I hope everyone had a lovely holiday. And now, back to work.

The Trump Administration certainly had a busy holiday. First we had a big Christmas Eve Epstein files document announcement. More than one million files they previously didn’t know about have somehow turned up! Somebody must have stacked them in a back hall under the old pizza boxes. My goodness, what a surprise. And after Trump’s girl Pam kept saying the DoJ had done an “exhaustive review” of everything Epstein and there was nothing in the files worth releasing. It’s going to take them a while to review all that, of course.

And then on Christmas Day Trump bombed Nigeria. Why did Trump bomb Nigeria? To please his White evangelical supporters, basically. White evangelicals in the U.S. have been yammering that Nigerian Christians were being “targeted” for death. There was talk of a Nigerian Christian genocide. So Trump dropped a bunch of bombs on Nigeria, I take it. And the evangelicals were pleased.

I’ve been watching this for a while. There has been a lot of terrorist violence in Nigeria. Some of the people killed by terrorists are Christians. Some of them are not. According to Pew, Nigeria is 56 percent Muslim and 43 percent Christian. Maybe. I’ve seen different figures elsewhere. Terrorist groups in Nigeria include West African ISIS, Boko Haram, and Ansaru, These are all Muslim organizations. But there are also a whole lot of criminal gangs in operation, and I take it the authorities aren’t always sure if particular incidents of violence are terrorist-related or gang-related. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-most populous country.  It has more than 250 ethnic groups, with varying languages and customs. Who knows who is targeting whom?

Juan Cole:

Ironically, the strike was fully supported by the Muslim president of Nigeria, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and coordinated with the federal military. Nigeria’s Daily Post is more positive about the operation than most US newspapers. It says that US naval vessels in the Gulf of Guinea launched 16 guided MQ-9 Reaper missiles at “two major Islamic State ISIS terrorist enclaves located within the Bauni Forest axis of Tangaza Local Government Area, Sokoto State.”

So Trump’s attempt to configure the action as a Christian strike in defense of Christians (for his Evangelical base) is a stretch. He seems actually to have worked hand in glove with Tinibu and the Nigerian Muslim elite to hit a mutual problem. Although parts of Nigeria, especially the northeast, are poor and conflict-ridden, there is no evidence that Christians suffer worse from this violence than Muslims — people from both communities have been kidnapped, brutalized, and killed by forces such as Boko Haram.

That’s what I’m seeing from other sources. Whatever is going on in Nigeria is not a simple Muslims-versus-Christians dichotomy. It’s more complicated. Never mind that Trump had no authorization whatsoever to bomb Nigeria. Nothing happening there threatens the United States. He just did this to score points with the White evangelicals. Who are less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, btw.  See also Breaking down U.S. strikes on ISIS in Nigeria and the complicated conflict there at PBS.

Also, Trump has decided that since “affordability” is a fake word, or something, the midterms will be about “pricing.” I don’t think that’s going to help him much.

You’ve probably also heard that the MAGA movement is fracturing. There was a particularly good analysis of the current state of MAGA at the New York Times — The Strange Death of Make America Great Again by Matthew Walther. It’s good enough that I’m burning my last gift link for the month. Walther proposes that “Coalitions organized around symbolic enmities and ideological absolutes rather than shared material interests are prone to sudden collapse.”

… MAGA’s internal contradictions can no longer be ignored. The movement that had promised an end to foreign adventurism has found itself torn between an alliance of ideological noninterventionists and realists and a hawkish national security establishment. Trumpism promised a revival of domestic manufacturing, yet neither the president nor his advisers have decided whether this means tariffs, industrial policy, reviving organized labor, environmental deregulation or mere nostalgia. MAGA also promised immigration reform but has oscillated between showboating deportations and a deference to pro-visa allies in Big Tech and corporate agriculture. At the same time,  American support for Israel has become a contested issue on the right for the first time in decades. Some opponents have been accused of antisemitism; others simply announce it. …

… This problem extends to Mr. Trump himself. No postwar political movement has been more closely bound up in the fortunes of its founder than MAGA is. Yet during the recent controversies, Mr. Trump’s own views have been neither heeded nor even earnestly solicited. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he has begun to recede from the movement he created.

Is MAGA sustainable without Trump? MAGA was never a serious political movement. It is more of social/cultural phenomenon, a movement of people estranged from multiculturalism, liberal values, and the 21st century in general. .

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune.

Without a strong personality to rally around, to tell them who to hate this week, they have no direction. And Trump is fading. Had he lived, maybe Charlie Kirk could have been the new MAGA Daddy for at least part of the movement. But I don’t see J.D. Vance or Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro or Nick Fuentes or any other semi-leaders of MAGA turning into The One. More likely MAGA, whatever it is, will just fracture. Even Jim Geraghty, a long-time Trump apologist who writes for the Washington Post, called the recent Turning Point conference A conference of clowns; “Wrestlemania with podcasters.”

See also Cracks have emerged in the Maga coalition by Moira Donegan at The Guardian.

This is one of those “where do we start?” days. So let’s start with Trump unveils a new class of Navy battleship named after himself at WaPo.

Trump, speaking alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, said the new warships will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” along with hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns and lasers. The first battleship, to be called the USS Defiant, will be part of a broader effort to build a modern “Golden Fleet” of warships, Trump said, indicating that he will play a leading role in the program.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” Trump said.

The Navy said in a news release after Trump’s announcement that the vessel “will be the most lethal surface combatant ever constructed” and triple the size of a current Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which is about 505 feet long and weighs about 9,000 tons. That would be smaller than existing aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, vessels that commonly carry Marines at sea.

At the last minute 60 Minutes pulled a segment covering the experiences of detainees at CECOT in El Salvador. This was done by Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief. She wanted to avoid controversy, she said. It blew up in her face.

Weiss said the segment was flawed because it didn’t present the administration’s point of view. That’s largely because the administration failed to respond to 60 Minutes’ requests for comments. Sometimes silence is a response. “A free press isn’t free if stories get shelved just because the powerful won’t talk,” Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said. I rarely watch CBS News, but it’s sad that the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has come to this.

There was commentary when Weiss was named to the position that she lacked experience in the news side of the business. She’s always been on the opinion/editorial side. I hope she gets canned soon. But the larger issue has to do with what political pressure is doing to the news business. And what’s behind that is mergers and media monopolies.

For years the FCC enacted regulations to make sure news consumers had access to sources from a variety of companies. But Trump’s FCC chair has thrown that out the window. Now there is a raging battle going on over which right-wing interest is going to end up with a digital media monopoly. And right now CBS and CNN are being sacrificed to Trump, says Franklin Foer at The Atlantic.

The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.

This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government’s merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.

He does a good job of explaining why changing technologies have made the news business far more fragile and more susceptible to authoritarian manipulation than they were back when Katharine Graham decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. That kind of expose may not happen again in the U.S. The press won’t be free to do it.

You’ve probably heard that GOP congresswoman Elise Stefanik has announced she is not running for re-election. As far as I’ve heard, she does plan to serve out her term. But even more surprising, she’s dropped her plans to run for New York governor next year. I understand she was polling way ahead of the only other Republican in the race. Although I think her chances for getting elected were remote. Gov. Hochul is not wildly popular, but I don’t think any Republican has a prayer in a statewide race in New York right now.

What’s more interesting to me is what happened just before this decision. It has to do with the recent shooting at Brown University. The Usual Bleepheads on the Right (led by Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec) had made up their minds that the shooter was a particular Brown U. Palestinian undergrad whose name I will not repeat because it’s been spread around the Web enough already. According to rightie rumors, the perp had stormed into the classroom screaming  “Allahu Akbar” before shooting. Variations of this rumor insisted that the primary target was not the physics professor who was slain but Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, who was vice president of the campus Republican Club. WaPo:

“She was a Republican leader in the Republican Party at Brown University,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) said Tuesday during an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast. “You can’t tell me she wasn’t targeted. I would hate to miss that opportunity to say that because the consequences here are very, very fishy. But at the end of the day … nobody really pays a price for this.”

Cook was one of the two students who died. The other student who died was Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman who had hoped to become a brain surgeon. For some reason the Right didn’t generate any rumors about why he was targeted, too.

Now, what does this have to do with Stefanik? First off, her gubernatorial campaign manager, Alex de Grasse, was all over X attacking the innocent Palestinian student and repeating the rumors. He and others also accused the president of Brown U. of “protecting” the Palestinian student (that part is probably true). And then Stefanik herself got in on it. 

“It seems very clear to me that the president of @BrownUniversity will need to be hauled in front of Congress for a hearing under oath,” Stefanik posted on X on December 17. She got a book deal the last time she interrogated Ivy League presidents under oath.

And then law enforcement identified the alleged shooter as Claudio Neves Valente, originally of Portugal and a former Brown U. physics student. The motive for the shooting appears to have been an an entirely personal one to Valente, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Did Stefanik feel a twinge of remorse, or at least embarrassment? Maybe. It’s also the case that a poll came out recently showing Stefanik ten points behind Gov. Hochul. Stefanik’s district is way up north, bordering Canada, and is mostly rural. She’s been in the House since 2015 and has won all her re-election campaigns easily. In 2024 the district went for Trump by 60%. I’ve read that Stefanik, a Harvard grad, originally positioned herself as a moderate. And then she moved Right. Now she is the fourth-ranking Republican in the House and considered a loyal Trump minion, although people who know her personally say she’s not necessarily a MAGA True Believer.

You may remember that Trump had appointed her to be ambassador to the UN, and then after she’d said her goodbyes to the House he un-appointed her. She accepted this with good grace. She was promised something else big later on. But recently, the New York Times reports, Trump refused to endorse her for governor over her most likely primary opponent, who hadn’t even formally entered the race yet. That may have been the final straw, the Times said. And it illustrates once again that with Trump, loyalty goes only one way. Stefanik is planning to spend more time with her family now.

Update: Politico: “President Donald Trump endorsed Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman in the New York gubernatorial race, a day after Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) ended her bid.”

“Bruce is MAGA all the way, and has been with me from the very beginning,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Saturday. “Bruce Blakeman is a FANTASTIC guy, will win the big November Election and, without hesitation, has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Governor of the ONCE GREAT STATE OF NEW YORK (IT CAN BE GREAT AGAIN!). BRUCE BLAKEMAN WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Nassau County is western Long Island. All I know about Blakeman is that he wants to ban trans women from sports and fought mask and vaccine mandates during the Covid pandemic. A wackadoo, in other words.

I’ve not been to Stefanik’s district and can’t say how politics works there. Whether any Democrat has a chance of taking her seat next year I do not know.

There’s one other factor that might have discouraged Stefanik. The few Republican women in Congress seem to be bailing at a faster rate than men. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) has just announced she is retiring after a single term. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa is retiring. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is running for governor. Rep Nancy Mace of South Carolina is running for governor. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia isn’t even staying for her full term. There are a few others.  I’ve heard that part of the problem is that these women are tired of being treated as second-class legislators by Republican men, who are not exactly woke.

Update: Paul Kane reports in WaPo Republican women shrinking their ranks in Congress.

“There’s a lot of weak Republican men, and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women. So they always try to marginalize the strong Republican women,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) told The Washington Post’s Kadia Goba in an October interview.

In other news: Trump plans to meet with health insurance executives soon, and he will tell them they have to lower their premium prices.

“I’m going to call in the insurance companies that are making so much money, and they have to make less, a lot less,” Trump said during an Oval Office announcement on drug pricing. “I’m going to see if they get their price down, to put it very bluntly. And I think that is a very big statement.” 

Trump said the meeting could take place in Florida, where he will spend the next two weeks, or at the White House the first week of 2026. He said he came up with the idea on the spot. 

Shares of major health insurers like UnitedHealth Group Inc., Cigna Group and Humana Inc. plummeted after Trump’s remarks.  

At the same event, Trump heaped praise on the drug company CEOs who have made deals with the administration to lower costs for Medicare recipients.  

In the face of tariff threats from the White House, 14 drug companies have publicly reached agreements with the White House in exchange for tariff reprieve. 

The tariff threat won’t work on the insurance guys, of course,  And who else remembers that Medicare drug price negotiation was made possible by Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act? Thanks, Joe Biden!

I didn’t expect the DoJ to fully comply with the deadline set by Congress to release all the Epstein files. I did expect them to have a better excuse than “we aren’t ready.” Trump’s girl Pam seems to have interpreted the deadline as a suggestion to maybe begin releasing a few things, and the rest will follow whenever. She even admitted in her press release that what was released today was mostly stuff that had already been leaked.

Pam says it’s Kash Patel’s fault she isn’t releasing more stuff.

Attorney General Bondi requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, the Department received approximately 200 pages of documents, however, the Attorney General was later informed of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein that were not previously disclosed. The Attorney General has requested the FBI deliver the remaining documents to the Department by 8:00 AM on February 28 and has tasked FBI Director Kash Patel with investigating why the request for all documents was not followed.

Sure, Pam, whatever. This FBI page — the link came up in a news feed — contains links to what seem to be random Epstein-related records and documents, but the few I glanced at were redacted up the wazoo. Here’s a random sample:

This appears to be about somebody making a chart. it’s hard to tell.

Dems in Congress have vowed to pursue all legal options to force the DoJ to comply with the law, but there may not be any legal options. They can file a lawsuit, and a court may order the DoJ to comply, and then what?

You’ve probably heard that Trump has arranged to have the Kennedy Center renamed the Trump Kennedy Center, and that name has already been added to the center facade. The Kennedy family minus RFK the Lesser is not happy. See also Bill Kristol, who compares Trump to Caligula.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Trump’s televised address last night is how little splash it’s making this morning. Usually after some political event of any significance, media will be bursting with commentary about it within just a few hours. There is some commentary, of course, but the headlines are still mostly pointing to other news — Susie Wiles, Jack Smith, Venezuela. It’s as if much of the political press watched the speech, thought, “Well, that sucked,” and went back to what they’d been talking about before.

Right-wing media are dutifully taking the speech seriously, of course. This is an actual, unaltered screen grab from the Breitbart page this morning:

Should someone explain math to them? Or do we just let them live with their delusions?

I confess I probably watched less than three minutes before I bailed. I didn’t need to hear the same old lies all over again.

Of what commentary there is, the best I’ve seen is by Zack Beauchamp at Vox, courtesy of Yahoo News: The revealing pointlessness of Trump’s primetime speech.

President Donald Trump’s speech on Wednesday night had no grave significance. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much of a point at all.

The speech was a jumble of his usual false or even impossible claims — like a promise to reduce prescription drug costs by an impossible 400 percent — smashed together in no particular order. The speech began with a discussion of the cost of living, a subject he would drop and then return to as if just remembering that it was the number one reason his polls were low. Even the delivery was weird: Seemingly under network time constraints, the president read off the teleprompter angrily and quickly, speaking with the motormouth intensity of a 20-something banker who just discovered cocaine and now has a really great idea for a new restaurant.

So why am I writing about it at all?

Because the fact that it happened at all tells us something much more important: that the Trump administration is sinking, and his White House has no idea what to do about it.

He really did seem angry at Americans for not appreciating his greatness. But his administration is sinking, and he honestly doesn’t understand why or what to do about it.

In Trump’s mind everything must be going just fine because he’s in charge, even if he hasn’t actually done anything to address the issues facing us. As Jamelle Bouie, wrote yesterday, “Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government.” I mean, he got elected, right? And he enacted tariffs and got his Big Ugly Bill passed, and now everything is supposed to be great. Why are people bothering him with details? Why doesn’t everybody love him?

Trump’s pathological need for approval and recognition of his innate superiority was on display earlier yesterday. He has hung portraits of former presidents along a corridor in the White House with plaques beneath giving us Trump’s opinions of them. Many of the captions in the plaques were written by Trump himself and are dripping with ridicule. Joe Biden’s portrait is actually a photograph of an autopen. He seems to think that tearing down his opponents illuminates him in greater greatness, or something. Of course, it just illuminates how immature and petty he is.

There are several fact checks of the speech — here’s one from CNN — and it appears he said very little that was verifiably true. And it was nearly all stuff he’s said before, many times, and there’s not a lot of point in reviewing it. Which may be why there isn’t that much commentary. But the speech overall made him look desperate, angry, and even more pathetic.

I read the first part of the Susie Wiles interview at Vanity Fair. The second part is behind a paywall. I’m going to hazard a guess that Wiles will keep her job. My impression, from part one, is that Wiles is the White House Mommy. In a staff of people in various stages of arrested development, somebody’s got to be Mommy to make it work. And there she is. She’s clearly loyal to big baby Trump and probably very good at managing the adolescent personalities around him. But she’s intellectually dim enough to buy into whatever they’re selling. It would be difficult to replace her, in other words. And without Mommy the White House would be in Lord of the Flies territory in no time.

She did pretty much clarify that the boat bombings are mostly about regime change in Venezuela. But there’s another angle to Venezuela I hadn’t thought of. See Josh Kovensky at TPM, Is Trump About to Unleash the Kraken on Venezuela? Kovensky reminds us that Venezuela ties in to the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign.

Attorney Sidney Powell unleashed the Kraken in the form of a Nov. 19, 2020, press conference and lawsuit, filed days after. Unfortunately for the outgoing president, they were more comic relief than anything else. But they contained a claim that’s survived in the MAGA mind over the intervening five years and which, growing evidence suggests, may be playing a bizarrely significant role as the Trump administration wages a pressure campaign on Venezuela. 

Powell and Rudy Giuliani, during that mid-November presser, accused Venezuela of interfering with the 2020 election, using software from a voting machine company to swing the election to Biden. It was, they said, part of an international communist conspiracy with none other than Hugo Chavez as its long-dead mastermind. 

We all had a good laugh at the time, but Trump and MAGA haven’t let this go.

Now, the Kraken has returned. María Corina Machado, a key opposition figure who has asked the Trump administration to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power, told Bloomberg in October that Maduro and others “are the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including the U.S.” 

Trump himself acknowledged the connection late last month. In a Truth Social post that boosted an interview between CBS reporter-turned-right-wing influencer Lara Logan and two men who have spread claims that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election and that the Tren de Aragua gang is controlled by military officials in Caracas, the President wrote: “We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”

Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner, for months has been feeding Trump the story that the Tren de Argua gang is controlled by Maduro, Kovensky says. Is she trying to goad Trump into bringing down Maduro?

Trump is speaking to the nation tonight. Keeping in mind that the Epstein files deadline is Friday, who wants to bet Trump is about to declare war (which he can’t do, constitutionally) on Venezuela? Anybody?

In other news — it’s a bit too late for a lot of people, but this morning four Republicans in the House have jumped ship and signed a discharge petition to force a floor vote on continuing ACA subsidies. And that gave the petition enough votes to go into effect. The vote won’t happen until next year, though. And, of course, the chances this would pass in the Senate and get signed by Trump are, um, tiny. The four are Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, all from Pennsylvania, and Mike Lawler of New York. Lawler is my rep and will be significantly challenged to win re-election next year, I believe.

On the plus side, today the Senate passed a defense bill that includes a provision to force Pete Hegseth to give them unedited videos of all of the boat bombings, including the infamous “double tap” incident.

Jack Smith testified to a closed-door hearing of the  House Judiciary Committee today that he had Trump dead to rights. PBS:

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview on Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press.

He also said investigators had accrued “powerful evidence” that Trump broke the law by hoarding classified documents from his first term as president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and by obstructing government efforts to recover the records.

In Stuff to Read — do see Jamelle Bouie, The White House Is a Lost Cause. Sample sentence: “Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government.” See also Justin Glawe, Public Notice, 2025 was a political disaster for MAGA.

Hearing that Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were murdered last night was just too much. He was a good-hearted man who enhanced popular culture with his writing, acting, and directing. I’m not going to discuss suspects or motivations here; it’s too soon. Let the criminal justice system sort things out first.

But guess who couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself? This is from Rolling Stone:

As the film world and people of good taste around the world mourn the sudden death of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer, President Donald Trump jumped to make the apparent double homicide about himself. 

In an early morning Truth Social post, the president wrote that the couple had “passed away,” due to “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.” 

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before,” Trump added. “May Rob and Michele rest in peace.” 

He can’t even fake being human. This is ghastly.

In other inappropriate responses news: After the Brown University shooting yesterday Trump  “truthed” that a suspect was in custody. Except, when he wrote that, there wasn’t. Authorities frantically contacted Brown students to tell them to say sheltered. Then someone was taken into custody, but no information about this person was released for several hours. MAGA had a meltdown; they wanted to know whether the perp was an Islamic jihadist or Antifa, so they could know who to hate on.

Most appear to have settled on “Islamic jihadist.” The “person of interest” was then identified as a 24-year-old named Benjamin Erickson from Wisconsin. Even then, far-right sites like Gateway Pundit (to which I do not link) insisted Erickson had  barged into the classroom of a Jewish professor yelling something in Arabic and began shooting. But lo; Erickson has been released. Apparently whatever evidence they had on him didn’t hold up. He wasn’t the guy. And as of this writing there are no new suspects.

Trump, ever an asshole, then offered solace to the students and faculty at Brown by saying “Things can happen.”

Shortly after the terrible shooting in Australia, authorities in Australia said they were going to tighten gun laws. The U.S. Right — who finally had some real Islamtic terrorists to hate on — were outraged (example). They appear to be angrier about Australian gun control than about the deaths of fifteen people.

But speaking of inappropriate, asshole responses, Benjamin Netanyahu had to flap his lips and blame Australia for the shooting. In particular, he blamed Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese brushed this off.

See also GOP Lawmakers Call for Purge of Muslims After Bondi Beach Shooting. Because more bigotry is just what we all need, right?

There were a number of other injustices in the world today. But one I want to mention is at ProPublica, Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.

On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.

For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.

There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.

Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed. 

By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.

In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.

“Cholera” is a word that doesn’t mean much to most Americans these days, but massive cholera epidemics were common in the 19th century. The disease came on quickly and was nearly always fatal. Communities struck by cholera were decimated in short order. I’ve been in old cemeteries in which entire sections were victims of cholera epidemics. And it was a nasty death. Cholera causes diarrhea so intense that people die of dehydration and electrolyte imbalances within a few hours. A handful of people in the U.S. still die of it every year, but it’s unusual. The bacteria that causes cholera is spread through poor sanitation, usually sewage getting into drinking water. So now it’s mostly a third world disease.  Probably most Americans have no idea what it is.

Please do read the entire ProPublica story. It’s a testament to the callous indifference and irresponsibility of the entire Trump team. One could argue that other people should be taking more responsibility in the Sudan, and of course they should. But cutting off aid suddenly, with no warning or time to look for new funding for their programs, was a death sentence to a lot of people. And officials including Marco Rubio have been lying about it,

Two soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in Syria, the New York Times reports. Trump blamed ISIS and vowed to retaliate. But right now he’s at the Army-Navy college football game, so maybe he won’t screw up for a few more hours. Hegseth is probably planning World War III already, though. Note that the Times is reporting the assailant was a lone gunman.

In Trump’s first term 65 U.S. troops were killed, mostly in Afghanistan, so maybe he’ll fall back on pretending today’s deaths didn’t happen, as before. But back then Trump had people around him who reigned in him a tad. For most of Trump’s first term Jim Mattis was SecDef, although the last year there was a revolving door of five different acting SecDefs. A mess.

Fingers crossed Trump and Hegseth don’t start something stupid in Syria.