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.

The most alarming thing I’ve seen so far today is that Elon Musk and the DOGE boys appear to have gotten control of a sensitive payment system at Treasury through which the U.S. government pays out funds. From WaPo: (This is the last day of January, and I’m out of this month’s gift links for the Washington Post and New York Times, sorry.)

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

Musk somehow forced out the very senior guy at Treasury who oversaw this payment system. And it’s hard to know how much of this is Trump and how much of it is Musk. It wouldn’t surprise me if Musk is grabbing up more power and access than Trump realizes. If Musk controls the payment system, he can stop payments at his discretion, and create new payments nobody knows about. Congress? Congress?

A preliminary report on the DC crash says that the air traffic control tower was short staffed. From The New Republic:

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people. …

…. Staffing levels at the airport’s control tower have been below adequate levels for years, like many of the U.S.’s other airports. DCA’s tower only had 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to congressional reports. This is well below the FAA and air traffic controller union’s preferred number of 30, and is due to employee turnover and budget cuts, according to the Times.

As a result, many air controllers at the airport work up to 10 hours a day and six days a week. Those levels probably have not been helped by Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze, his gutting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and the FAA chief’s resignation at Elon Musk’s behest. As much as Trump and the right might try to blame DEI or something else ludicrous, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

There is also reporting that the helicopter may have deviated from its approved path.

But guess what? FAA employees, including air traffic controllers, got another “buyout” offer email YESTERDAY. New York Times:

In a mass email sent to federal employees just before 8:30 p.m. — almost exactly 24 hours after an air crash in Washington that killed 67 people — the Office of Personnel Management encouraged F.A.A. workers, including air traffic controllers, to look for new jobs outside of government, where they might have an opportunity to be more productive.

“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” stated the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

The message, in the form of “F.A.Q.s” — or Frequently Asked Questions — suggested that if the employees agreed to depart, they could take a second job or travel to their “dream destination” while still on the public payroll for months before leaving permanently. But employees have been informed over the years that it is illegal for them to take a second job while working for the federal government, raising questions about whether the government can deliver on that offer.

It also came after President Trump, in public comments, blamed efforts to diversify the air traffic controller work force as a contributor to the crash, saying hiring standards had been too lax. He provided no evidence for his assertions about air traffic controllers, a field plagued for years by staffing shortages.

Again, the emails urging federal employees to resign are coming from Elon Musk’s people. Musk is turning into a bigger danger than Trump.

I also want to call you attention to Dana Milbank’s column today. So I’ll just quote a big chunk of it.

A reporter asked whether he was really blaming the crash on DEI.

“It just could have been,” Trump said.

The big news today is that it appears the “freeze” order of yesterday has been entirely rescinded. Wow, did that mess blow up in Trump’s greasy orange face, or what?

I take it that around the country local television news reporters were covering the ways the freeze would impact local viewers. This must have upset a lot of folks. And I understand Democrats actually woke up and got aggressive in condemning it. And Stephen Miller is having a snit that the blowback stopped the freeze. Poor baby.

But wait … not so fast … later today the Trump administration said they were only rescinding the memo announcing the freeze order, not the freeze itself. Huh? NPR reports,

Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, told reporters that the move simply meant a recession of the memo.

She said efforts to “end the egregious waste of federal funding” will continue. She said the OMB memo has been rescinded “to end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage.” The administration expects that rescinding the memo will end the court case against it.

After widespread confusion from the initially very broad memo calling for a halt in federal assistance, pending review, the White House tried Tuesday to further clarify which programs would not be affected, later specifying that it would not impact Medicaid and SNAP programs, for example.

This latest statement from the White House is likely to add to the confusion rather than clarify it.

So nobody knows what’s going on. On to the next outrage, the fake “buyout.”

The more I read about Trump’s so-called “buyout” of federal employees, the more confused I got. At first I understood it to be the standard sort of thing some companies do when they are downsizing, to offer employees a better severance package than they would otherwise get if they go ahead and resign. But that’s not exactly right. It’s more like a “deferred resignation.” If federal employees offer to resign now, they will still be considered employees until September 30, at which time their pay and benefits end. But while they are still considered employees they don’t have to come into the office. It’s not clear whether they’ll actually be working from home or not. What happens if they take another job before September 30? Do they get to “double dip”? From what I’ve read, probably not.

I found this on Bluesky:

I have read the email from OPM. It is not what has been reported. IT IS NOT A BUY OUT.

It is an exemption from the partially unenforceable return to the office EO until end of the Fiscal Year. You may have to work every single workday until the end of the FY. No guarantees. All discretionary.

[image or embed]

— Eugene Freedman (@eugenefreedman.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 7:13 PM

See also What federal workers should know about Trump administration’s ‘deferred resignation’ offer.

Part of the problem is that it appears the executive branch needs congressional approval to do this, although right now Trump would probably get it if he asked. But another thing to know about this downsizing of the workforce is that it appears to be an Elon Musk operation. See Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management at Wired.

One of the best things I’ve read today about the downsizing is by David Dayen at The American Prospect, who first explains that the email with the fake buyout offer went to employees with the header “Fork in the Road.”

This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.

lso like Elon’s Twitter experience, OPM enticed workers to take the offer by explaining how miserable it would be to stay in a government job. The Trump administration is requiring a return to the office, and stripping thousands of employees in policymaking roles of civil service protections. Because of expected divestitures of physical office space, many workers would have to relocate into new offices or maybe even new cities. Because of promised reductions in force, many workers who choose to stay could be furloughed anyway: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” the email reads. Moreover, there are statements about higher performance standards and an emphasis on being “loyal” and “trustworthy.”

If that’s what toiling in the bureaucracy is like, maybe you’d think about taking the big severance package, even if it sounds too good to be true. Which it is.

Musk’s associates have apparently taken over OPM, according to a rundown from Wired and a Reddit post by someone claiming to be an anonymous OPM staffer. Chief of staff Amanda Scales worked for Musk’s AI firm; a former Tesla and Boring Company engineer is a senior adviser. Memos written by OPM had metadata revealing the authors as Project 2025 authors and conservative think-tank veterans. The previous chief information officer was reassigned just a week into starting at the agency, apparently because he wouldn’t set up this distribution list to all federal employees. (According to the Redditor, that’s been set up on a separate server that looks like it’s coming from OPM.)

Trump, of course, wants to replace career civil service employees with his own lackeys. Elon may just be trying to help. But Elon has a history of mass firings of employees. He seems to view his employees not as resources but as cost, and one of his first go-to strategies for handling too much cost is an indiscriminate mass firing of employees. You probably remember all the layoffs at Twitter, which didn’t appear to do Twitter any good. Last year he laid off 10 percent of the global workforce of Tesla. A report by Reuters found that Musk damaged parts of his company and mightily pissed of contracted vendors as a result. Later he went on a hiring spree to replace people he had laid off. Genius. But given Musk’s history, someone capable of finding a good job elsewhere might think twice about working for Musk.

It’s also the case that Trump doesn’t like work-from-home arrangements and had ordered all employees to return to the office. However, in many cases work-from-home was written into Union contracts. David Dayen writes that some federal agencies have already rejected Trump’s back-to-the-office order for that reason.

It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of federal civil service employees already have resumes in circulation, in hopes of finding a new job rather than continue to work for Captain Chaos. But I’d still be really cautious about going along with anything Musk/Trump proposes.

In other news:

Trump plans to cancel visas and deport all non-citizen students and others who took part in pro-Palestinian protests last summer. Reuters reports,

A fact sheet on the order promises “immediate action” by the Justice Department to prosecute “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” and marshal all federal resources to combat what it called “the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and streets” since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in the fact sheet.

“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Trump is Netanyahu’s boy.

In more other news: Today RFK the Lesser reported to the Senate for confirmation hearings. I haven’t been watching, but the reviews have not been kind. Among other things, Lesser believes Americans don’t like Medicaid because “the premiums are too high.” Um, there are no premiums, Lesser.

Update: The hits keep coming — Trump plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a migrant camp.

In light of Trump’s unprecedented freeze on nearly all federal spending other than the salaries of federal employees, Social Security, Medicare, and the U.S. military, I’ve been studying up on the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. All those years ago, President Richard Nixon had a practice of impounding, or refusing to spend, money appropriated by Congress for programs he didn’t like. In at least one case, he had vetoed the bill appropriating the money, but Congress overrode his veto.

Other presidents before Nixon held back on spending appropriated money, but it appears that in at least some cases the objective desired by Congress didn’t require all the money appropriated. Or, in some cases circumstances changed, making the appropriation unnecessary. For example, during Thomas Jefferson’s administration Congress appropriated money for some gunboats to put down some kind of lawlessness on the Mississippi River. But Jefferson decided “The favorable and peaceable turn of affairs on the Mississippi rendered an immediate execution of that law unnecessary.” The 1974 law was sustained and strengthened by the Supreme Court in Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35 (1975).

It’s my understanding that the 1974 act provides a means for a President to inform Congress if he really believes that not all appropriated money needs to be spent to secure what Congress wants. but Congress then has to agree the POTUS doesn’t have to spend it. A lot of presidents ever since have complained that the required procedures for not spending money are cumbersome, and a bit more flexibility would be nice. But Congress has the power of the purse, and presidents are not supposed to unilaterally substitute their own judgment for what Congress has decided to spend money on.

Here is the memo that was sent out last night announcing the freeze. I like this part especially.

Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

Among the apparently frozen programs are two that affect my day-to-day life, Medicaid and housing assistance grants. Earlier today all the Medicaid portals in all 50 states went down. The White House is claiming this has nothing to do with the freeze, and the portals will all be back online shortly. But if Medicaid payments are frozen, how are reimbursements supposed to go out? Is my Eliquis going to go back to costing $175 a month? What if I need a medical procedure I can’t afford? You understand my concern, I’m sure. And I’m thinking also of the majority of nursing home patients, whose bills are paid by Medicaid. What happens to them?

And the owner of the apartment building I live in gets a housing assistance grant that, I understand, makes up the difference between the reduced rents we seniors are paying here and what the apartments would rent for on the current rental market. I don’t know how the grant money is paid, but I assume there’s a limit to how long he can go without getting it.

Josh Marshall writes,

So I write the following with the caveat that everything in the unfolding Trump administration is cloaked in secrecy and uncertain from one moment to the next. But overnight President Trump kicked off a what can only be called both a wide-ranging constitutional crisis and also very likely a fiscal crisis. He has unilaterally halted – as of 5 pm this evening, according to an executive memorandum first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas – all “grant, loan and federal assistance programs” for at least 90 days. This appears to include everything the federal government does beyond the salaries of federal employees, direct checks to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the US military. Mainstream media journalists are calling this “temporary” or a “pause”. But that’s like saying you’re “temporarily” shutting down Congress or “pausing” elections. “Temporary” isn’t a meaningful term in this case. It’s hard to think through everything affected. Already the halt to USAID budgets has cut off funding for the prison guards holding 9,500 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, according to Syria expert Charles Lister. Cancer research, major parts of every state’s budget, the grants that keep the local daycare center running. This hits basically everything.

I’m seeing posts on Bluesky saying that the Small Business Administration loans for disaster relief in places like Los Angeles and North Carolina have been frozen, too.

This happened so suddenly it may take a few days for people to realize it happened. But what was announced yesterday was just a phase of the freeze. It had begun earlier.

On Inauguration Day, Trump ordered a 90-day pause in almost all foreign aid to give the administration a chance to ensure that it fits with its priorities. “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the executive order read.

Then on Friday, the State Department issued a “stop-work” order that surprised global health experts by stopping funds for not only future aid projects but also existing programs.

Over the weekend, USAID staff were told in an email by Ken Jackson, assistant to the administrator for management and resources, that the “pause on all foreign assistance means a complete halt” and that USAID staff should help ensure that aid work aligns with Trump’s America First policy and that staff who to ignore these orders could be disciplined. NPR obtained a copy of the email.

Some USAID staff have already been laid off for allegedly trying to get around this executive order.

Trump had also already “paused” “the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” All of this is supposed to be about everything being paused until the Administration can review the spending and decide if it should continue. But one, that’s not really the Administration’s job in the case of congressional appropriations. And two, a review of federal spending is not a bad thing, but the freeze wasn’t necessary to do that.

Russell Berman writes in The Atlantic that the Trump Administration plans to argue that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional. They can certainly argue that, but they might want to have waited for a court’s opinion before going ahead with impoundment.

Berman interviews a bunch of people who say that what the Administration is doing is certainly illegal, and they believe the courts, including the SCOTUS, will rule against Trump on this issue. However, it would have been better if Congressional Republicans rose up to stop him, and so far that doesn’t seem to be happening. And until there’s a court decision all kinds of people are going to be in all kinds of limbo, waiting to know what’s going to happen with programs they depend on.

The Washington Post (sorry I’m out of gift articles for the month) is reporting now that the White House says the new freeze was only intended for foreign aid and DEI programs. That’s not what the memo says, but whatever. WaPo continued,

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.

Miz Lindsey has boldly declared that pardoning the violent J6 defendants was a mistake. However, he’s siding with Trump on birthright citizenship. “I think it’s a cheap way to award citizenship,” he said. “You should not be a citizen simple because you were born here.”

So how did you get to be a citizen, Miz Lindsey? Is he proposing that nobody gets to be a citizen until they’ve passed some kind of qualification test?

Of course, what he’s complaining about are the parents, not the children. Through most of U.S. history all kinds of odd people showed up here without being sorted into “legal” or “illegal” piles. But until the 14th Amendment citizenship was assumed to belong only to white people.

Do read What ending birthright citizenship could look like in the U.S. in the Washington Post. We’d need a whole new bureaucracy to check out birth records. And it would create a huge pool of undocumented, and probably stateless residents. It’s a “solution” to a non-problem that would cause many bigger problems.

Update: Trump is picking fights with Colombia because Colombia refused to allow two U.S. military planes presumably full of Colombian nationals being deported from the U.S. to land there. (The Biden administration was using chartered commercial jets to fly people being deported back to their countries of origin, which I understand is actually a lot cheaper.) Colombian President Gustavo Petro appears to have been primarily objecting to a U.S. military plane flying into his country without advance notice. Why Trump is insisting on military planes and not chartered flights isn’t clear to me. Maybe he thinks military planes are more cool. Anyway, Mexico refused to allow a U.S. military plane to land yesterday, but apparently that issue was smoothed over. The issue may have been that Trump didn’t get permission in advance to land the plane.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced he had blocked two US military flights carrying migrants heading toward the country and called on the United States to establish better protocols in its treatment of migrants. Petro also left the door open to receiving repatriated migrants traveling on civilian planes.

Following Petro’s announcement, Trump criticized him on social media while announcing a slate of new sanctions and policies targeting Colombia, including a 25% tariff on all imports from the country, a “travel ban” for Colombian citizens, and a revocation of visas for Colombian officials in the US along with “all allies and supporters.”

Anyway, instead of just working out some arrangement that was more comfortable for Colombia, Trump is throwing fits and punishing Colombia for not doing things his way.

According to Google’s AI overview, which I don’t entirely trust, “The primary imports from Colombia to the United States include crude petroleum, coal, coffee, cut flowers, gold, refined petroleum, vehicles, machinery, electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural goods like corn, with the US being the largest importer of Colombian goods overall.” It mentions corn, but the big one is COFFEE. More than 25 percent of the COFFEE we drink here comes from Colombia.

The new Big Lie among the MAGAts is that there is no such thing as “Palestinians.” The story being circulated on the Right (apparently originating here) is that the “Palestinians” are a made-up people invented by Soviet propagandists during the Cold War. They’re really just Arab Muslims who settled in the area that is now Gaza and Israel over the past couple of centuries, the story goes.

This claim began to circulate yesterday after Trump proposed moving all the Palestinians out of Gaza and resettling them in Egypt or Jordan. What Egypt and Jordan think of this plan, I do not know. I doubt they will comply, so this proposal is unlikely to go anywhere. I’m also waiting to see what Juan Cole has to say about it. Netanyahu and the hard right in Israel are ecstatic, of course.

Trump also lifted the hold placed by President Biden on  on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. I wonder what all those Muslim Americans in Michigan who voted for Trump are thinking now. Hmmm.

FYI, the name “Palestine” appears to have been coined by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE to designate a district of Syria between Phoenicia and Egypt. In the 2nd century CE the Roman Empire renamed its province of Judea as :Syria Palestinia. The Romans were suppressing the Jews at the time, of course. So the name has been around for a while. The Palestinian people are said to be the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, although in the Middle East everybody’s DNA is pretty much all mixed up now, so everybody is a descendent of just about everything that was ever there.

Of course, anyone paying attention to Trump over the past few years could see something like this coming for miles and miles. I’m sorry that Joe Biden’s Gaza policies turned out to be a mess, but as I’ve argued  earlier we cannot know what Kamala Harris’s policies would have been. Vice Presidents are more or less gagged about splitting with the POTUS on foreign policy, especially while delicate negotiations are going on. She at least was on record as supporting a two-state solution, which Trump does not. Trump wants whatever Netanyahu wants, and he was clear about that during the 2024 campaign to anyone paying attention.

I see that there were some pro-Palestinian protests of Trump yesterday in Chicago; whether this was before or after he announced his plan about clearing out Gaza, I do not know. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for all those tools who were out protesting “genocide Joe” to be just as fervently opposed to Trump’s Gaza policies, no matter how cruel. “genocide Donald” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. No fun.