2nd ammendment

Be clear about what’s happening: Trump is siding with Putin

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 19, 2025

The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.

A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.

Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.

Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.

Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.

While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.

Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”

“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”

To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.

The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.

The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.

In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.

Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.

But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.

When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.

When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.

Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”

This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.” Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.

“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.

For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.

For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war” but which side is America now on?

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 16, 2025

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It’s heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It’s horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.

NATO watches as Trump invites Putin to “visit” Washington

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 12, 2025

Yesterday afternoon, in a bizarre performance, President Donald Trump hosted reporters in the Oval Office, the formal working space of the President of the United States. As Trump sat quietly behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States as a symbol of international friendship, billionaire Elon Musk held center stage. Musk talked to the reporters, wearing a jacket over a T-shirt, and a “Make America Great Again” ball cap—a likely violation of the Hatch Act, which Trump’s people routinely ignore—while his young son X wandered around the room, at one point exchanging a look with a downcast Trump that observers immediately captioned: “You’re sitting in my daddy’s chair.”

The event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in charge of the U.S. government. The executive order, titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” provides for an operative from DOGE to be assigned to every agency, where that operative will be in charge of all hiring and firing. It also puts downsizing in DOGE’s hands and establishes that only one new employee can be hired to replace four who leave.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that these operatives report to Musk, who is “clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.”

Trump said that Musk had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” but in fact they have produced no evidence of such waste. Today Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said Congress has had no information from Musk or DOGE, and when asked to produce evidence of fraud, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt simply listed things that seemed to be “against the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.”

As both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported today, the big winner from all the cuts to the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that were scrutinizing his businesses.

On the floor of Congress today, Moskowitz pointed out that Musk’s claims to have uncovered waste, fraud, and abuse present a problem for Congress. Led by House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Republicans have not yet managed to fund the government for 2025, but rather than trying to pass the 12 appropriations bills necessary before the March 14 deadline for a government shutdown, Johnson is hoping to pass a continuing resolution that will extend funding as a comprehensive package. Moskowitz pointed out that if, in fact, the government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress should debate each appropriations bill in detail rather than use a continuing resolution that would perpetuate what the Republicans say is billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Long gone is any pretense that the administration will work to lower prices for ordinary Americans. The Consumer Price Index report out today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that inflation surged in January, gaining a half a point as the cost of gas, rents, and groceries went up. Egg prices rose 15.2%. On Monday, Trump levied a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, raising concerns that prices for cars and trucks, as well as appliances and rebar for construction, will also rise.

Today Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) published an op-ed in the Louisville Courier Journal warning that “Kentuckians can’t afford the high cost of Trump’s tariffs,” which could cost the average Kentucky resident $1,200 a year. “[P]reserving the long-term prosperity of American industry and workers requires working with our allies, not against them,” McConnell wrote, and he called for “strengthen[ing] our friendships abroad.”

Trump responded to today’s report by posting on social media: “BIDEN INFLATION UP!”

The Republicans submitted their budget resolution for funding the government today. It called for cuts of $2 trillion to mandatory spending, a category that includes Social Security and Medicare. Two Republican lawmakers told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico that Republicans expect to cut food aid for more than 40 million low-income Americans; Hill’s colleague Grace Yarrow reports the House Agriculture Committee is eyeing about $150 billion in cuts to supplemental nutrition programs. The proposal also calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and an increase of $4 trillion in the debt ceiling.

Today saw a landmark shift in the foreign policy of the United States. Since World War II, the U.S. has stood behind the international organizations that worked to stabilize the globe by creating spaces for countries to work out their differences without resorting to war. Among the principles of those organizations was that bigger countries couldn’t simply take over other, smaller countries, and one of the ways countries enforced that principle was through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the collective security agreement in which signatories agreed that an attack on one would be an attack on all.

In 2016, Trump’s people weakened the U.S. stance against Russia’s incursions on Ukraine by softening the language of that year’s Republican platform, and Russia worked to help Trump get elected, apparently because Putin believed Trump would look the other way as Russia took not only Ukraine’s Crimea but also significant territory in eastern Ukraine. Then, in his first term in office, Trump often took Putin’s side and threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO.

President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to strengthen NATO and pulled together a strong coalition to back Ukraine when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. But when he took office just three weeks ago, Trump alarmed observers by suddenly talking about taking over other countries like Panama and Canada, and Denmark’s territory of Greenland. Such moves would directly undermine the post–World War II international organizations the U.S. has always championed. They would destroy NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian organization that protects North America from aerospace threats, and would also rip apart the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that has joined Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since World War II.

Today it appears Trump is making good on this threat to turn away from the longstanding policy of the U.S. and toward the foreign policy advocated by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Trump has been talking about demanding $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for continued U.S. support, but today, at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group put together under Biden to coordinate assistance to Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested a new U.S. position. Hegseth echoed Putin’s demands, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus giving up two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders. He wanted, he said, to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

Trump’s social media account—it did not sound like his own words—posted today that he “just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia…. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” thus offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine. And, the post said, they had agreed to start negotiations over Ukraine, although it also specified they had not included Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their talk. The post said that Trump “feel[s] strongly, [the talks] will be successful.”

The Russian government’s readout of the call added that “bilateral economic relations between Russia and the United States were also brought up during the conversation,” language that almost certainly means Putin wants Trump to lift the economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine that have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy.

The Trump administration also swapped U.S. teacher Marc Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a kingpin of Russian cybercrime who operated one of the world’s largest currency exchanges, facilitating drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering. When announcing Fogel’s release, Trump was asked if Russia had given anything in exchange. He answered: “Not much, no. They were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually.” Russia refused to include Fogel, who was wrongfully detained in 2021, in the large prisoner swap of June 2024.

Today, the Senate approved Tulsi Gabbard, who has often made comments sympathetic to Russia and who has defended former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia after the Syrian people ousted him, as the U.S. director of national intelligence. All Democrats voted against Gabbard and all Republicans voted in favor of her, with the important exception of Senator Mitch McConnell, who said: “The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.”

Tonight, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom released a joint statement vowing to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and making it clear that “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.”

Trump is gutting congressional oversight, wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 9, 2025

On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.