Toxic Work Atmosphere

You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.

Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:

After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....

I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.

We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats" 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—

As Thousands Jeer

 

Via ABC News.

Via Axios:

Trump signed an executive order Monday that puts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in charge of training a specialized National Guard unit dedicated to "ensuring public safety" in D.C.

• "They say: 'We don't need him. Freedom, freedom, he's a dictator,'" Trump said at a White House event, suggesting deploying the National Guard in Chicago next.
• "A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump added. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person."

There's something there I don't think he's done before, and it's at least a little spooky. Nobody comes out and says, "Hi, I'm Donald and I'll be your dictator tonight." When Trump was saying during the campaign that he was going to be a dictator but only on Day 1, to "close the border and drill, baby, drill", it was reasonable to understand him as joking, or whatever that thing is he does when we're expected not to take him literally, because that's not how you apply for the job, in the first place.

You never announce your intention to be a dictator if that's your plan: you get some simulacrum of the vox populi to ask you to be the dictator and turn them down. Caesar got Antony to offer him a golden diadem three times at the Lupercalia (the Carnival-type festival held on the Ides of February) of 44 B.C.E., according to Plutarch, and he said no each time, understanding that the Senate and People of the city had absolutely rejected kingship centuries earlier, but he had already accepted an offer (from Antony's colleague Lepidus) of the official dictatorship in 49, which he held for just 11 days, long enough to stage an election making him one of that year's consuls, and was subsequently reappointed another 3 times, until his appointment early in 44 as dictator perpetuo, dictator in perpetuity, the thing that decided Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators that they had to kill him right away, a month after the Lupercalia, on the Ides of March. Caesar's rejection of the golden diadem hadn't impressed them.

Anyway, that's what Trump is doing in the Axios story, "A lot of people are saying we like a dictator." He's saying I don't want it, but maybe you should make me an offer, because I am extremely qualified, by gender and sense both common and uncommon. That's the conventional way to put in your application.

Speaking of Farces

The secret of his success is that it's a secret.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) August 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Speaking of farces, there's a story about the origins of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit that started circulating a week or so ago in the German tabloid Bild: in Steve Witkoff's August 6 meeting with Putin, he came away with the impression that Putin was proposing to have Russian troops "peacefully withdraw" from the territories they've partly occupied in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as part of a ceasefire agreement, in return for Ukraine leaving Russia in control of some territory they had held since 2014, maybe Donetsk: this would be the basis of Trump's claim on August 8 that there would "be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."

Needless to say, this was not on offer; the best guess is that Putin said the Ukrainian troops could "withdraw peacefully" from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and the Russians wouldn't attack them as they left, and Witkoff heard it wrong. By the time Trump spoke on the 8th (one of his deadline days for dealing out the "consequences" that Putin was supposed to suffer if he failed to agree to a ceasefire), Witkoff had spoken with European officials that morning and understood that he'd been mistaken and there was no chance of a deal, but the invitations had already gone out and been announced on Russian media. 

But it's not clear that anybody told Trump about that; he went through with plans for a festive breakthrough meeting in Anchorage, with the red carpet and military flyover, the tête-à-tête meeting between the two with only interpreters present (first time since Helsinki!), the luncheon "in honor of his excellency President Putin", and a nice tchotchke for the Russian leader, the "desk statue" of a bald eagle, and schedule featuring three Trump interviews for Fox News.

Farces All the Way Back

The always worth reading Greg Olear had a fine post up working critically through some of the classic definitions of fascism and coming to his own kind of diagnostic approach that can be applied to the ongoing emergency—which I might want to get back to at some point. But the thing that has me triggered at the moment is a minor quibble with a point that isn't even from Olear, but rather from a quotation he offers of Umberto Eco, the great semiotician, feuilletoniste, and novelist, in his own 1995 essay on "Ur-Fascism":

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.

I would maintain that the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country was that of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the first president of the Second French Republic, who got himself elected following the decidedly leftist Revolution of 1848, having made something of a leftist name for himself (as the author of a treatise calling for the "extinction of poverty" and the instigator of a number of anti-royalist coup attempts against the "roi citoyen" Louis Philippe), under the political aegis of his dead but still revolutionary uncle Napoléon, Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 or 1815, depending how you count; but in his presidential campaign quickly aligned himself against liberals, socialists, and radicals with the rightmost faction, of Adophe Thiers ("who believed he could be the most easily controlled," sound familiar?) and Victor Hugo, not yet the heroically progressive author of Les Misérables; and after the election, ordered an expeditionary force sent by the National Assembly to Rome to support the republicans under Mazzini and Garibaldi, to support the Pope instead.

And then, in 1852, about to be term-limited out of office by the Second Republic constitution, staged his own auto-golpe, naming himself Emperor Napoléon III (on the silly claim that the first Napoléon's son, the Duc de Reichstadt, had in fact been the Emperor Napoléon II), prompting Hugo to flee into exile in the Channel Islands (first Jersey, then Guernsey), and to refer thereafter to the newly minted Emperor as Napoléon the Little, and the occasion for Karl Marx's famous maxim according to which history always repeats itself, first time as tragedy (with the first Napoléon) and second time ( with the third) as farce.

I had a dream about this once, I'm not kidding, which I've never figured out a way to use, though it's maybe the best dream I've ever had from a literary point of view: not a dramatic dream about things happening, but a narrative dream about telling a joke, which I was either telling or listening to, which I now remember something like this:

Kashy Patel and the Room of Requirement

 

Hogwarts Level 7, with the Room of Requirement, by mvm5600/DeviantArt. 

Had a weird sighting of FBI director Kash Patel a week or so ago, in The New Republic:

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency.

Stashed away in a what? The TNR writer flatly called it nothing but a "far-fetched attempt to distract from the president's ties to the alleged sex trafficker" Jeffrey Epstein, and moved on to making fun of Trump for talking about Epstein anyway, in response to a press question about Patel's discovery, but my impression was that he thought Epstein was really what the question was about:

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said....“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam...”   

I think Trump doesn't, or didn't, know about Patel's secret room. Or at least didn't know enough to expect a question about it at the presser. I suspect it's a bit of Patellerie of a kind we've wondered about before that he hasn't seen a particular need for Trump to know about (yet), because it's not quite ripe. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't need to know about, like the outcome of the dinner with Bondi and Patel that was supposed to take place at the vice president's office to discuss the Epstein matter (publicity drove the dinner to the White House instead, but there's still no indication the president showed up for it). Patel has tried the story out, though, according to the New York Post version of the story, sometime in late June, on the Joe Rogan show:

 “When I first got to the bureau, [I] found a room that [former FBI Director James] Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of,” he said. “They [l]ocked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.'”

That's a fascinating detail about the hard drives. Is that going to be where the Hunter Biden laptop ended up? But the crown jewel of this chamber of secrets according to The Post is something else:

Total Victory

Satellite image by Planet Labs, food aid convoy in southern Gaza, via The New York Times.

This paragraph has been hanging out in the tabs for a few days already, but it's getting more bothersome as time goes by. From Tom Friedman:

This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.

Well, wait a minute, Tom. Not disagreeing with the basic premise that the Netanyahu coalition and the Hamas thing are the worst, as bad as political leadership gets, but "insisting on surviving this war" is not a good illustration of how bad the latter are. It's not crazy if they don't like a deal where they let go of the hostages and then IDF kills them all, which is why they keep insisting that the release of the hostages must  be accompanied by the end of the war. You may well feel that death is what they deserve, but it's not surprising that they feel different. This is actually normal. Good people and bad people alike object to being killed. You can bothsiderize the parties on some parameters but rejecting peace is not one of them.

Another Casualty of the War on Reality

Via 5 Calls Civic Action.

There's a hint of rationality in Trump's violent reaction to the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when he accused the BLS of "rigging" the numbers in an attempt to harm him ("ME"), and abruptly fired the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer:

Though the history is virtually all fiction: the October 2024 jobs report, issued two days before the election on November 1, was dismal for the Democrats, counting just 12,000 new jobs for the month, effectively zero, and a downward revision of 112,000 jobs to the August and September numbers; there was no report issued on November 15 (it always comes out on the first Friday of the new month); and in the next report, issued on December 6, listed a gangbusters gain for November of 227,000 jobs and significant upward revisions of 56,000 for September and October—so if it was rigged to affect the presidential election it must have been rigged against the Harris campaign and in Trump's favor. (Of course it wasn't rigged at all.) The 818,000-job downward revision referred to in the "Truth" was announced in August 2024, well before the election, and covered the previous 12 months, so that would have favored Trump too. Has anybody but me bothered to check any of this out? 

More Spaghetti on the Wall

This, discovered by @plankysmith.bsky.social, took me aback. What? Who makes fun of weeping police officers? Why would he do something like that? We all have our issues with NYPD, but that just sounds gratuitously mean. Leave the poor guy alone, you know. Who knows what he might have been through, what violence he might have witnessed, what pain he might have been forced to inflict, what sufferings he might have endured in his private life? A policeman's lot is not a happy one! (Happy one!) As a general rule.

And it's not like the Zohran we've come to know and love! Funny, but never cruel, and more likely to laugh at himself than some defenseless third party. What's up with this?

And then the other thing was that nobody seemed to know,  or even to be interested. Planky, and Roy Edroso, mocked the story from a literary standpoint, as it well deserved, but the Bluesky commentators mostly seemed to be most interested in denouncing Politico's morals and those of its right-wing German owner, which was understandable, but not very informative, while at the ci-devant Twitter, they just denounced Zohran, and nobody was wondering what had happened:

And finally, long story short, Mamdani's original tweet, to which Politico helpfully linked, didn't seem very informative either:

Umm what pic.twitter.com/DhIcZxOQRb

— Timbo (@TimboNotes) July 29, 2025

At least until you looked at the timestamp, which was pretty clarifying. Mikey had observed the troubled officer shortly before noon on November 7, 2020; Zohran offered his gnomic comment just an hour later. What was November 7, 2020? Four days after the 2020 election, and the day enough of the absentee ballots had been counted that the media outlets were able to call it for Joe Biden, which they did around 11:30 AM.

In other words, that cop wasn't upset because he'd seen somebody getting shot, or had to make a difficult arrest, or gotten a breakup text from a girlfriend, he was overcome with grief because he had just learned that Trump had lost. Or that's how Mikey evidently saw it. And how is that not funny? And how is Zohran's remark "mocking a crying cop"? (Whoever the cop was, it's totally unlikely he ever saw the tweets, let alone had his feelings hurt.) If you were scrolling a lot that afternoon you'd get what it was about, but by the next morning its meaningfulness had to be reconstructed out of the metadata, as I just did. I still don't really know myself what Zohran exactly meant, either, I may as well admit.

There's a lesson there, I think, on the current media climate: that it's not just vicious, but also profoundly stupid. Axel Springer Politico's purpose, no doubt, is to make trouble for Mamdani, not even necessarily to get Andrew Cuomo or whomever elected, just to make things difficult for the Democratic nominee, maybe focusing on trouble with the NYPD, which is kind of a given for a New York mayor of the progressive or left variety, given how right-wing the cops are especially in the upper echelons—remember how fraught the relationship was with de Blasio. I wouldn't be surprised if Politico was explicitly dredging the data for examples: feeding Mamdani's Twitter feed into the chatbot and asking it to find instances of him disrespecting the police, and this is what it came up with.

But they didn't have any clear idea what it might actually mean,  and weren't curious enough to try to find out. They didn't quote it in the article, or describe it to any degree, just linked it and hoped for the best, that the right people would accept that it was a real scandal without looking into it too closely, and that's pretty much what they got—though it's less a proper scandal than more spaghetti on the wall. But you can't learn anything from it if you don't look at it a little more closely, and that wall is getting really fithy. It's just more moral denunciation, all the damn time.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

 

The Stupid--It Ken Burns!

 

Unionist soldier's postcard, via PBS Learning Media.

Jamelle Bouie was writing about Vice President Vance, who seems to have been quietly and gradually  disappearing from public life in recent months (it's pretty funny by Bouie standards), and his bizarre speech at the Claremont Institute earlier this month attacking the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship:

At one point in Vance’s speech, when he’s scolding Mamdani for ingratitude, Vance asks whether Mamdani has “ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again.” It is striking that the vice president invokes the Civil War to make his point.

The great ideological victory of that conflict was to establish the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When, at Gettysburg, Lincoln pronounced a “new birth of freedom,” consecrated by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion,” he meant the egalitarian freedom that [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and others like him sought to deny.

Because, as Bouie shows, in his arguments against birthright citizenship, Vance is aligning himself with Taney, and the Dred Scott decision, against Lincoln and the outcome of the war.

Shande

 

Children waiting to receive food in Gaza,  Tuesday, photo by Mahmoud Issa/Reuters via Haaretz.

So you're maybe 13, 14 years old, in a tent somewhere in southern Gaza, watching your parents die of hunger, maybe your grandparents, and you haven't eaten anything yourself for three days, and they all try to stop you from heading out to one of the three or four distribution sites of the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the southwest of the territory, perhaps four or five miles away, from which you might be able to bring back a box of pasta and rice and lentils and some cooking oil, if you're lucky (and have access to cooking gas, and water, which the displaced hardly do). Because that's not a sure thing; there's never enough there for the people who need it, and there are gangsters there with muscle to take more than others get, and the Israeli Defense Forces mobilized nearby who might start shooting live ammunition at any moment, that's a constant at all of the sites—the IDF say they're just firing "warning shots" but dozens are getting killed that way every day. Of course you're going to go anyway.

Via BBC.

And the American mercenaries, nobody knows who's paying them, armed as well, with bullets as well as stun grenades and pepper spray:

Democracy is a Kitchen Table Issue

Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via NPR.

From the TPM Morning Memo, a little vignette of presidential lobbying:

During an interview with CNBC this morning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) alluded to an assurance he received from Trump — that the president would fix whatever issues Republicans had with the legislation he wants them to pass via executive action.

“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,” Norman said Thursday morning. “We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

Oh well, in that case. If he's going to use "his powers". Superstrength? X-ray vision? Spidey sense? Can he grow instant wolverine claws? 

I imagine he was talking about Article II of the US Constitution, of which he said during his first term, "I have an Article II that lets me do whatever I want." That's legally as ridiculous as it sounds—the specification of the "executive power" in the oath doesn't really mention powers so much as duties (to "faithfully execute the Office, and "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution), and the only explicit powers are those of making treaties, naming officers, and issuing pardons, all but the last with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's not even anything in Article II on the veto—that's in Article I, as a check on the Congress, as Article II has a congressional check on the presidency, in the procedure allowing them to be impeached and tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The way it really works in the system of checks and balances has traditionally been that each Branch can do whatever another Branch can't stop them from doing—Congress can stop the president through the impeachment process, the Supreme Court can stop him (if somebody sues) by examining the legality of his behavior, including whether it's constitutionally permitted or not. It's infuriating that we should even have to be talking about this, as if there were some possible universe in which Trump's assertion could be correct. But here we are.

Election Eve

 

It's finally starting to look really possible that Zohran Mamdani will win the Democratic primary in the New York mayoral race: in its final poll before Election Day tomorrow, Emerson College's simulation of the rank choice outcome has him winning, for the first time, in the eighth round, 52-48. It's a nice illustration of how the system works, with the lowest-performing candidates dropped out and the votes distributed to voters' second and third and so on choices, until one of the candidates crosses the 50% mark:

I had a sense of how something like this could happen; Cuomo, running especially on name recognition, is mostly a first choice, more often of voters who didn't rank anybody else—he has fewer votes to pick up in the subsequent rounds. Mamdani, attractive but seen as a bit of a gamble, gets a lot of third and especially second choices behind candidates seen as safer, Adrienne Adams and Brad Lander, the best qualified by conventional measures. I can see my own vote (in the end I decided to rank Lander first) moving into Mamdani's column in the last two rounds. In that big jump putting Mamdani over the top, you can see how the cross-endorsement strategy was supposed to work.

I Know Everything

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com, Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via Washington Post.

David Rothkopf may be the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:

as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it. And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his Great White Whale.

Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of yesterday, including at least 239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18 months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point) and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not especially shocked.

Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the two countries in April and May, of which the last, held May 23 in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time soon. 

New York Note

@zohran_k_mamdani

Los neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.

♬ original sound - Zohran Mamdani

This is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more:

Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.

For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. 

"We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as Mamdani does.

In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among 11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners, and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are, that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded technique of pushing us in one direction.

Then, Cuomo's ethical failings aren't limited to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as The Times reported:

Send the Marines

I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!" And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting, as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about, that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could if he felt like it: 

When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."

If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.

Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.

The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:

Belated Memorial Day

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

Birthright Citizenship Redux

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Revised and expanded from the post of January 26, with what I think is a somewhat new argument up in front, inspired immediately by an irritating Bluesky post. 

Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/2R4OE9lT8a

— Ilan Wurman (@ilan_wurman) January 23, 2025

The "entire literature" (which seems to consist of a single book by Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, Yale University Press, 1985, and its brief recap in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine National Affairs, summer 2018, presumably published in the hope of attracting attention from President Trump and his factotum Stephen Miller), is fatally flawed by its failure to recognize the significance of an obvious fact: there were no "illegal aliens" in the United States at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified two years later, only millions of immigrants who might or might not choose to be naturalized (white immigrants, that is, under the terms of the Naturalization Acts of 1798 and 1802).

And when those immigrants had children, as they often did, no reason to question their citizenship or "naturalize" them; as affirmed in an 1844 New York state case, Lynch v. Clarke, in which a state judge held that a woman born in New York City, of alien parents temporarily sojourning there, was a U.S. citizen. They were "natural" already; for the children of immigrants, birthright citizenship was the universal norm (local governments could order the deportation of obnoxious individual immigrants, but there wasn't a national policy). Miller's scenario is completely irrelevant to the realities of the time when the 14th Amendment was written.

The hard cases before 1866-68 were not immigrants, but people whose parents were born within the borders of the US: citizens of the Indigenous nations, and the freed descendants of enslaved Africans.

To the President's Health

At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.

In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December, went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight, which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the rumors he was most anxious to avoid. 

That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27, during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the public thought he might be, based not on observation of the president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.

Adventures in the Trump Brain

Over at Techdirt, the genial Mike Masnick has come up with a brilliant explanation of what is happening when Trump does an interview like the one with Time a couple of weeks ago; it's something remarkably similar to the way a chatbot, especially the less successful-looking early models like ChatGPT itself,  handles a conversational series of prompts, with its "response generator":

1. A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
2. Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response generator
3. Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
4. The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear, rather than for accuracy or truth....

Brilliant, if maybe not exactly right. Consider Masnick's first example:

You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—

Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn’t do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.

We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.

Huh?

We spoke to him a year ago.

How did he do?

You can read the interview yourself.

Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn’t do well. He didn’t do well at all. He didn’t do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren’t asking him questions like you’re asking me.

(In case you’re wondering, you can see the Biden interview here and he did not cut if off after a matter of minutes).

Because he's not doing what the automaton does, saying "what he thinks his audience wants to hear" (or, more accurately, trying to assemble the string that represents the most probable response to the prompt). Unlike the automaton, he is thinking, but in this passage from late in the interview what he's thinking about is how not to respond to the prompt, an uncomfortable series of questions on the abuse of foreign students' free speech rights over the Gaza issue, which he's not enjoying and doesn't know anything about (other than the less than accurate report that there was "tremendous antisemitism at every one of those rallies"), and he leaps at the mention of Biden's name as an opportunity to change the subject to something more comfortable, the subject of how superior he is to Biden, who would never have had the courage to submit to an interview with Time, except of course it immediately turns out he did.

So he instantly switches to pretending not only that he already knew that, though he obviously didn't, but even more ridiculously that he'd actually read the transcript, bringing in the words from the prompt.

That's the part that really looks like AI, where he lies, or hallucinates, "I did read the interview", though he's just told us he's hearing about the interview for the first time. AI is unable to maintain discourse coherence over a certain distance, as in this beautiful example I saw yesterday:

I asked Google how much $1M in gold would weigh. Simple math problem. It gave the wrong answer, then the correct answer, then wrong answer again. Somehow they have broken the math ability of a mathematical machine. It’s impressive, actually.

[image or embed]

— Ross in Detroit (@rossindetroit.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 7:23 PM

Gemini's conversational rules for answering a prompt like that are evidently to state the conclusion, then show its work, then repeat the conclusion: but it doesn't "know" the conclusion before it's done the rather complicated work required for this question, and "hallucinates" an answer instead. Then, after doing the work, it doesn't "know" that it has contradicted the prefabricated conclusion. 

In a similar way, Trump has a set of prefabricated conclusions about Biden that he has been deploying for well over a year, that he's afraid of interviews and that everything he does is a failure, and when the prompts force him to switch them up, he simply does so, without showing any awareness that he's contradicting himself, and adding a kind of "hallucination" for verisimilitude, in the bit about the interview having been cut short (possibly inspired by an incident of September 2023, when a very jet-lagged Biden was giving a speech in Hanoi and his staff pulled him offstage before he was finished).

That's exactly how he maintains that tariffs will both protect the return of manufacturing industries to the US (because people will buy American dolls and pencils rather than pay the tax) and simultaneously raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue (because people will gladly pay the tax). The two concepts aren't connected for him, so they never collide, unless some mean interviewer forces the issue, like Time here telling him that the magazine did interview Biden, or Terry Moran on Kilmar Ábrego García:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don't do that -- M-S-1-3 -- It says M-S-one-three.

TERRY MORAN: I -- that was Photoshop. So let me just--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can't do that -- he had --

-- he-- hey, they're givin' you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you're doin' the interview. I picked you because -- frankly I never heard of you, but that's okay --

TERRY MORAN: This -- I knew this would come --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you -- Terry -- but you're not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed --

TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We'll agree to disagree. I want to move on --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.

Where Trump responds to being contradicted like a Mafia don.

And you don't necessarily need the AI concept to understand it. There's a lovely formulation by David Roth at Defector:

It is one of the defining Trump things that any belief that makes it into his mind will bump around in there forever; his understanding of the world is the sum of those things, thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut free from any context or facticity, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside of his luxuriously appointed skull. They drop bowling balls on the cars; there is no such thing as gold paint; they looked at his hand and the proof was right there. None of this, of course, is new. None of the beliefs are new, really, and nothing that Trump will do between this moment and his last one on earth will be new, or surprising in the least. It's just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at that moment.

Just floating around his brain, from the bowling balls (probably not originating in a bizarre misinterpretation of the Nissan ad at top—the most thorough investigation I've seen is by Philip Bump, from 2018) to Kilmar Ábrego's knuckle tattoos, and all the rest.

 

What Were You Expecting?

 

Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.

The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows. 

The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:

Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.

As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.

Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.