Trump 2.0

[dyqik]

Now it seems that replying to that Musk email (requiring details of work done) is voluntary: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/opm-mus ... =119127113

That's curious. I read a post on ISF earlier which appeared to be a Musk tweet saying people might get a 2nd chance but failure to respond twice meant dismissal. Must see if I can find that again...

He doesn't have the power to fire anyone.

[IvanV]

Now it seems that replying to that Musk email (requiring details of work done) is voluntary: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/opm-mus ... =119127113

That's curious. I read a post on ISF earlier which appeared to be a Musk tweet saying people might get a 2nd chance but failure to respond twice meant dismissal. Must see if I can find that again...

He doesn't have the power to fire anyone.

He appears to have the practical power that people are being fired on his say-so. Maybe he tells other people to do the actual firing, and as they are loyal appointees they do it. Maybe it isn't legal. But the individuals find they don't have a job any more. The people who fired them have the practical power to block from returning to their desks or accessing their materials to carry out their job. The best they can do is sue for unfair/constructive dismissal, which might increase their pay-off.

When we were a couple of weeks into this presidency, I was asking, where is the evidence of actual constitutional abuse. But with all this I do see people doing things which are apparently not within their legal power, but in practice being able to get away with doing it. They may find themselves having to pay people off for it, but they don't seem to care. And that is abuse.

[FlammableFlower]

Looks like there's push-back from within https://x.com/AP/status/189442117068378 ... BH5zg&s=19

[headshot]

Totally normal presidential behaviour:

https://news.sky.com/video/donald-trump ... m-13317247

Donald Trump posts 'what's next' for Gaza AI video on his Truth Social platform
The video shows a rebuilt "Riviera" in Gaza, golden balloons with Trump's face on them, golden statues of the president and AI images of him and Benjamin Netanyahu lounging in the beach.

[Opti]

Totally normal presidental c.ntish behaviour:

Fixed for truth.

[Martin Y]

It appears Trump reposted this AI-generated satirical parody video as if it wasn't a joke about his astonishing hubris and crass bad taste, thereby confirming both.

https://news.sky.com/video/donald-trump ... m-13317247

[Brightonian]

Totally normal presidential behaviour:

https://news.sky.com/video/donald-trump ... m-13317247

Donald Trump posts 'what's next' for Gaza AI video on his Truth Social platform
The video shows a rebuilt "Riviera" in Gaza, golden balloons with Trump's face on them, golden statues of the president and AI images of him and Benjamin Netanyahu lounging in the beach.

A "bold vision", says the Mail: https://archive.ph/qxFLn

[TopBadger]

It works though eh - all these "dead cats" thrown around, filling the media and entertaining his supporters while his cronies dismantle the government.

[Martin Y]

It works though eh - all these "dead cats" thrown around, filling the media and entertaining his supporters while his cronies dismantle the government.

Yeah, there was something I saw earlier (can't find it now, annoyingly) where some senator was solemnly pronouncing that Musk's junior coding club army were conducting a forensic audit of government departments, and how they would root out fraud and waste.

Of course auditing is actually a thing, for which real people have received training and qualifications and experience and Musk has not been hiring forensic accountants, he's been hiring techbro coder novitiates who want to be a super-genius like him. It's going to be exactly as much of an incompetent shambles as it looks like it might and they're unlikely to find enough savings to pay for the damage they'll cause.

[IvanV]

One of the things I find so annoying about small government advocates, in whatever country, is that they are never explicit on what government should and shouldn't do in future. I have assumed that this is in part because they know that once you list out the things that government won't provide any more, that will piss off lots of people who realise it will negatively impact them. It becomes easy for the media to attack.

But watching Musk trying to achieve smaller government, by randomly slashing here and there, we realise that maybe the reason they don't give details is that they just haven't thought about what they want less of. They maybe have some sort of doctrinal belief that we can just have a lot less government and somehow all the things we need are still provided, but with much greater efficiency. There has been some pushback, as idiotic things have been stopped and had to be restarted, making DOGE realise that actually you do have to have some sort of thought about whether we really need this. But the idea that you can decide what we really need by getting individual workers to justify their existence, the millions of statements processed by AI, rather than any kind of higher level thoughts about what we really need, is a joke.

And so far federal government outgoings - daily statistics are published on this - are still materially above last year. The only relatively large saving so far is slashing USAid, which is a relatively large spender, and its outgoings have largely stopped. But even that isn't large enough to get the outgoings even close to last year's. Maybe with all these sackings it takes time for the staff savings to come through, as lots of compensation is in principle being paid. I don't know if there has been an analysis of this, but the impression I get is that you can sack a lot of civil servants, and their wages are not actually where a lot of the outgoings are. The huge things are Medicare and social security. This source gives some info on federal outgoings, incomings and deficit. But it is shown monthly up to Jan 2025, which has very little DOGE effect at that point. I read an article looking at it daily into mid-Feb, which motivates what I wrote, but I haven't found that again.

[bolo]

You can find the daily data here:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trac ... real-time/

[jimbob]

It works though eh - all these "dead cats" thrown around, filling the media and entertaining his supporters while his cronies dismantle the government.

Yes

[Opti]

Slap my wrists if you want - but I still have a Xitter account. I only rarely check in to see what the people I follow are saying.

Here's a quite important thread.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1894 ... 04952.html

[IvanV]

Slap my wrists if you want - but I still have a Xitter account. I only rarely check in to see what the people I follow are saying.

Here's a quite important thread.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1894 ... 04952.html

There is unfortunately a sudden greater risk of some truly terrible and unnecessary epidemic, as they have turned off the US's disease defences. They lie that they turned them back on again, when in fact what they have done prevents the officials from doing that. But there is also potential, in just 4 years in office, for them to be lucky and get away with it. As repairing the damage will take time, it might happen later before the repair can be enacted, so the Trumpeters can pretend it was someone else's fault.

Meanwhile there has been a large growth in the unvaccinated in the last few years. RFKjr's is making it still easier for the antivaxers to be unvaccinated, so this will continue to expand. The map of vaccination rates is uneven, as the antivax crew have a strong clumping tendency. Localised measles epidemics are already occurring in some of the densest clumps, and in a little while things like that could become wider scale as vaccination rates continue to fall.

RFKjr has become interested in the ADHD "epidemic" in the US, with rates seemingly 2-3 times higher than comparable countries. It is quite evident that it is due to over-diagnosis. But RFKjr prefers to believe it is real so that he can find a cause he can save America from, probably kemiculs. If that is an excuse for some stronger rules on some of the things that other advanced countries reasonably object to in American food production methods, or even a backdoor route to some environmental clean-up, well that won't be too bad. But they could do with fixing the over-diagnosis problem. Maybe they'll quietly do that to make it look like their other measures worked.

[IvanV]

There's an interesting article in last week's Economist on how much is Trump breaking the constitution. So far, we read, the Trumpeters have obeyed the rulings that the court has made preventing them doing things Trump or Musk tried to order. So far seemingly so normal, the Economist remarks, as similar court cases occur quite frequently too under other presidents as people object to their actions. But these things are happening at a much higher rate. But Trump appears to be ruling entirely be decree, is producing executive orders at prodigious rate, and the houses are doing very little. The sheer rate of effort might achieve a lot even as people fight against it in the courts. As indeed we see with the foolish cuts that are hard to reverse.

Such misbehaviour by presidents is not unprecedented. They make comparisons to Franklin D Roosevelt's attempts to undermine the constitution by packing the supreme court, in reaction to the cases that were preventing him bringing in many aspects of his New Deal. And some aspects of the New Deal were indeed constitutionally abusive. Whilst his own party prevented FDR from packing the supreme court, the supreme court also backed down to a degree, perceiving the risk to itself, and FDR found it easier to get at least the less controversial parts of his program through.

They also compare with Richard M Nixon's attempt to recruit the DoJ and IRS to attack his political opponents. He was prevented from using the IRS by his own party. He did get the DoJ to sack the Watergate Special Prosecutor, but only after the official he first instructed to do that resigned. Nevertheless the DoJ continued to investigate Watergate. Trump is probably actually quite pleased at all the lawyers resigning for refusing to do his bidding, as he will replace them with loyalists who will. So it is looking like Trump will have much greater success in repurposing the DoJ to be his political tool, preventing it from investigating alleged criminals he has done deals with, than Nixon. And we wait and see if he can get into the IRS and social payments databases to get kompromat on his enemies from those.

The Economist snidely reminds us that making the civil service into a loyal partisan administration was what Lenin did in the Soviet Union, and that didn't work out very well in the end. And in pointing out how many loyal Trump voters are being damaged by the cuts - for example cancelling the $1.7bn/yr of aid money that was used buy US agricultural produce to dish out as food aid - they remind us of HL Mencken's dictum that democracy is the theory that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it good and hard. For Trump is not doing these things to our surprise, he signalled them very strongly in his election campaign. It was just mixed in with so many dead cats it was hard to know what was a dead cat.

[bjn]

Slap my wrists if you want - but I still have a Xitter account. I only rarely check in to see what the people I follow are saying.

Here's a quite important thread.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1894 ... 04952.html

There is unfortunately a sudden greater risk of some truly terrible and unnecessary epidemic, as they have turned off the US's disease defences. They lie that they turned them back on again, when in fact what they have done prevents the officials from doing that. But there is also potential, in just 4 years in office, for them to be lucky and get away with it. As repairing the damage will take time, it might happen later before the repair can be enacted, so the Trumpeters can pretend it was someone else's fault.

Meanwhile there has been a large growth in the unvaccinated in the last few years. RFKjr's is making it still easier for the antivaxers to be unvaccinated, so this will continue to expand. The map of vaccination rates is uneven, as the antivax crew have a strong clumping tendency. Localised measles epidemics are already occurring in some of the densest clumps, and in a little while things like that could become wider scale as vaccination rates continue to fall.

RFKjr has become interested in the ADHD "epidemic" in the US, with rates seemingly 2-3 times higher than comparable countries. It is quite evident that it is due to over-diagnosis. But RFKjr prefers to believe it is real so that he can find a cause he can save America from, probably kemiculs. If that is an excuse for some stronger rules on some of the things that other advanced countries reasonably object to in American food production methods, or even a backdoor route to some environmental clean-up, well that won't be too bad. But they could do with fixing the over-diagnosis problem. Maybe they'll quietly do that to make it look like their other measures worked.

There is an ongoing measles outbreak in an under vaccinated part of Texas that killed a child this week. RFKJr's response was as appalling as you would expect.

[headshot]

Jesus. Zelenskyy tried to remain composed, but his meeting with Trump and Vance was an utter clusterf.ck.

It’s clear America is now an ally (or an asset) in Putin’s propaganda machine.

[TopBadger]

Not sure if Trump is a Putin stooge or just out for himself, but to all intents and purposes it doesn't matter, the outcome is the same.

At the moment Europe's support seems to be holding for Ukraine. They need to expect to support Ukraine alone though, without the US. Trump's US is no longer willing to be the "world's policeman". Similarly the rest of NATO would be foolish to continue to assume the US would rise to the mutual defense clause.

[Martin Y]

US has now ended support for repairing Ukraine's constantly-bombed power grid. Amazing times we live in.

[Martin Y]

... Trump's US is no longer willing to be the "world's policeman".

Trump has wrecked, possibly permanently, America's soft power. All it will have left is hard power. Abundant hard power to be sure, but it's harder and more costly to wield. China will be overjoyed.

[Lew Dolby]

Always thought Trump was pretty thick (and a bully and a coward) but worried what would happen if/when people with brains started using him as a handpuppet. Looks like that's exactly what's happened.

[Martin Y]

It would be interesting to know what exactly Trump's deal was that Zelensky declined to sign, leading to that petulant scene in the oval office.

It was staged for Zelensky to play the meek supplicant, gratefully, even tearfully handing over Ukraine's treasure to Trump, who might in turn benificently deign to something something.

But it turned into a couple of overentitled pricks berating him for not being grateful enough to them for all the stuff Biden had given him.

[Stranger Mouse]

... Trump's US is no longer willing to be the "world's policeman".

Trump has wrecked, possibly permanently, America's soft power. All it will have left is hard power. Abundant hard power to be sure, but it's harder and more costly to wield. China will be overjoyed.

I don’t expect Taiwan to last long. And South Korea will be worried.

f.cking depressing.

[headshot]

Not sure if Trump is a Putin stooge or just out for himself, but to all intents and purposes it doesn't matter, the outcome is the same.

Someone in the White House is a Putin stooge.

Unbelievably, there was a “journalist” from TASS* in the Oval Office whilst the AP and Reuters have been barred.

The White House statement about it says they “snuck in”. Because The White House is known to be a really easy place to sneak into…

Russia has won the Cold War. They just didn’t assume it was over in 1991.


* https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/28/medi ... val-office

[monkey]

Not sure if Trump is a Putin stooge or just out for himself, but to all intents and purposes it doesn't matter, the outcome is the same.

Someone in the White House is a Putin stooge.

Unbelievably, there was a “journalist” from TASS* in the Oval Office whilst the AP and Reuters have been barred.

The White House statement about it says they “snuck in”. Because The White House is known to be a really easy place to sneak into…

Russia has won the Cold War. They just didn’t assume it was over in 1991.


* https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/28/medi ... val-office

The other day when Macron was visiting some french journalists snuck in an AP journalist (who have been banned because they call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico) by giving them one of their passes.

Seems to be easier than you might think.