, receive a pile of actionable material or will he receive what amounts to a large pile of spoiled questionnaires? And either way, what will he—and the White House—do with whatever it receives? In one situation, it will have to take on the reality that a shockingly large number of bureau personnel played a role, quite unsurprisingly, in the largest federal investigation in American history. They executed search warrants, ran down leads, interviewed people, made arrests and testified in one or more of the 1,500 plus federal prosecutions that resulted.
Does Bove imagine that he will fire all of these people? Does he imagine administering loyalty tests to them somehow? What do you do when you want to punish FBI agents for enforcing the law—and thousands of them did it faithfully?
Conversely, as seems more likely, Bove may find himself with a whole lot of survey refusal—and thus limited useful data on who the villains are who actually did their jobs with respect to Jan. 6. What does he do then? Does he fire everyone who refused to self-disclose? Does he fire the management in the field offices who tolerated—or even encouraged—the refusal?
What does an administration bent on revenge do when FBI personnel en masse choose to “hang together” rather than hanging separately?
The FBI rank and file have power in this equation that other agencies, such as USAID for example, do not have. The Trump administration does not need USAID. It wants to eliminate foreign aid anyway, so if the personnel at the aid agency get uppity, who cares? And if they quit? All the better.
The FBI is not that simple. For one thing, the administration does need law enforcement. If there’s a terrorist attack, and there will be, and the FBI is not in a position to prevent it or investigate it quickly and effectively, the administration will take the blame.
This administration also draws its legitimacy from backing the blue. Even in their war on the intelligence community, Donald Trump and his people always tried to distinguish between the rank and file and the “bad apples” who were running things. Waging a full-scale war against the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, a war that is all about targeting street agents for having done their jobs, is a dangerous game—far different from sacking an FBI director, or even two, who went to some elite law schools and served at the upper levels of the Justice Department.
Then there’s the problem of capacity. FBI agents are actually very hard to replace—good ones are, anyway. The physical demands are significant. Most have specialized education of one sort or another. And while people often imagine FBI agents as glorified cops who kick doors down, the truth is that a lot of agents have exquisitely specialized expertise. The training of a good counterintelligence agent takes many years. Some agents have specialized scientific training. There are even agents who specialize in art theft. Take out a thousand FBI personnel for political reasons, and you destroy literally centuries of institutional capacity. A good FBI agent is much harder to create than, say, a good assistant United States attorney.
It’s early yet, and I don’t want to wax over-optimistic in dangerous times.
But I will say this: I’m very proud of how the FBI is performing under incredible stress.
An FBI that was putting its collective foot down and refusing to be politicized, refusing to participate in a political witch hunt within its own ranks, and refusing to become political agents of the regime in power would, so far anyway, look almost exactly like what we are seeing.
It is always a dangerous thing to cheer when an armed component of the federal government resists political leadership. Nobody, after all, elected the FBI.
But when the political leadership seeks to conduct personnel actions against career officials based on who was involved in lawful and appropriate law enforcement actions against those who now have the protektzia of the faction in power, a certain measure of conscientious objection is in order—lest the entire operation become an organ of authoritarianism. And when the Justice Department tried to fire people because Trump does not trust them, which violates the Civil Service Reform Act—a law that forbids the government from taking adverse action against those in the competitive service for improper reasons, politics foremost among them—agents who resist are upholding the law, which is closely aligned with their own oaths and the FBI’s culture, and the rule of law itself.
Whether this is happening in the numbers it will take to force the administration to back down I don’t know. Whether it is happening in the numbers it will take to make some Republican senators reconsider their race to install a partisan apparatchik at the helm of the agency, I don’t know either. And whether the next week will see a wholesale elimination of decades of investment in law enforcement and intelligence under the rule of law, I cannot say.
Today, I can only say thank you to everyone who is doing the right thing in ways the public will probably never see. Right now. Today. When it’s very hard. To everyone who is telling Bove, “Fire me if you don’t like it but no, I’m not helping”: may all the gods keep you safe.
Wired magazine published an article identifying the young men who are members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. They are called “experts,” even though they range in age from 19 to 24. Some of these “experts” are college dropouts. All of them worked for either Musk or billionaire Peter Thiel before their current assignment.
Mercedes Schneider calls your attention to the young people deployed by Elon Musk to peer into the computer files of key U.S. government agencies. She relies on a story that first appears in Wired, which identified the guys and posted their photographs.
On BlueSky, people have added details about Elon’s team. They seem to be computer whizzes. At least one is known for his hacking skills. They range in age from 19 to 24. A couple, apparently, are recent high school graduates.
Musk may have more than one such team, because his gang has taken control of the databases of several important government agencies. They have moved into the closely-guarded payment system of the U.S. Treasury, where they have downloaded the personal data of millions of Americans, as well as the details of government contracts.
Musk teams also took control of the computers at the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, and the USAID. The last agency has done 13,000 in staff and administers humanitarian aid to countries around the world USAID feeds the hungry, sends help with disasters, and distributes medicines when there is a need). Musk hates USAID, for some reason, and kept the agency closed on Monday so his boys could explore its files and computer system without interference from those who work there. Musk convinced Trump that the USAID should be closed and reopened as a part of the Dtate Department. Musk said that USAID was full of “radical lunatics,” and Trump echoed that claim.
At the moment, they are in the Department of Education, copying files.
On the PBS Newshour last night, Richard Painter, who was the ethics officer in the George W. Bush administration, said that Musk had massive conflicts of interest. Musk owns several businesses that receive federal funding. Painter said that Musk should either divest himself of the companies that hold federal contracts or quit his current job.
Diane Ravitch's blog 