The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director. With a team of incompetent and unqualified nitwits in charge of national defense and intelligence, we’re being left absurdly vulnerable to terrorist and military aggression. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping must be absolutely giddy.

One wonders how it is genuinely mediocre people rise to prominence, but it happens all the time. I read something at the Bulwark a couple of days ago that gave as good an answer as I ever heard. Jonathan Last writes that when he was much younger and writing for The Weekly Standard he read something by an economist named Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute that was obvious nonsense. Without going into details, it was. Just read Last’s Bulwark column. So Last met with Hassett to try to gently explain to him what he was missing, To no avail. “Hassett was unmoved,” Last writes. “Utterly and completely. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand me; it was that he didn’t want to understand. Invincible ignorance.”

So Last began checking Hassett’s other work and found he had a clear record of making wildly wrong predictions about the economy. But instead of hurting his career, Hassett kept getting promoted up the ladder at AEI.  Conclusion:

My lunch with Kevin Hassett was the moment in which I stopped believing in meritocracy.

People succeed in life for lots of reasons. Intelligence, nepotism, charm, luck. So far as I could tell, Hassett had none of those. He was dim, ordinary, tiresome, and not particularly lucky, either.

He was merely the product of a system that needed people like Kevin Hassett to exist. And this system was designed to protect and promote the Kevin Hassetts of the world, irrespective of how silly they were.

Specimens like Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and even Donald Trump succeed because they are the products of a system that needs them to exist. This organization is not necessarily formally organized, but it exists. Trump’s specimens serve a larger purpose they themselves probably don’t understand.

Oh, and naturally Donald Trump made Kevin Hassett the Director of the National Economic Council. Being wrong a lot is no impediment in the Trump White House, as long as you tell Dear Leader what he wants to hear.

I read something else this week I wanted to mention in the post yesterday, but it was running a bit log so I left it out. But the Independent (UK) reiewed a book I remember reading about awhile back. A Very Stable Genius by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig was published in the U.S. in 2020, but I take it that it was just released, or re-released, in the UK. Here’s a bit from the review:

“Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Mr Trump reportedly asked John Kelly, his then-chief of staff, when they took a private tour in 2017 of the USS Arizona Memorial, a ship commemorating the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.

“Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else,” write the authors, who quote a former White House adviser concluding the US president was “dangerously uninformed”.

This gives us a sense not only of Trump’s bottomless ignorance but of the insulated world he lived in all his life. Most of us born in the 1940s and early 1950s grew up watching World War II movies and listening to our parents and their friends talk about the war. Trump, obviously, did not. He must have even missed From Here to Eternity. His father — said to have been a Nazi sympathizer — knew New York real estate. And Trump seems not to have ever been the least bit curious about anything else. That’s his whole world. No wonder he thinks strategic alliances are just arrangements in which foreign countries pay us to protect them. And since he knows nothing about history, he can’t possibly fathom why western Europe has no interest in appeasing Putin.

Here’s another bit from the review:

During a meeting with Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister’s “eyes bulged out in surprise”, the Washington Post reporters claim, when Mr Trump told him: “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”

China and India in fact share more than 2,000 miles of common border.

Mr Modi’s expression “shifted from shock and concern to resignation”, with aides telling the authors the Indians “took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the US following the meeting.

And this:

When Mr Trump early in his tenure agreed to feature in an HBO documentary in which all living presidents read from the constitution, Mr Trump blamed others in the room when he struggled to read the text.

“It’s like a foreign language,” he allegedly complained.

There really was such an HBO feature, called The Words That Built America. It was directed by Alexandra Pelosi. They must have done enough takes of Trump’s reading that he didn’t come across as illiterate. But this may be why he still doesn’t know how the federal government is structured and what the role of POTUS actually is. He can’t read.

During his first term he claimed Article II gave him the power to do whatever he wants. Which of course it does not. Article II has 12 or 13 paragraphs, most of which are about how a president is elected, compensated, and sworn in. The actual job description is in the next four paragraphs, in which the words “Advice and Consent of the Senate”  are featured prominently. And then the last paragraph is about impeachment. But those four paragraphs provide a remarkably limited job description.

Trump is way too stupid to see how the, um, characters who are running his government are setting him up to fail. They’re all in way over their heads. They are all compromised up the wazoo. The real world is going to catch up with them all eventually. I hope not too many innocent people will be hurt, but I fear they will be.

At The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper writes that Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History. Empires tend to collapse when they lose wars, or are attacked by barbarians, or suffer a series of debilitating crises, or maybe just stagnate over a period of years. What we’re seeing now, he says, may be the first time in history that an empire in “splendid condition” chose to deconstruct itself.

America suffered no military defeat. We were not outstripped economically by a bigger or better-organized competitor. Rather, we elected an insane tyrant who is blowing up the foundation of our international power for no reason, all while he lets a South African immigrant ultra-billionaire and his crew of teenybopper fascists tear the wiring out of the federal government—again, for no reason.

Never underestimate the destructive power of stupidity.

Certainly much stupidity is involved here, but there’s another factor. See David Kurtz at TPM, Trump Must First Destroy The Gov’t In Order To Corrupt It.

Trump II’s opening month blitzkrieg has wreaked all manner of damage and destruction – some of that undoubtedly for the pure sake of doing it – but the real power dynamic is in converting the vast array of government goods and services into a political currency that Trump can exchange for favors, leverage, control, and obedience.

What were democratically agreed upon government programs now become baubles to be awarded friends and denied foes. Congress is reduced to a supplicant trying to secure exceptions, carveouts, and special treatment for themselves and their constituents. Even if Trump succeeds ultimately in wrecking only a portion of the federal government, he will have accrued vast new power not just by stripping it from Congress but apportioning the spoils back to individual members at the time, place, and manner of his choosing, on his terms, however corrupt they may be.

There are multiple reports out today saying that Republicans in Congress, while publicly praising Musk/Trump for whatever it/they are doing, are privately calling the White House and begging Trump to not freeze or cut funds that Congress has already appropriated for their states. Because they can do the math. A great many jobs and revenue streams flowing into their states are being shut off. Their constituents will feel the pain, sooner or later. Maybe they’re sorry they let him take over the power of the purse. But not yet sorry enough.

And then there’s the Putin factor. Many eyebrows were raised last night when Trump posted some rant that blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war with Russia.

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.

I don’t know where “there” is, other than Ukraine. Trump also leaned heavily on Zelenskyy to hand over rights to half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals — estimated value #11.5 trillion —  to the U.S., in exchange for … well, nothing specific. Such a deal. Remarkably, Zelenskyy said no. Trump seems to think that Ukraine owes us for the military assets sent to them by the Biden Administration. Trump still thinks of strategic alliances as something like protection rackets.

I don’t know why blaming the war on Ukraine surprised anybody. Trump has said things along that line before. It’s such a colossally stupid thing to say that I don’t think Trump is gaslighting here. I think, on some level, he believes it. And why would he believe it? Do you think Vladimir Putin put some ideas in Trump’s head about why Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine? Hmm.

But then there’s Trump’s Wishful Thinking tendency; he says things he wants to be true whether they are true or not. As in Covid will just go away. Trump’s reasons to dislike Zelenskyy go back to his first term, and his first impeachment. So Trump is calling Zelenskyy all kinds of names and raving that he needs to be voted out of power. And Zelenskyy has had a few things to say about Trump. This is from today:

In a post on his Truth Social account, Mr. Trump responded with a scathing attack on Mr. Zelensky.

“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle,” Mr. Trump wrote.

As he did in making his assertions a day earlier, he misrepresented verifiable facts. The United States, for instance, has allocated $119 billion for aid to Ukraine, according to a research organization in Germany, the Kiel Institute, not $350 billion.

Mr. Trump also suggested that future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”

Somebody might explain to Trump that oceans aren’t the buffer against aggression they used to be — and they were never perfect — but I doubt he’d listen. Europeans are, um, not happy about any of this.

Anyway, as I’m sure you know, negotiators from the U.S. and Russia are now meeting in Saudi Arabia to work out a “peace deal” that I bet will pretty much rip off Ukraine, which isn’t represented. I understand there’s an emergency summit of European powers going on in Paris to come up with a counterplan.

But back to the domestic front. People are already talking about a “Musk brain drain” of our best scientists and other bright folks losing their jobs. Other governments and private industries abroad might be sending recruiters over here already. Musk is disassembling agencies and programs that took years to reach standards of excellence and will take years to put back together, if they ever are. We’re losing everything that really made America great. MAGA is bent on turning America into a third-world shithole, but of course they can’t see that.

I have been thinking of the great American historian Richard Hofstader. Back in the mid-1950s he wrote an essay for The American Scholar called “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” He was writing about the hard-right McCarthyites of his day, but there are a lot of parallels to MAGA.

There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative. Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Possibly nothing summed this up better than the J6 rioters who assaulted Congress yelling “1776!” while they waved Confederate flags and tried to tear apart the constitutional processes that the real Revolution of 1776 was fought to establish. These are people who are terribly alienated from modern society and culture and want to destroy it and “restore” something that never really was. And in their minds Trump is some kind of colossus who can give them what they want, even though he’s really a corrupt and feeble-minded puppet of a foreign power. Possibly the only reason the destruction of America that’s going on now didn’t happen sooner was that it was waiting for a Trump to lead it.

Here’s a story from this morning — the AP is reporting that FAA employees, including air traffic control staff, are being fired by the Regime. As if we weren’t already short of air traffic control staff. I wouldn’t be planning any plane trips in the near future. And over the weekend we learned that big rounds of firings are underway at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Trump promised not to cut Medicare, but good luck with that.

What they’re doing, apparently, is going through all the agencies and laying off “probationary workers,” which means people who have been hired in the past year or so. And all these newhires are being fired for “performance” reasons, because that’s the only way they can be fired. This includes people with high performance ratings, I understand.

Paul Krugman:

So what would be your worst nightmare about large, hastily announced job cuts? Maybe firing the people responsible for keeping our nuclear weapons secure? Sure enough, on Thursday night, according to CNN’s reporting, Trump officials fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently unaware that this agency oversees America’s nukes. (Maybe the name should have been a giveaway?)

The next day, realizing the enormity of the error, the agency tried to reinstate those workers — but was having trouble getting in touch, because the terminated workers had already been locked out of their government email accounts.

Trump officials also summarily fired 3400 workers at the National Forest Service, which plays a critical role in fighting forest fires. The administration said that no firefighters were laid off, but right now — before fire season begins — is when the service should be trying to prevent fires by, among other things, clearing vegetation that can feed those fires. That work has now been hobbled, in some cases brought to a complete halt. (Remember when Trump blamed California for devastating fires, claiming that the state hadn’t raked enough leaves?)

There have been large layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just as America is experiencing a serious spike in ordinary flu cases and alarm bells are ringing about a potential bird flu pandemic. Under political pressure, the CDC has been withholding reports. So we might not even know about the next pandemic until it’s well underway.

Large layoffs have struck at the Department of Health and Human Services, including, according to CBS, half the officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes called the “disease detectives,” who play a crucial role in identifying public health threats. There have been layoffs at the FDA, which monitors the safety of food additives and medical devices.

And according to the union, several hundred workers have been fired at the Federal Aviation Administration.

Regarding the FAA, one would think the airline industry has some clout with Congress and is going to say something about this. And regarding the forestry people — Trump probably doesn’t realize that about 57 percent of the forests in California is under federal jurisdiction and managed by the National Forest Service and National Park Service. So they’re his responsibility, not Gavin Newsom’s. And we’re just about to enter the standard fire season.

I keep reading that all these mass firings are not going to give Musk/Trump the savings they want for their tax cuts. Even killing many entire departments isn’t going to do it. I hate to think what they plan next. Maybe they’ll sell Alaska back to Russia.

From Huffpost: Elon Musk’s DOGE Posts Classified Data On Its New Website.

Elon Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency on its new website, raising bigger concerns about where Musk’s programmers got this information and what they are doing with it. …

…The website states in tiny print at the bottom that its database excludes information from U.S. intelligence agencies.

But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.

“DOGE just posted secret NOFORN info on their website about [intelligence community] headcount, so currently people are scrambling to check if their info has been accessed,” said one Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from senior leaders.

If you haven’t been following the Mayor Eric Adams scandal, this bit from last night’s Chris Hayes show will help. Basically, the SDNY prosecutors have a massive case against Adams going back to 2014 or so. He’s been accused of accepting undisclosed gifts and bribes from foreign interests for a long time. There is a ton of evidence. But Adams cozied up to Trump, and a quid pro quo was worked out with the new people at DoJ that the charges would be dropped (but without prejudice; he might still be prosecuted in the future) as long as he was on Trump’s team regarding handling of migrants. Basically, Mayor Adams now works for Trump instead of NYC. So now a number of high-level prosecutors have resigned because the quid pro quo was so obvious that they couldn’t put their names to it. As of this writing I’m not sure the charges have been dropped yet. I understand the DoJ has now filed to have the case dismissed.

And here is the background on how Musk and Trump helped themselves to $80 million in New York City’s bank account and, of course, lied about what the money was for to justify the theft. Watch Chris Hayes break up over the overdraft fee.

Since last night another U.S. attorney resigned over this scandal. Here’s the letter he wrote. It’s worth reading. Here’s just a bit.

In short, the first justification for the motion—that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys is so weak as to be transparently pretextual. The second justification is worse. No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.

Today Mayor Adams appeared on Fox News with “Border Czar” Tom Homan. It seems like an open admission that the Trump Administration owns Adams.

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth are in Europe, scaring people to death. Vance made a speech to the Munich Security Conference, which was supposed to be about security, but instead was a stew of culture war crap. The other attendees were, um, alarmed. And Hegseth isn’t getting rave reviews, either.

Here’s another one, from CNN: Trump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s weapons stockpile, sources say. Of course they did.

I’m just exhausted.

RFK the Lesser was confirmed as health secretary. I’d wring my hands about it, but even if somehow he had been rejected I can’t imagine Trump putting anyone competent into that position. I hate to think of the devastation if there’s another pandemic in the next four years.  I believe Kash Patel is up next, and he’s made it out of committee.

This morning I read House GOP Makes Official Its Plan For Devastating Cuts To Medicaid at TPM. I knew this was coming, but it’s personally upsetting as I was just able to get on Medicaid last year. It’s been great so far. I’m getting the same medical care I would have gotten with normal insurance, but all my co-pays and deductibles are gone. I’m even fully covered if I have to be hospitalized for something. If that goes away I may have to make hard decisions about what health care I can actually get without running up a debt I can never pay. So far I haven’t heard anything specific about ending housing subsidies, but they’ll get to it eventually.

It’s hard to keep up with the nonsense. Now I’m reading Trump is proposing what he calls “reciprocal tariffs,” which seems to mean that other countries aren’t supposed to impose higher tariffs on our stuff than we impose on their stuff. Exactly how he expects to enforce that, I have no idea. I see that back in the early FDR Administration there was a law called the Reciprocal Tariff Act that was intended to facilitate negotiating lower tariffs to undo the damage of Smoot-Hawley, but that was way different.

This comes about in part because Trump is obsessed with trade deficits and believes they are a bad thing that happen when other countries are “unfair” to us. Even the Cato Institute says that’s not how it works. But even if trade deficits were really bad, as I understand it tariffs are not the best tool one might use to correct the situation. He really is a moron.

You’ve probably heard that Trump and Putin are negotiating with each other about ending the Ukraine-Russia war with no input from Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Comparisons to the 1938 Munich Agreement between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler abound. And Trump continues to be confused about who started the war.

Trump was asked if he viewed “Ukraine as an equal member of this peace process?” Trump responded: “It’s an interesting question. I think they have to make peace. That was not a good war to go into.”

So, yeah, everything’s going to hell. Quickly.

Stuff to Read:

David Graham, The Atlantic, The Trump Supporters Who Didn’t Take Him at His Word

Philip Bump, The Washington Post, Trump, Musk and America are headed for a very rude awakening

Paul Krugman, Elon Musk Is Faking It

Since Trump was re-inaugurated, every week when I do grocery shopping I take a photo of the basic store-brand large eggs, showing the price, and post it on Facebook. They’ve gone from $6.49 a dozen on January 21 to $7.99 today. So much winning! Today’s announcement that inflation was up by 3 percent drew a standard response from Trump — “BIDEN INFLATION UP!” He’s also calling for lowering interest rates, which the Fed is very unlikely to do anytime soon given the inflation numbers. Sooner or later try I predict Trump will try to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and replace him with someone who will drop interest rates at Trump’s bidding. There must be somebody reporting on Fox News who would do.

So Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as director of national intelligence. Mitch McConnell was the only Republican who didn’t vote for her. I think the nation is going to be incredibly lucky if we get through the next four years without another major terrorist attack, or worse. We’ve got incompetent nutjobs in charge of security and intelligence. We’ve got a so-called POTUS with a gift for pissing off most of the planet.

More tomorrow. Please as ever feel free to vent in the comments.

First, let’s everybody stop saying we’re “approaching” a constitutional crisis, or “risking” one, or whatever. It’s here. We’re smack in the middle of it.

Everyone’s looking to the courts to stop Trump, but Trump and his people have made it clear they’re ignoring the courts. It is the administration’s official policy that courts have no authority over presidents.

Lawyers for the Trump administration argued late Sunday that a court order blocking Elon Musk’s aides from entering the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems impinged on the president’s absolute powers over the executive branch, which they said the courts could not usurp.

This part is rich:

They argued that the order violated the Constitution by ignoring the separation of powers and severing the executive branch’s right to appoint its own employees. The restriction, they wrote, “draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction” between civil servants and political appointees working in the Treasury Department.

“Separation of powers” only works one way with Trump; his way.

The filing followed warning shots over the weekend. Vice President JD Vance declared that the courts and judges were not allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power,” although American courts have long engaged in the practice of judicial review.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump called the ruling by Judge Engelmayer a “disgrace” and said that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”

Writing for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait (yeah, I know, he’s wrong a lot) writes that Trump’s determination to simply govern by executive orders and whatever Musk feels like doing is especially remarkable considering Republicans control Congress, and Republicans in Congress have been entirely compliant to Trump’s demands (with the exception of the Matt Gaetz appointment). Trump could easily accomplish what he wants through the usual constitutional processes. He just doesn’t want to bother.

Just as Trump and Musk are refusing to submit their plans to a Congress that their party controls, they are at least toying with the notion of ignoring orders by a court they have shaped. The Supreme Court, which has final word on all constitutional disputes, has a two-to-one majority of Republican appointees. When Vance floated the idea of defying the courts in 2021, he was anticipating his party taking actions so indisputably illegal that not even friendly justices would swallow them. They are prepared to smash a system they control, simply because it won’t move at the frantic pace they demand. …

… Just this weekend, The WashingtonPost reported that the administration is asking candidates for national-security and law-enforcement positions to answer questions such as “Who were the ‘real patriots’ on Jan. 6? Who won the 2020 election?” and declining to offer jobs to those who fail to supply MAGA answers. Trump has sanctified the insurrection, has criminalized the prosecution of even its most violent activities, and is screening out anybody willing to question his belief that he is entitled to absolute power.

If you had predicted things like this before the election, most Republicans would have accused you of Trump derangement syndrome. Yet Republicans have barely uttered a peep of protest in the face of these actions.

Given his party’s near-total acquiescence in every previous step toward authoritarianism, perhaps Trump would not have to be crazy to take the next one. The entire administration is intoxicated with power. The crisis lies not in the structure of government so much as in the character of the party that runs it, which refuses to accept the idea that its defeat is ever legitimate or that its power has any limits.

Yet even Chait (who is wrong a lot) begins the essay by saying the U.S. is “sleepwalking into” a constitutional crisis, not that we’re already in one. I think some of these people are afraid to admit the system is breaking down as easily as it is breaking down. If Trump decides to just ignore the courts, who’s going to stop him and by what enforcement mechanism that Trump doesn’t control?

This happened today:

A federal judge on Monday said the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.

The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with what he called “the plain text” of an edict he issued last month.

Judge McConnell’s ruling marked a step toward what could quickly evolve into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after a social media post by Vice President JD Vance claimed that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” elevating the chance that the White House could provoke a constitutional crisis.

Already, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, challenging Mr. Trump’s brazen moves that have included revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon Musk’s teams access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems. Judges have already ruled that many of these executive actions may violate existing statutes.

Maybe if Judge McConnell goes to D.C. and wags his finger sternly at Elon Musk, Elon will back down. Or not. See also The Courts Blocked Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze. Agencies Are Withholding Money Anyway. at ProPublica.

At the New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say. So somebody’s saying it. One of the scholars interviewed said that while previous presidents have done unconstitutional things, this is the first time we’ve had a president who thinks the Constitution is meaningless.

So, yeah, it’s a crisis.

Trump just announced, with Netanyahu standing beside him, that the U.S. would occupy Gaza, deport all the residents, and develop the region into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” And U.S. troops will be deployed to do this. I am horrified.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board weighs in on Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico:

I can’t get past the subscription paywall to read the whole thing, but I trust the headline is a reasonable summation.

WSJ as part of the Rupert Muroch media empire did a lot to make Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world. Are they surprised at what he’s doing? Did they not notice he’s a moron?

Case in point: Some time Thursday Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to open the dams to two California reservoirs. Why? He got it in his head that the water would somehow flow down to Los Angeles and help with the firefighting. And he did this on very short notice without consulting with state authorities.

Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire! pic.twitter.com/Oaz92ZeiTh

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2025

Except the water won’t magically flow south to Los Angeles, and there’s no readily available way to encourage it to do so. Trump just dumped water that will probably be needed for agriculture this summer, for no good reason. Billions of gallons. The New York Times:

Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two dams in California’s Central Valley on Friday in a move that seemed intended to make a political point as President Trump continued to falsely blame the Los Angeles wildfires on water policies in the Democratic-run state.

The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said. Nonetheless, President Trump said on Friday that the same action would have prevented the Los Angeles wildfires on the other side of mountain ranges over which that water has no way of traveling.

“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” President Trump posted on Friday on social media in an apparent reference to the dam releases. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”

Experts expressed dismay on Friday that releasing so much water now served little use for farmers, who typically have higher irrigation needs in the spring and summer months when agricultural fields are abundant. …

... Alarmed, local water managers rushed Thursday to prepare for an abrupt onslaught of water they had not asked for, according to county officials. In an email to the Kings County Board of Supervisors, Jim Henderson, the county’s public works director, said that the water authorities had reached out with “serious concerns” before a flurry of calls to local Republican members of Congress dramatically slowed the flows.

And Elon Musk isn’t much brighter.

“They” didn’t keep the water from the people of California. Trump just took it away from the people of California. If there’s a drought in California this summer it’s going to hit California agriculture really, really hard. A publication dedicated to San Joaquin Valley water issues totally blasted the water release.

“Every drop belongs to someone,” said Kaweah River Watermaster Victor Hernandez. “The reservoir may belong to the federal government, but the water is ours. If someone’s playing political games with this water, it’s wrong.”

It was no game on Thursday when area water managers were given about an hour’s notice that the Army Corps planned to release water up to “channel capacity,” the top amount rivers can handle, immediately. 

The Army Corps later agreed to more measured releases, alleviating a mad scramble to alert first responders and have crews on standby in case river banks were breached and levees overtopped, as happened during the 2023 floods.

See also:

Politico, Trump says he opened California’s water. Local officials say he nearly flooded them.

Daily Kos, For the Sake of a Photo Op, Trump Tries to Ruin CA Farmers that Probably Voted for Him

Digby, Hullabaloo, Make It Stop

There are a several big reservoirs in the Ozarks and Appalachia, mostly built during the New Deal to provide hydroelectric power. If you’ve lived near one, you appreciate that the people who schedule the release of water need to know what they are doing.

So, yes, this is really stupid. And speaking of Elon Musk and the California fires, see Federal firefighters fought L.A.’s blazes. Then came resignation offers.by Daniel Wu at WaPo. It begins,

Justin Brown had done a grueling stint at the perimeter of the Hughes Fire, battling last week to keep the blaze from spilling into towns in northern Los Angeles County. He was still sore Tuesday when an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management arrived in his inbox, warning of upcoming cuts to the civil service and presenting an offer to resign from his job

“It was a slap in the face,” Brown said.

The article goes on to say that the letter was a huge blow to morale for the firefighters.

Speaking more of Musk, he now indeed has full access to the government payment system.

And back to the tariffs, Trump did indeed sign executive orders imposing 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico and Canada, a 10% tariff on Canadian oil exports, and a 10% tariff on goods from China. Nobody who knows anything about economics thinks this makes any sense. See Paul Krugman, The End of North America and Why Has Trump Gone Soft on China and Hard on Canada?

I’d already mentioned in the last post that Musk and his private sector minions are taking over the payment system through which the federal government distributes money. Later today I read that Musk’s people — can we call them Muskies? — have taken over the General Services Administration, which manages federal offices and technology. This is from Wired:

And then I read this from Reuters:

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.

 

This is getting very frightening.

Oh, and Trump’s tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and maybe China, are supposed to go into effect tomorrow unless something happens in the night to stop them.

Update: Trump administration forces out multiple senior FBI officials and January 6 prosecutors.

A letter sent to the fired prosecutors said their removal was based on their role in the Jan. 6 prosecutions. It cited an executive order Trump recently signed that called the Jan. 6 prosecutions “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years.”

In a separate memo to the FBI workforce sent out Friday night, the bureau’s acting director, Brian J. Driscoll, Jr., informed employees that acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, had asked for a list of all FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases for “a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll wrote. “I am one of those employees.”

It was not immediately clear why the FBI and DOJ officials had been ousted. The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.

A majority of FBI personnel may be targeted before this is over. A reporter asked Trump about it today, and he said he didn’t know this was happening.