Jonah Goldberg gives one of those high-placed friends the benefit of the doubt: he's just looking for Peace in His Time.
After his time, however, he doesn't give a rat's ass:
Trump doesn’t care about down the road. He wants to be able to claim he achieved peace in the short term. If Putin invades Ukraine again on January 20, 2029, that’s not his problem. In fact, he might even like it: He could point to it as more evidence that Putin would never invade the country while Trump was president.
This is how Trump thinks about politics, international and domestic alike. He cares less about serious, lasting policy than what he can take credit for immediately.
I somehow didn't have "Makes Neville Chamberlain Look Good in Comparison" on my Trump II Bingo Card.
George Will is similarly unimpressed: This is American greatness only if you have a MAGA-nifying glass.
From the French word “petite,” meaning “small,” comes the English word “petty,” which describes the Trump administration. This is greatness as restored by the midgets of MAGA:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in the room when the U.S. foreign policy of 80 years was jettisoned, and he was thrilled. This small occupant of an office once held by big people (from Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren and Daniel Webster to George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger) swooned on X: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before.”
Do Rubio’s muscles cramp during prolonged genuflections? He is, however, right, in his fashion: No president has ever before “stood up for America” this way, by turning U.S. foreign policy 180 degrees, away from supporting democracies toward rewarding war criminals. (Nine days before Donald Trump’s Oval Office berating of Ukraine’s president, the Financial Times website presented video of Russians murdering unresisting Ukrainian prisoners of war.) In a future X post, Rubio might elaborate on how courage featured in this reversal. Or in Trump’s pique about what he considers Ukraine’s insufficiently reiterated gratitude for the assistance Ukraine received from the Biden administration.
So smitten is Trump with Vladimir Putin (“genius”), he cannot fathom that the Russian leader surely considers him a weakling. Putin knows that Trump knows, but is too servile to say, who invaded whom on Feb. 24, 2022.
I feel I should apologize to Elvis Costello: I used to be amused, now I'm just disgusted.
Also of note:
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Is "Stop Making Sense" the new Democrat motto? Some days it seems that way. Oh, heck; most days it seems that way. In his article, Democratic Incoherence on Transgender Sports, Noah Rothman examimes the D-side objections to a legislative ban federal funding to schools that put boys on girls' sports teams:
According to Senator Tammy Baldwin, the legislation was an attack on localism and an overreach by the federal government. “I, for one, trust our states, our leagues, our localities to make these decisions without interference from Congress or the president,” she said.
Noah remembers just a few months ago when the Biden Administration expanded Title IX to mandate the inclusion of transgender males in women’s athletics. Apparently Senator Tammy does not.
In fact, isn't Title IX premised on not trusting "states, leagues and localities" to make their own decisions on this?
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Preserving their phony-baloney jobs is, in fact, goal number one. Bryan Caplan explains Why Federal Workers Won’t Quit.
Being a federal worker has suddenly gotten far less pleasant. Trump keeps erratically lashing out his entire workforce. He’s siccing Elon Musk on them in search of waste and heresy. He’s ordering them to abandon years of hard work.Furthermore, in the eyes of most federal workers, Trump is ideologically and personally odious. While I couldn’t find any decent data on federal workers’ Democrat/Republican ratio, federal workers’ campaign contributions skew quite left. Indeed, setting aside the military, federal workers look almost monolithically Democratic:
[Chart at link]
Granted, you could argue that a few of Trump’s policies are making federal workers’ lives better. Firing all the DEI workers and ending all the DEI trainings will outrage the far left, but the moderate left will perchance breathe a quiet sigh of relief. But even the most moderate leftist probably hates Trump twice as much as they hate DEI, so on balance it’s safe to say that most federal workers’ job satisfaction is, on balance, taking a big hit.
Bryan notes that federal workers are "vastly overcompensated" compared to private-sector workers doing similar jobs.
Disagree? Bryan is willing to bet actual money on this; see his post for details. Are you game?
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When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets. Madeleine Rowley notes the latest example of that truism: A $20 Billion Slush Fund—Paid by You to Progressive NGOs.
The Department of Justice is investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of Joe Biden’s $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Created in the spring of 2023, and managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the fund was supposed to be a first-of-its-kind program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered “historically left behind.”
But it appears little of the $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.
“The Biden administration used so-called ‘climate equity’ to justify handouts of billions of dollars to their far-left friends,” Lee Zeldin, the Trump administration’s new EPA administrator, told The Free Press. “It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds. This rush job operation is riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption.”
A Free Press investigation reveals that of the $27 billion, $20 billion was rushed out the door to eight nonprofit groups after Kamala Harris lost the election—but before President Donald Trump took office. As one former EPA official put it on a secretly recorded video, it was akin to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”
There will, sadly, be no movie about this starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; but that's fun to think about.
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