- Tom Nichols on the recent crisis;
- Paul Krugman concludes Trump’s people are both incompetent and evil;
- Even Fox News blames incompetence;
- Europe reacts to insults;
- Children with measles are getting sick from overdoses of Vitamin D, per JFK Jr.’s advice;
- The Trump administration is cancelling medical research;
- And MTG identifies migrants with rapists.
On the major story this week, let’s look at Tom Nichols’ take.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 26 Mar 2025: The Trump Team’s Denials Are Laughable, subtitled “The president’s officials must know that what they did in the Signal group chat was wrong—and dangerous.”
The defense of the United States is a serious business. Breaches of national security are especially dangerous. So perhaps I should not have laughed at the reactions of Donald Trump and his staff and Cabinet members to the revelations by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Shane Harris about a group chat on Signal (one that accidentally included Jeff) dedicated to planning strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
I laughed because I am a former government employee and Senate staffer with a fair amount of experience in dealing with classified information, and the administration’s position that nothing in the chat was classified is ludicrous. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth added a bit of topspin to that position on Monday when he got off a plane in Honolulu and, seemingly in a panic, fulminated against Jeff and tried to deny that any “war plans” were shared in the chat.
…
None of this is funny. If any of this had leaked at the moment Hegseth blathered it over Signal, American servicepeople could have died. (As my friend David French at The New York Times wrote on Monday, if Hegseth had any honor at all, he wouldn’t wait to be fired. He’d resign.)
But I couldn’t help it: I laughed at the reaction of top Trump officials. As I read White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s grammatically challenged statement, in which she claimed that information included in the conversation was “sensitive” but not “classified,” I thought she was trying to engage in some sort of not particularly convincing parsing. But listening to her briefing later in the day, I realized that Leavitt doesn’t seem to know the first thing about classified information. Unfortunately, apparently neither does Hegseth, nor CIA Director John Ratcliffe, nor any of the other people involved in this mess.
It goes on, for another five screens. Someone who knows something calling out the morons who know nothing.
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So, is it just incompetence? Or do they have some kind of plan, or at least underlying motivations?
Paul Krugman, 26 Mar 2025: Incompetent or Evil: A False Dichotomy, subtitled “Trump’s people can be and are both”
Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?
The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.
The incompetence is obvious. How are they evil? Case in point, threats to Social Security.
One answer is incompetence. …
An alternative answer sees the damage to Social Security as part of a deliberate scheme to undermine public faith in government, and to create an opening for lucrative privatization schemes.
This is consistent with my recent thoughts that the reason conservatives want to privatize government functions is to give themselves a chance to become wealthy running those functions themselves.
Krugman has developed this idea before, about the billionaire brain:
Which of these views is right? My answer is both. Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework. But he also clearly detests anything that makes life better for non-billionaires.
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Even Fox News sees the incompetence.
Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 26 Mar 2025: Fox defense for negligent texting of war plans: Top Trump national security officials are incompetent
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Meanwhile,
Politico Europe, 25 Mar 2025 (via JMG): Europe fumes at Trump team’s insults in leaked Signal chat, subtitled “British forces already took part in strikes against Houthis, so don’t call us ‘freeloaders,’ former defense secretary says.”
Trump and his team are burning the bridges of 80 years of political alliances among western nations.
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While children with measles are getting sick from overdoses of Vitamin A, per JRK Jr.’s anti-scientific homespun advice, there seems to be an underlying motivation.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 26 Mar 2025: The misogynist agenda of “MAHA moms”, subtitled “RFK Jr. is using his ‘MAHA moms’ to push women out of the workplace and into the kitchen”
It’s not so much, I think, that he has this conscious agenda in mind; it’s that this motivation to return to traditional gender roles is part of the conservative [tribalist] mindset, and a reject of Enlightenment and scientific values.
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And oh by the way, this is much more serious than Hillary’s emails.
Slate, Fred Kaplan, 25 Mar 2025: The Signal Chat Fiasco Sends a Clear Message to Our Allies, subtitled “This is a much bigger security breach than Hillary Clinton’s emails.”
So how serious was this Signal conversation as a security violation? First, let’s compare it with the Republican Party’s blue-chip example of a security violation: Hillary Clinton’s sending and receiving classified information through her personal cellphone while she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state. “Hillary’s email” became the rallying cry for GOP activists—one of the dangerous offenses for which the FBI should “lock her up”—during the 2016 presidential race between her and Trump.
The Trump team’s Signal chat contained information that was about as “top secret” and timely as one can imagine. Back in 2016, the FBI examined 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over and found that 110 of them—the back-and-forth of 52 email chains—contained classified information. Of those, just eight had material that agents claimed she should have known was “top secret.” (Only 36 had “secret” info; eight had “confidential” info.)
Followed by details.
And that’s it. Nothing about ongoing or upcoming military campaigns or any other sorts of operations, the disclosure of which could have significantly damaged U.S. security. And yet those emails—the subject of three front-page stories in one issue of the New York Times, among many others—may well have cost Clinton the election. Trump referred to them many times as serious leaks that should disqualify her from the presidency.
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A few items from aggregate site JMG.
- From Nature: HHS Axes Research Into New Antiviral Medications
- From NY Times: HHS Cancels Funding For Infectious Disease Tracking
Imbeciles. It’s easy to imagine the MAGA thinking here. We know enough! We follow the Bible! Don’t confuse us with more facts!
And.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the lowest of low in the Republican party, automatically conflates immigrants with rapists. Pure xenophobia… the visceral fear of ‘the other’.
