It appears the Colombian Crisis is over. I take it there was much bellowing and snorting and pawing of hooves on both sides for several hours. Now the news is that Colombia is accepting the migrant flights, and Trump backed down from the sanctions. News reports since the crisis began have been inconsistent. As I understand it, Colombia never said it would not take back its people; the issue was about how Trump was sending them. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia at one point offered to send his own presidential jet to bring the migrants back. That didn’t work for Trump. I hope eventually we get the whole story, which I don’t think we’ve heard yet.
U.S. Tech stocks plummeted like a rock because of something happening in China related to AI. The tech bros must be having a sad. I’ve yet to understand what the big deal is about AI; I think it’s being overhyped.
Philip Bump is one of my favorite writers still working for the Washington Post. Today he writes The gutting of American institutions has led to Trump gutting America itself. Here’s just a bit —
Trump has never really understood the presidency. He came to the office in 2017 from the Trump Organization, far more a monarchy than a democracy. In his previous perch, he said what was going to happen and it happened. He chafed at the balance of powers in D.C. that allowed both Congress and the Supreme Court to weigh in on what he did. He also didn’t understand or didn’t accept that the nature of his role was temporary — that he was chosen as four-year steward of something bigger than himself. Trump treated the office and its trappings as his own, which culminated in his attempt to block Joe Biden from (rightfully) ascending to a presidency that Trump considered his own.
This has been my impression all along. Trump doesn’t know how to function except as a dictator. He decides what’s important; he hands out orders; he expects people to follow his orders. His much-hyped deal-making skills only ever consisted of lying and bullying. And we see that in yesterday’s Colombia Crisis. Under any other president none of that would have happened. A normal administration would have worked with the government of Colombia in returning the migrants, not just send them in handcuffs on military planes, apparently with no advance warning, and then have a snit when Colombia didn’t accept the flights.
See also In Exacting Retribution, Trump Aims at the Future as Well as the Past by, um, a bunch of people at the New York times. Everything Trump is doing is about exacting retribution and eliminating the guardrails that get in the way of his absolute power.
For example, Trump has been dismantling the public health section of the federal government. This is probably mostly personal — in his mind, they made him look bad during Covid. It’s probably also the case that his ignorant ass doesn’t grasp what the public health section does, and he thinks cutting it would save money. If you want to be scared to death, read up on the Marburg virus and all the ways the U.S. is not prepared to stop it, thanks to Trump.
More stuff to read:
Garrett Epps, Washington Monthly, Trump’s Flaming Turd of an Argument for Ending Birthright Citizenship.
Interesting — Dems are considering flipping the script and holding the debt ceiling hostage to limit Trump’s agenda.
More about the Friday night massacre of inspectors general by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.
The Chinese AI thingy was done for pennies on the dollar. I mean the way we see dollars. I worked for a small company which with a dozen employees, beat a mighty Neoliberal-Multinational corporation to market with their own similar product. It was one of those too-big-to-fail-their-lobbyists kind of corporations, recently made infamous for all its fails of late. They’d thrown hundreds of so-called “associates” at it, yet we beat them. It wasn’t rocket science. We accomplished our victory by cutting out all the bullshit.
In response, Trump seems to prefer billions and billions more bullshit. Maybe he’ll bring back Rama-swami who’ll find and import those “superior not-American” developers?
Right – even if China had managed to do AI without the specialized, high power chips we're not letting them have, people here in the US spend billions training a model. They're saying they didn't need to spend all that much money training the model.
There *will* be more news, and it's best to wait and see, because it could be like China announcing cold fusion, in the sense that cold fusion didn't pan out, either.
The Colombia bit was, Trump sent Colombians back to Colombia in shackles, and they hadn't been to the bathroom. It was a military plane, which isn't expected to have normal facilities for comfortable flights.
Note: other Presidents send people back on charter flights, because it's *cheaper* than military flights, but, I'd imagine they don't let you shackle your transportees. Anyway: this is why the Colombian presidential plane was a reasonable choice; "for effs sake, if you won't rent your own plane, you can use mine!"
Anyway, the long and the short of it was, Colombia got snippy over how their people were treated; Trump went trade war, and Colombia said "fine, we'll match you."
It's not exactly fair to say "both sides backed down." Trump backed down, if we don't send prisoners in shackles to Colombia any longer. What *is* important is, the Biden administration would have cared enough to send them back on a comfortable flight, more cheaply than on a military flight, and nothing would have happened; Trump tried shackles and military flights, was told "no!" and backed down.
Cruelty is the point. Columbia said no. It looks like the deal they struck is that when the US has enough Columbian refugees, Columbia will send a plane. They will (hopefully) return with dignity. I wonder if other Central American countries will demand the same treatment.
Why id Trump concede that point? I'm guessing that somebody realized that treating people like cattle would not play well in the US. That's where the spotlight would have been. Hitler never admitted to the death camps to the Germans during the war. Cruelty is the point but it has to be conducted with discretion.
Don't know if this had something to do with the concession TFG made: Rachel revealed that the cost of the military plane round trip was over $800,000, to transport fewer than 100 people (?). Last year charters from commercial airlines were used at around $100,000 a pop.
I'm not being critical of watching the "atrocity of the day," However, I'm trying to pick out from all the flying garbage the facts that reveal Trump's end game. Project 2025 was mapped out by some sadists but they are not as stupid as Trump's cabinet picks. You don't have to be Einstein to foresee that deep cuts are going to adversely affect large swaths of the population.
Trump has to get a budget passed by reconciliation. With the most slender of margins in the House, the Freedom Caucus has the upper hand. To offset the cost of the tax cuts and the stuff Trump wants to add, a lot of people who voted for Trump will be victims of Trump policies.
If Project 2025 realized that enacting the draconian cuts, they would lose control of Congress in 2026, and quite possibly the White House in 2028. So they have a plan to keep power even if they lose the election. THAT'S the thing we have to counter. I can't see it in a week but hidden in the smoke and mirrors are real decisions that will point at the intended end game. My ears are up with the Friday Night Massacre of Inspector Generals.
Yes the IG "firings" are important. Those are non-partisan roles established by bi-partisan congressional legislation signed into law. One of the specified functions of each of the IG's is to detect and remediate corruption (ie. contracts awarded to non-low-bid cronies, money laundering, etc.). This new administration doesn't want those functions to be effective.
I see the IG firings as the tip of a spear. Obviously, Trump is clearing the way to do whatever he wants without restraint. It's very serious. According to a whole lot of people, the way the IGs were fired was illegal. Is anybody taking this to court? I keep looking for some kind of official pushback, but I haven't seen it yet. And until there are further developments, or new information revealed, I'm going to be looking at what the rest of the spear is doing.