I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
President Trump’s handpicked acting D.C. U.S. Attorney insisted Friday afternoon that a federal judge should rescind his own order from Friday morning barring recently released Oath Keepers from going to D.C. and, specifically, the U.S. Capitol.
The administrative arm of the federal court system rebuked the Trump administration Friday for sending out an email blast to nearly the entire judiciary branch, including court employees and apparently every judge in the country.
Another detail out of FDA. The agency has removed pages which provide guidance to medical researchers on conducting medical trials with representative numbers of men and women and ethnic and/or racial minority groups. I think most people know this: but this isn’t a matter of symbolic diversity. Many medications and/or diseases or conditions present differently in men and woman and in people with different genetic backgrounds.
Wanted to share some information on the RFK Jr. nomination before the Senate.
It probably won’t surprise you that RFK Jr., along with Tulsi Gabbard, are among the few Trump nominees who might actually not get confirmed. But I’m told that one senator who Democratic senators and health care advocates have real concerns about is none other than Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). To be clear, Whitehouse isn’t confirmed as voting for Kennedy. But he appears to be actively considering it. (Ed Note: WTF?)
In order to combat the scourge of “DEI,” the DOJ yesterday indefinitely suspended observance of events like Black History Month, Women’s History Month and other long observed (and one would imagine fairly innocuous) commemorations.
The details are as follows.
Yesterday as part of the implementation of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order and the related anti-DEI guidance memorandum from the Office of Personal Management, the Executive Office of United States Attorneys immediately “suspend[ed] observance programs until further notice” and advised regional U.S. Attorneys Offices that “we believe it would also be prudent for the USAOs to suspend all observance events at this time.”
For what it’s worth, Black History Month isn’t something that BLM activists came up with. President Gerald Ford recognized February in 1976 and Congress passed a law designating February as National Black History Month in 1986.
The news was contained in a circular email sent to all U.S. Attorney’s Offices and shared with TPM.
We talk a lot about the structural imbalances in American politics, but perhaps the most consequential disparity arises from the Trump right’s fundamental commitment to breaking shit. We’ve seen it unfold in spades this week, as promises to destroy as much as they can as quickly as they can begin to be kept.
It’s not new to Trump. It’s been an essential element of the conservative project for decades now, reflected in anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist’s famous line about shrinking the federal government until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub.
When destruction is the point and there is no responsibility or accountability for building, creating, or even administering, all manner of democratic norms and civic consensus start to fall apart. Perhaps in the long term the consequences of the destruction will exact a political price, but in the meantime, the performative transgression is its own reward.
The Trump II Destruction Continues …
Swathes of the federal government have ground to a halt in the first week of the second Trump administration:
Disturbing: Trump moves to close Pentagon office focused on curbing civilian deaths
Alarming: Health researchers are reeling as Trump administration pauses travel, communications, and meetings.
Vindictive AF
After yanking special security protection from his own former national security adviser, President Trump has now done the same thing to Mike Pompeo, his own former secretary of state, and Brian Hook, his former special representative for Iran. Both men have been under threat of retaliation from Iran.
Quote Of The Day
“Patriotism is loyalty to country and loyalty to the Constitution – not loyalty to a single head of state. No stroke of a pen and no proclamation can alter the facts of what took place on January 6, 2021. When others in the public eye are not willing to risk their own power or popularity by calling out lies when they hear them, the record of the proceedings in this courthouse will be available to those who seek the truth.”
–U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, joining other federal judges in Washington, D.C. in reluctantly dismissing a case against a Jan. 6 defendant at the request of the Trump DOJ
The Other Trump Pardons
Beyond the Jan. 6 pardons, President Trump is using his first week in office to abuse the pardon power in other ways: to signal whose side he is on regardless of the law, to score political points, and to reward supporters explicitly for their political backing:
a convicted online drug kingpin who was a cause célèbre for pro-Trump libertarians.
A Weird Day On The Pete Hegseth Beat
Even as defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth cleared a significant confirmation hurdle in the Senate, new allegations continued to emerge about his prior misconduct:
In response to questions from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Hegseth revealed that he paid $50,000 to the woman who accused him of a 2017 sex assault, the AP has learned.
Pete Hegseth’s ex-wife has given a new statement to the FBI about his alcohol use, CNN reported: “He drinks more often than he doesn’t.”
A Senate floor vote on the Hegseth nomination is expected late tonight. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) were the only two Republican no votes on yesterday’s procedural vote. Hegseth can only lose three GOP votes, so it remains close but no real sign yet that enough Republican senators will rally to stop his confirmation.
Whither Kash Patel?
The confirmation hearing for Trump FBI pick Kash Patel has been scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 30
NYT: F.B.I. Pick Pushed False and Misleading Claims About Trump Investigations
Bloomberg: FBI Nominee Patel’s CNN Defamation Lawsuit Fails to Advance
NYT: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Sees ‘Deep State’ Plotters in Government, and Some Good in QAnon
The Intimidation Is The Point
As President Trump rolls back anti-discrimination rules across the federal government, including some that date back to FDR, law professor SamuelBagenstos makes the point that the way Trump is doing it is designed to squelch pro-diversity voices in the private sector, too:
But there’s an even more pernicious aspect to the new anti-DEI EO. It will be used–and appears to have been carefully designed to be used–to intimidate and harass private institutions that are outspoken in their support for a robust vision of equity. And it will be used to encourage those institutions to silence their employees who speak out in favor of such a vision (and, on university campuses, to silence those who speak out on other matters).
‘A Blatantly Unconstitutional Order’
President Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship did not survive first contact with a federal judge.
In a court hearing to temporarily block the executive order, U.S. District John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, called it a “blatantly unconstitutional order”
I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say where were the judges, where were the lawyers?”
Coughenour savaged Trump administration lawyers for arguing otherwise. “Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” Coughenour said. “It just boggles my mind.”
NYT: Trump Officials Move to Quickly Expel Migrants Biden Allowed In Temporarily
A federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Newark, New Jersey, swept up citizens, including a U.S. military veteran, according the city’s mayor.
WaPo: DOJ focus on ‘sanctuaries’ follows prison threats by Stephen Miller’s group
‘It’s Become Too Violent An Environment’
The current political atmosphere is prompting some churches to pull back from offering sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. Seth Kaper-Dale, a pastor at the Reformed Church of Highland Park in central New Jersey, told the WSJ: “It’s become too violent an environment, and the current president’s sort of invitation to violence makes us not want to have a label of sanctuary,” he said. “I do not need this to become the next Tree of Life synagogue.”
The Toils Of Cassidy Hutchinson
UNITED STATES – JUNE 28: Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, is sworn in to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol hearing to present previously unseen material and hear witness testimony in Cannon Building, on Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In the midst of their bogus counter-investigation last year of the Jan. 6 committee, some House Republicans got jumpy that if they subpoenaed former Trump White House aide-turned-whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson then sexually explicit texts to her from members of Congress might come out, according to a bizarro report in the WaPo:
Before that meeting, a Johnson aide told Loudermilk’s staff that multiple colleagues had raised concerns with the speaker’s office about the potential for public disclosure of “sexual texts from members who were trying to engage in sexual favors” with Hutchinson, according to correspondence produced at the time that detailed the conversation.
The exact nature, timing, and scope of the sexts remains pretty opaque in the WaPo report. In her 2023 book, Hutchinson recounted some creeptastic moments involving then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rudy Giuliani, which they each denied.
Oath Keepers founder and seditious conspirator Stewart Rhodes left prison this week beaming — President Donald Trump had commuted his sentence, nullifying Rhodes’ 18-year term behind bars.
