I keep thinking this has to implode, sooner rather than later. Trump and/or Musk will do something so egregious, so dangerous, that *someone* will step up to reign them in, even if very carefully, behind the scenes, so as not to upset the clueless MAGA supporters.
- The Trump team keeps firing essential workers, perhaps by “accident,” now officials working on bird flu, and FAA employees despite several recent plane crashes, and earlier, the nuclear stockpile team.
- Trump speaks like a true dictator about saving the country;
- Trump and Musk’s claims of abuse have no evidence;
- The immigrant taking away American jobs is… Elon Musk;
- They want to throw people in jail;
- How evil is the absence of empathy;
- Measles outbreaks are linked to religious schools;
- Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or August Caesar? Both;
- Heather Cox Richardson on the “liberal consensus” and how the majority of Americans don’t actually want to get rid of government programs.
Examples of the first item today and yesterday.
NBC News, 18 Feb 2025: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them
Also:
NBC News, 17 Feb 2025: Hundreds of FAA employees are let go as Trump’s mass layoffs continue, subtitled “Nearly 300 Federal Aviation Administration employees were fired just weeks after a midair collision over Washington, D.C., killed 67 people.”
Not to mention the Delta rollover plane crash in Toronto yesterday.
How bad does this have to get? Not to mention everything else they’re doing.
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He’s penalizing the media for not using Trump-ordained language. Paging Orwell.
Salon, Brian Karem, 15 Feb 2025: Trump, sensing a lack of solidarity, pushes the press down a slippery slope, subtitled “Donald Trump demands the Associated Press bend a knee — while the rest of the media falls back”
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Spoken like a true dictator.
JMG from NYT, 16 Feb 2025: Trump: Saving The Country Does Not Violate Any Law
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PolitiFact, 13 Feb 2025: Trump, Musk claim government ‘fraud’ without showing proof. How common is federal fraud, abuse?
On Feb. 12, during a White House press conference, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for evidence of fraud.
“I love to bring the receipts,” Leavitt said. She cited three contracts for $36,000 for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, $3.4 million for the Council for Inclusive Innovation at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and $57,000 related to climate change in Sri Lanka.
But these are not fraud of course, these are merely initiatives that Trump & Co. don’t like. They’re conflating very different issues. And of course Trump fired numerous Inspectors General whose jobs it was to ferret out fraud. Their claims about fraud are a ruse.
Alas, the PolitiFact piece gives several examples of where fraud *has* been found, but no quick easy answer to how “common” such fraud is. (In every human institution, I suspect, there are individuals who try to take advantage of the system. That’s what people do; it’s part of the dual human nature in which individual survival is balanced against group survival.) That doesn’t mean the system is fraudulent. If anything, our system of government is extremely robust, with its balance of powers, even as Trump and his acolytes try to skirt them.)
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Yes, there are immigrants taking away American jobs!
Boing Boing, Carla Sinclair, 17 Feb 2025: Jasmine Crockett zings Elon Musk with heartfelt ‘apology’ to MAGA: ‘You were 1000 percent correct’ on immigrants
“There’s an immigrant taking people’s jobs,” the Texas lawmaker conceded in a social media post, repeating MAGA’s favorite refrain, before getting to the punchline. “…his name is Elon Musk.”
“He’s snatching farms, government jobs (even those in which they manage our national security), and definitely those whose jobs are to root out fraud (inspector generals), & those that are keeping us safe (FAA), meals on wheels workers, head start, and the list goes on,” Crockett acknowledged, calling out the South African billionaire for firing approximately 10,000 U.S. workers in his mission to demolish the nation’s federal government.
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How authoritarians and dictators love to just throw people into jail.
Salon, Alex Galbraith, 17 Feb 2025: “They deserve a long prison sentence”: Musk joins Trump in trashing “60 Minutes”, subtitled “The head of DOGE lashed out over a segment on the slashing of USAID funding”
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I saw this today on Facebook, but here’s an independent source for the quote.
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.
Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials
Again, recall George Lakoff’s characterization of liberals being driven by empathy, while conservatives (like Trump) are indifferent to empathy, being obsessed with obedience, responsibility, discipline, and loyalty.
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What a surprise.
JMG from Austin Statesman, 17 Feb 2025: Growing Measles Outbreak Linked To Religious Schools
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It’s happened before, and most people didn’t realize it at the time, and most people don’t realize it now.
Salon, Jim Sleeper, 17 Feb 2025: Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar? Honestly, it’s both, subtitled “An aspiring dictator, fueled by popular resentment, overthrows a failing republic. We’ve seen this show before”
Donald Trump’s destruction of America’s 249-year-old constitutional republic and civic culture follows a historically familiar pattern that includes two especially striking precedents — one ancient, one modern. In both of these, an aspiring dictator overthrows a tottering republic while promising its frightened, gullible and/or opportunistic citizens that he is rescuing it even as he drains it of its remaining legitimacy and power.
The precedents I have in mind rose and fell on elements of “human nature” that also drive what’s befalling us now. We Americans often consider ourselves transcendent of such dark elements, triumphant over them and even innocent of them. But the precedents I’m going to sketch suggest that every time Trump tells us that one of his accomplishments is so great that “you’ve never seen anything like it,” he’s marching people who believe him one step closer to the same abyss that swallowed Augustus Caesar’s ancient Roman Empire and Adolf Hitler’s modern German Reich. This time is no different. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman was right to warn Guardian writer Robert Tait that this is “dictatorship … a shattering assault on the foundations of the Constitution.”
Again, we are beholden to base human nature. Human institutions, like the US Constitution, have been designed to regulate, if not overcome, the tendencies of base human nature that are least appropriate in the modern world. But they’ve failed before, and seem to be failing now.
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Finally for today, here is Heather Cox Richardson, reiterating her characterization of the “liberal consensus” from her book DEMOCRACY AWAKENING (that I reviewed over three posts, ending here) that dominated mid-20th century US politics, and how that’s working out.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, 15 Feb 2025: February 15, 2025
Beginning:
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.
With some history, including Reagan’s welfare queen.
Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.
That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.
Most of what people think is wrong, as I keep observing.
When asked, Americans say they don’t actually want to get rid of government programs.
…
Nonetheless, Trump is echoing forty years of Republican rhetoric when he claims to have a “mandate” to slash government and to purge it of the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that hold the playing field level for Black Americans, women, people of color, and ethnic, religious, and gender minorities.
Ending:
For forty years, Republican politicians could win elections by insisting that government spending redistributed wealth from hardworking taxpayers to the undeserving because they did not entirely purge the federal programs that their own voters liked. Now Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are purging funds for cancer research, family farms, national parks, food, nuclear security, and medical care—all programs his supporters care about—and threatening to throw the country into an economic tailspin that will badly hurt Republican-dominated states.
A January AP/NORC poll found that only 12% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for billionaires to advise presidents, while 60% thought it would be bad.
Forty years of ideology is under pressure now from reality, and the outcome remains uncertain.
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