Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.”
Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.
But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.
This week’s threatened tariff war blew up in Trump’s face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially assured him they would do things they are already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump’s tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S.
Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump’s team “had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea” when Trump blurted it out. “[T]here had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal,” Swan and Haberman wrote, “let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” an idea his own officials considered “fantastical even for Mr. Trump.”
Trump’s comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there.
Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left.
In his important piece “The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It,” published February 2 in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president’s multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump’s term. Snyder referred to the president as “a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras.”
Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.
Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”
Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”
This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country’s healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.
On X, Musk said “this is where the big money fraud is happening.” But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.
Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, “DOGE has not presented evidence of ‘fraud’; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don’t need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]”
“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. “They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom's Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."
While Murphy didn’t say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk’s team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that “[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?”
Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”
In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”
Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) announced he would introduce the ELON MUSK Act—the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act—which would ban federal contracts for Special Government Employees, similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees.
Opposition might well continue to grow, as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home (the collapse of USAID is already an international crisis). Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump’s own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive healthcare from federally qualified health centers; half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education; the top six states that receive grants under the department—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—all voted for Trump in 2024.
Tonight, Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR), Patty Murray (WA), Gary Peters (MI), and Brian Schatz (HI), will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Vought’s proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” the senators said. “Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump’s illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs.”
Israel’s defence minister has ordered the military to prepare plans to allow Palestinians “who wish to leave” Gaza to exit, after Donald Trump suggested the US take over the territory and resettle its residents in other countries.
Israel Katz said the military plan would include options to leave via land, air and sea. “The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration,” he said in a statement on X, although it was clear that the journeys would only be in one direction.
It is, so far, worse than I feared. [my sentiments, exactly] 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 seemed 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.
Kansas reckons with large tuberculosis outbreak as health officials hamstrung
Experts fear consequences of Trump’s restrictions on CDC as state sees one of largest outbreaks ever recorded in US
Kansas is experiencing one of the largest tuberculosis (TB) outbreaks ever recorded in the US, as public health powers at the state and federal level have been greatly curtailed.
Outbreaks like these may become more common and dangerous as officials’ efforts are hamstrung and their communications are limited, experts say.
“You can think of TB outbreaks like a canary in the coalmine of our public health infrastructure,” said David Dowdy, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“What causes them to happen is a weakening of our public health infrastructure.”
Since January 2024, there have been 67 active cases of tuberculosis identified in two counties in Kansas – more than the usual case count for the entire state in a year, despite the counties together representing less than 3% of the state’s population, according to US Census data from 2023.
“It’s definitely more than just a little blip,” said Dowdy. “It’s one of the largest outbreaks of tuberculosis that we’ve seen in the country in the past 30, 40, 50 years.”
The state has also detected at least 79 latent cases of TB, in which patients do not display active symptoms but may develop and spread active disease later.
The state is currently monitoring 384 people who are undergoing testing and treatment, officials in Kansas said.
Public health officials in Kansas and from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are “working together to mitigate the risk of TB in the community and ensure the safety of all individuals”, Jill Bronaugh, communications director for the Kansas department of health and environment, said in a statement.
But the risk to the general public remains low, she said.
“We are also working with schools and businesses to help prevent the spread of TB by supporting efforts to monitor symptoms and provide education,” Bronaugh said.
It is an uphill battle in a state that has seen public health powers sharply reduced in the wake of the pandemic.
The Kansas governor was banned from closing down businesses during public health emergencies in 2021. And the legislature forbade state and county public health officials from mandating tests, isolation and closures due to infectious disease in 2023.
Tuberculosis tends to spread when people spend a lot of time in crowded conditions such as prisons, jails and homeless shelters. These are also places where people frequently lack access to adequate healthcare, which can make infections more likely.
Other factors such as malnutrition, HIV/Aids and other immune-suppressing conditions put people at greater risk of getting sick.
But what really causes TB outbreaks is the inability for public health professionals to respond, Dowdy said.
“It’s not that we don’t know how to do it,” Dowdy said of treating TB patients and keeping the bacteria from spreading. “It’s about the conditions underlying this that enable these outbreaks to unfold.”
When there is a way to detect the first cases, and there are enough health workers to trace and test contacts and to support patients who test positive, outbreaks can be stopped before they even start.
But when the systems are incomplete or dismantled and there are not enough health workers or resources to go around, “it’s easier for these sorts of things to go undetected for a longer period of time”, Dowdy said.
“The people in Kansas are doing a good job with this. They just don’t have the resources they need,” he said.
At the national level, the Trump administration limited what the CDC and other federal health agencies can do by instituting a communications blackout in its first weeks.
The ban on external communications includes withholding the release of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a highly regarded epidemiological digest that updates the public and medical practitioners on emerging and continuing outbreaks, among other crises.
On Friday, hundreds of pages were also removed from health agency websites to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to remove references to race, gender, sexual identity and disability, among other identities. Some of those pages have now been restored, sometimes with edits and omissions because of the order.
Outbreaks such as the one in Kansas speak to the importance of coordination between states and national entities like the CDC, Dowdy said.
“One can only see these sorts of events when you can look from a big-picture perspective, and that’s what our national agencies are there for, but we can only respond to them at a local level, which is what our state and local health agencies are there for,” he said.
“The importance of being able to coordinate between those and maintaining strength at both the national and the state and local levels really can’t be overstated,” Dowdy added. “Disruptions to those systems certainly increase the risk of outbreaks like this occurring.”
Internationally, the in effect dissolution of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) means global outbreaks of preventable illnesses such as TB could increase.
John Green, the author, YouTube star and TB advocate, said he had worked for months on a partnership with private donors, the Philippines and USAid on an $85m project to end TB in two regions of the Philippines.
“It could provide a blueprint for eliminating TB worldwide – except it’s … not happening,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky.
Global outbreaks are the major driver for TB cases in the US.
Although the Kansas outbreak is large, it accounted for less than 1% of all TB cases in the US last year. About two-thirds of cases are detected among people who were born outside of the US, pointing to greater transmission outside of the country.
The current outbreak in Kansas is happening in the same place as a different outbreak detected in 2021-22. Troublingly, the disease strain in that outbreak showed resistance to several TB treatments, known as multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB, which can make outbreaks more challenging to contain.
There is no sign that this cluster of cases shows resistance to treatments – but if MDR-TB were to spread, it might be more difficult to ascertain now.
MDR-TB outbreaks are often detected through notable spikes in CDC monitoring reports, which may be affected by the gag order on US health agencies.
The report on the 2021-22 outbreak in Kansas, for instance, was published in the now quiet MMWR.
The U.S. has seen high-profile immigration raids since Trump took office, but Dara Kerr of The Guardian today reported that the Trump administration “is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations.” On January 24, 2025, old online press releases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from as much as a decade ago were updated to make Google prioritize them as new releases, thus creating the illusion that raids are taking place all over the country. When The Guardian asked ICE and Google about the changed dates, some of the new dates disappeared, dropping those stories out of the top of search results.
Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like them but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power to undeserving Black and Brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Over the past 45 years, that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the “Deep State,” whom they blame for destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it.
But the Republicans’ vision of the nation never reflected reality and now, under President Donald Trump, it is entirely made-up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that last week’s fatal midair collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Trump today claimed CBS “defrauded the public” in “the greatest broadcasting scandal in history” when it exercised normal editing procedures on a 60 Minutes interview with then–vice president Kamala Harris that he insisted—falsely—involved replacing her actual answers with others. Today, Trump called for CBS News and 60 Minutes to be “immediately terminated,” despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of the press.
MAGA is amplifying right-wing lies. Today, influencers—including Musk—claimed that USAID secretly bankrolled Politico, claiming that the media site had taken $8 million from USAID. In fact, that sum was not an annual grant, but rather years of subscriptions from across the government to Politico Pro, a pricey subscription service for data and legislative analyses for lobbyists and government officials. “Politico…has never taken a cent of government subsidies or state funding,” said the chief executive officer of its parent company. “[P]eople are paying for… [Politico Pro] because they need the service,” he said. “It’s not subsidies, it’s capitalism.” When Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined the chorus parroting the lie, fact-checkers noted that her office is a subscriber: it paid $7,150 for a yearlong subscription starting last January.
Nonetheless, Trump posted in all-caps that it "LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A 'PAYOFF' FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS."
Another story spreading disinformation appeared today after the State Department claimed that Panama had agreed to let U.S. government vessels transit the Panama Canal for free. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino told reporters that the story was “lies and falsehoods” and noted that he had told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that he doesn’t have the legal authority to waive transit fees for anyone.
This morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump boasted that he had delivered water to California, saying: “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn’t that easy to do. But I opened it up and it’s pouring down.” Camille von Kaenel and Annie Snider of Politico talked to Trump supporters among California’s farmers. They reported today that the 2 billion gallons of water Trump dumped onto the ground last week was water for irrigation that could never make it to the Los Angeles fires, which were under control by the time he dumped the water, in any case. For now, the farmers are sticking with Trump despite the loss of the water intended for their fields in the dry summer, but called for “close coordination” over the “incredibly complex” California water system.
Brian Stelter posted a December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: "Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals." Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.”
Performative victories over “the Libs” make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders distort reality in order to stay in power?
The current administration’s actions strengthen the hand of foreign nations, especially China, against the U.S. Yesterday, Pam Bondi, Trump’s second choice for attorney general—the first had to withdraw after the House Ethics Committee drew attention to his drug use and sexual behavior—took the oath of office.
Today, Bondi disbanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Then-director of the FBI Christopher Wray established FITF in 2017 to stop countries like Russia and China from interfering with American politics, as Russia had done in 2016 to help elect Trump. FARA required anyone accepting money from a foreign government to declare that connection, and was key in helping law enforcement agencies to dismantle foreign influence operations. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, for example, pleaded guilty to violating FARA when he didn’t disclose that he was being paid by those linked to the Russian government. (In December 2020, before he left office, Trump pardoned Manafort.)
Prioritizing human smuggling and drug cartels, the Justice Department under Bondi is scaling back white-collar crimes like bribery of foreign officials, kleptocracy, and money laundering. In the past few years, the Justice Department has recovered yachts, planes, and real estate from Russians sanctioned because of the attack on Ukraine. “Taken together these changes are an invitation to foreign actors to interfere in American affairs,” Aaron Zelinsky, a former national security prosecutor for the Justice Department, told Ben Penn of Bloomberg Law. “Even worse, it’s an invitation to Americans to help them do it.”
The assault against the United States Agency for International Development is tangled in foreign power struggles, too. Andrew Duehren, Alan Rappeport and Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that while Trump administration officials claimed they were conducting a general review of the Treasury Department’s payments system when they sought access to it, emails show that the plan all along was to freeze payments to USAID.
Daniel Wu of the Washington Post noted today that the destruction of USAID will take billions of dollars from American farmers, as well as other businesses, and Paul Sonne of the New York Times reported today that authoritarian leaders, including those of Russia, Hungary, and El Salvador are cheering on Musk’s boast that he was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” USAID funding was less than 1% of the U.S. budget and focused on humanitarian assistance and healthcare for underserved populations. But it also promoted democracy. It has monitored elections in Russia, documenting extensive voting irregularities there. With the U.S. abandoning foreign aid, China can step in to fill the void.
China will also be able to step in at the G20 summit of the world’s largest economies to be held in November in Johannesburg, South Africa, if Secretary of State Marco Rubio keeps his vow not to attend. Rubio says he is walking away from the international table because Trump says he is unhappy that South Africa is “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” Trump ally Elon Musk hails from South Africa and has agreed that “white South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.” South Africa has also refused official approval of Musk’s Starlink satellite system because of a state requirement that 30% of a company must be owned locally, a requirement SpaceX has criticized.
Yesterday, a White House order signed by Trump required the Central Intelligence Agency to send over an unclassified email listing all the employees hired in the past two years. David Sanger and Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported that the list included the first names and first initial of the last name of those hires, including “a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, called the sharing of the information over unsecured channels “a disastrous national security development,” adding: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China.”
If there are advantages for foreign adversaries in the policies of the administration currently in power, there are also advantages to favored corporations. Musk’s team, along with Trump’s officials, is dismantling the government with the claim that it is inefficient and corrupt, but it appears their plan is to put Musk and his ilk in charge of the services Americans need.
In what sounds like an attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said—and here are his words, as Aaron Rupar transcribed them—“We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system one by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all the kinds of things necessary for that. And it's very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve, bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment . And one of things that’s gonna be, I'm gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys— I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted today that “the DOGE team” is “going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system,” saying that “‘experienced’ Washington bureaucrats are the reason our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling.”
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton pointed out that “US airlines had gone 16 years without fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22-year-olds fix things fast.”
Critics of the idea of Musk taking over the nation’s air traffic control systems note that his Tesla electric vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America. The average fatal crash rate is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven; Tesla has a rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven. On social media, “God” posted: “Thou shalt not let the foreign billionaire whose rockets blow up all the time anywhere near the air traffic control system,” an apparent reference to the January 16 explosion of a SpaceX rocket over the Caribbean that scattered debris over the region led the Federal Aviation Administration to lock down airspace over Turks and Caicos.
There is apparently yet another reason that people will lie to gain power. Today, Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal reported that one of Musk’s young team of engineers, Marko Elez, 25, abruptly resigned after Long linked him to a social-media account that championed racism and eugenics, the idea that human populations can be improved by selective breeding, an idea embraced in Nazi Germany.
Last night, Senate Democrats filibustered for 30 hours in an attempt to convince Republicans to join them in rejecting Trump’s right-wing religious extremist nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. In the House, Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act to stop Musk and DOGE from accessing personal financial data.
U.S. District Judge John Coughenour indefinitely blocked Trump’s executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” “It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain,” Coughenour said.
The Department of Justice under Attorney General Bondi immediately said it would appeal the ruling. And tonight, Senate Republicans confirmed Christian nationalist Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Stephen Groves of the Associated Press noted that Vought once described the budget director’s job as “a President’s air-traffic control system.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) described his confirmation as a “triple-header of a disaster for hardworking Americans.”
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Trump’s order cited an ICC-issued arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war as a reason for the decision. Netanyahu visited Washington this week and praised Trump as Israel’s “greatest friend”.
Responding on Friday, the ICC called on its member states to stand up against sanctions, describing Washington’s move as an attempt to “harm its independent and impartial judicial work”.
It said: “The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” and it urged its 125 member states “to stand united” for justice and human rights.
World leaders and rights groups have rushed to defend the court. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, criticised the sanctions, which he said would “jeopardise an institution that is supposed to ensure that the dictators of this world cannot simply persecute people and start wars”.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the ICC gave “a voice to victims worldwide” and it “must be able to freely pursue the fight against global impunity”.
In London, a spokesperson for the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, said Britain supported the independence of the ICC and had no plans to place sanctions on its officials.
In Geneva, a United Nations rights body said Trump’s decision should be rescinded. “We deeply regret the individual sanctions announced yesterday against court personnel, and call for this measure to be reversed,” said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN human rights office.
In his order, Trump said the ICC had “abused its power” by issuing the warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, which he claimed “set a dangerous precedent” that endangered US citizens and its military personnel. Netanyahu strongly applauded Trump’s move, calling it bold.
The ICC was established in 2002 to prosecute serious crimes committed by individuals when member states are unwilling or unable to do so themselves. While the US and Israel are not parties to the statute, their citizens can fall under its jurisdiction. Israel has other allies such as the UK, Germany and France who would be obliged to arrest Netanyahu if he were to travel to those countries.
The warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were approved by a three-judge panel elected by state parties, and the prosecutor has also investigated Palestinian militants including Hamas.
An arrest warrant has been issued for the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, whose whereabouts are unknown. In 2021, the ICC ruled that it had jurisdiction in Palestine and could investigate crimes there, despite Israeli objections.
It was unclear if the Trump administration would announce the names of specific individuals targeted by the sanctions. ICC officials have prepared for sanctions to affect senior figures at the court including its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.
[...]
Britain, Germany, France, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sierra Leone are among the 79 countries which have signed a statement condemning US president Donald Trump’s decision to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“Such measures increase the risk of impunity for the most serious crimes and threaten to erode the international rule of law, which is crucial for promoting global order and security,” the statement said.
“Sanctions could jeopardise the confidentiality of sensitive information and the safety of those involved—including victims, witnesses, and court officials, many of whom are our nationals,” the countries said.
Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof has described the sanctions as a “worrying signal”, saying it is extremely important to the Netherlands that the court can function without hindrance.
Israel
Trump announced the move during a visit by Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – who is wanted for war crimes by the court – and said the court’s investigation into the US ally was “baseless.”
According to an analysis last month by the Volkskrant, the Netherlands runs a particular risk, given that it hosts the ICC and that everyone who has been arrested ends up on Dutch soil. Although detention is up to the court, everything between Schiphol airport and the 12 ICC cells at Scheveningen jail is the responsibility of the Netherlands.
The Netherlands also provides operational support, including security and access to suspects and witnesses.
