- Trump claims Ukraine started the war; Zelensky accuses him of living in “disinformation space”;
- Musk, corrected about the lie that 150-year-old people are still receiving Social Security, keeps spreading that lie;
- Tom Nichols on Trump and Musk and Hannity, who have no idea how American democracy works;
- Thomas L. Friedman on how the world is complex, and how conservatives do not understand this;
- Dahlia Lithwick realizes DOGE is a protection racket.
Today’s outrageous statement by Trump, made so casually it’s hard to believe it was a red herring meant to distract the media for a news cycle so they would not notice how Musk continues to dismantle the government; more likely it’s Trump gaslighting the world, sure that whatever he says will be believed by his followers. We’re in Orwell territory, again.
Politico, 19 Feb 2025: Trump blaming Ukraine for Putin’s war leaves Europe reeling subtitled “The U.S. president called out Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a diatribe against Kyiv.”
Donald Trump’s statement that Kyiv “started” the war Russia launched on Ukraine has left Europeans dumbstruck, with one British government aide simply responding, “Jesus.”
On Tuesday night, the U.S. president claimed that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a poor negotiator, saying it’s his fault that his country — which Russia has been attacking for a decade now, including a full-scale invasion in 2022 — is being left out of negotiations over a potential peace deal.
“Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal,” Trump said. The U.S. president also reiterated his interest in forcing Ukraine to hold elections as part of a deal to end the war.
Also:
CNN, 19 Feb 2025: Trump calls Zelensky ‘a dictator’ after Ukraine’s leader accuses him of living in ‘disinformation space’
NY Times, 19 Feb 2025: Trump Falsely Says Ukraine Started the War With Russia. Here Is What to Know., subtitled “A look at how the war in Ukraine began, the state of the peace talks and why the country isn’t holding elections.”
But it’s no surprise that Trump is ready to throw Ukraine under the bus in order to cozy up to Putin. They’re two of a kind.
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Musk has been corrected (it’s all about Cobol) but keeps spreading the lie. Trump and Musk both deliberately lie, over and over. Don’t their fans realize this?
Washington Post, opinion by Philip Bump, 19 Feb 2025: The tactical ignorance of Elon Musk, subtitled “Musk’s claims of widespread fraud in the Social Security system merit skepticism.”
After a “cursory examination of Social Security,” he said, “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” This, he added, was “a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. That’s my guess. Or should be very famous. One of the two.”
Musk, you will recall, is a tech guy. And it didn’t take long for other tech guys to point out a probable explanation for those 150-year-olds, one that Musk should probably have considered: It was what a data error in an old system often looks like — a function of date values being left blank in a database or outdated records or both.
But Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.
“There are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote in a response to a question about his allegation. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Musk’s numbers were still wrong or deceptive or, again, both.
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They’re simpletons, like many conservatives.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 18 Feb 2025: Who Is Running the United States, Musk or Trump?, subtitled “In an interview with Sean Hannity, three men demonstrated that they have no idea how American democracy works.”
Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multibillionaire to enforce his executive orders. Trump complained that he would write these “beautiful” executive orders, which would then languish in administrative limbo. Musk, for his part, explained that the president is the embodiment of the nation and that resisting his orders is the same as thwarting the will of the people. Hannity, of course, enthusiastically supported all of this whining about how hard it is to govern a superpower.
In other words, it was an hour of conversation among three men who have no idea how American democracy works.
Nichols describes how the interview went, given Trump’s “inability to hold a single thought for very long. Hannity, as usual, tried to throw softballs; Trump, as usual, missed every pitch.”
A few other news flashes from the interview: The president of the United States thinks that the government should not pay its bills in full. It should lowball its contractors and force them to accept half payment, he said. Former President Joe Biden was going to leave two American astronauts marooned in space for “political reasons,” according to Musk. Also, Biden wrecked America in every possible way, but they’re fixing it. Musk said he has never seen Trump do anything “mean” or “wrong,” while Trump claimed that he’s always respected Musk. Musk added that he’s never asked Trump for anything, ever, and that if a conflict should arise in his DOGE efforts, he’ll recognize it and recuse himself. (Earlier today, when asked why DOGE and SpaceX employees are working at the FAA and DoD, agencies where Musk has contracts or regulatory relationships, Trump said: “Well, I mean, I’m just hearing about it.”) Finally, Trump and Musk expect to find a trillion dollars of fraud and waste in the government.
(Aside: I’ve read Nichols’ latest book, OUR OWN WORST ENEMY, and will be writing it up here soon.)
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Here’s an excellent opinion piece by Thomas L. Friedman about the complexities of the world that Trump (along with many conservatives) doesn’t understand.
NY Times, Thomas L. Friedman, 18 Feb 2025: Why Trump’s Bullying Is Going to Backfire [gift link]
The scariest thing about what President Trump is doing with his tariffs-for-all strategy, I believe, is that he has no clue what he is doing — or how the world economy operates, for that matter. He’s just making it all up as he goes along — and we are all along for the ride.
As I’ve noted, most politicians, and certainly most conservatives who operate out of knee-jerk ideological principles (cut taxes for the wealthy, spend more on the military, etc.), never identify conceptual goals and then identify steps to reach those goals.
I’d love to see the plan. As in: Here’s how we think the global economy operates today. Therefore, to strengthen America, here is where we think we need to cut spending, impose tariffs and invest — and that is why we are doing X, Y and Z.
That would be real leadership. Instead, Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on rivals and allies alike, without any satisfactory explanation of why one is being tariffed and the other not, and regardless of how such tariffs might hurt U.S. industry and consumers. It’s a total mess.
Then he comes to the broad issue.
My favorite tutor in these matters is the Oxford University economist Eric Beinhocker, who got my attention when we were talking the other day with the following simple statement: “No country in the world alone can make an iPhone.”
Think about that sentence for a moment: There is no single country or company on earth that has all the knowledge or parts or manufacturing prowess or raw materials that go into that device in your pocket called an iPhone. Apple says it assembles its iPhone and computers and watches with the help of “thousands of businesses and millions of people in more than 50 countries and regions” who contribute “their skills, talents and efforts to help build, deliver, repair and recycle our products.”
We are talking about a massive network ecosystem that is needed to make that phone so cool, so smart and so cheap. And that is Beinhocker’s point: The big difference between the era we are in now, as opposed to the one Trump thinks he’s living in, is that today it’s no longer “the economy, stupid.” That was the Bill Clinton era. Today, “it’s the ecosystems, stupid.”
And this is precisely, as I’ve noted before, why all these isolationist efforts to “buy American” and tax via tariffs foreign goods are misguided. They’re not possible, as in the iPhone example, and in the long run they will only hurt. We’re a global culture now and there’s no going back.
Another example:
As NPR noted in a recent story about the auto industry, “carmakers have built a vast, complicated supply chain that spans North America, with parts crossing back and forth across borders throughout the auto manufacturing process. … Some parts cross borders multiple times — like, say, a wire that is manufactured in the U.S., sent to Mexico to be bundled into a group of wires, and then back to the U.S. for installation into a bigger piece of a car, like a seat.”
Trump just waves off all of this. He told reporters that the U.S. is not reliant on Canada. “We don’t need them to make our cars,” he said.
Actually, we do. And thank goodness for that. It not only enables us to make cars cheaper, but also better.
…You cannot make complex stuff alone anymore. It’s too complex.
More examples about vaccines, and microchips, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Concluding:
If you stand back and look at the big sweep of economic history, Beinhocker explains, “it is really a story of scaling up our networks of cooperation to harness and share knowledge to make more complex products and services that give us higher and higher standards of living. And if you are not part of these ecosystems, your country will not thrive.”
And trust is the essential ingredient that makes these ecosystems work and grow, Beinhocker adds. Trust acts as both glue and grease. It glues together bonds of cooperation, while at the same time it greases the flows of people, products, capital and ideas from one country to the next. Remove trust and the ecosystems start to collapse.
Trust, though, is built by good rules and healthy relationships, and Trump is trampling on both. The result: If he goes down this road, Trump will make America and the world poorer. Mr. President, do your homework.
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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, 18 Feb 2025: I Just Figured Out What Elon Musk’s DOGE Really Is, subtitled “That it’s a protection racket should have been obvious all along.”
Beginning with all these government cuts.
[White House press secretary Karoline] Leavitt tried to soothe these vital institutions and programs with the promise that anyone who was worried about their own parochial interests should just pick up a phone and call the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to ask for special favors and exemptions. As Leavitt described it, she had been in contact with Vought that very morning, “and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board, and if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president’s agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies.”
The line struck me at the time as a strange and ominous admission: Sure, we have arbitrarily defunded the government as you have come to understand it, but just hop on the phone with the as-yet-unconfirmed OMB director (he has since been confirmed), plead your case, and he might just do you a little favor. In the blur of the will-they-won’t-they OMB memo rescission and the subsequent lawsuits, it was easy to miss that mobsters dole out services in precisely this fashion. Governments typically do not.
Remember the first scene in the first Godfather movie?
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And there’s still JD Vance’s speech in Europe, in which he encouraged nations like Germany to give more credence to their far-right, i.e. Nazi, constituents. More tomorrow.
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Infrastructure notes: I spent some time a couple days ago upgrading and polishing posts from the past several weeks, inserting ‘more’ tags and fixing broken image links. I now realize that you can’t use image links from Facebook posts; those links are perhaps dynamic, and disappear in a few days or weeks. So: I download the photos, and installed those into my WordPress posts, in several places.
