Month: February 2025

Did you know that Donald Trump plans a $200 million anti-immigrant ad campaign in the US and overseas? Trump says the ads will tell the real story of what he's doing on the border. They star Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota and currently Secretary of Homeland Security:

Noem said that Trump instructed that he didn’t want to be in the ads himself, telling her: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”

She recalled: “I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.’ So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border.”

Here's the ad, though it's so incompetently loaded and served you probably won't be able to play it:

I wonder where the money for this came from? Apparently we can't afford to fully fund medical research at CDC or NIH these days, but we can find a few dollars under the sofa cushions to thank President Trump for closing the border. Imagine that.

E-commerce sales continue to stay above their pre-pandemic trend:

The growth rate isn't stronger than it was before COVID. It's just above trend and growing at the trend rate. But it shows no signs of slowing down.

I won't pretend to be a huge fan of James Carville, but he happens to have said something that's been on my mind ever since Donald Trump won the election:

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told Mediaite’s Dan Abrams that the Trump administration would “collapse” within 30 days and advised Democrats to sit back and let it happen.

...."What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. It doesn’t need Elizabeth Warren and somebody screaming to pacify some progressive advocacy groups in Washington".... “It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks,” he said of opportunities for Democrats. “Just lay back.”

I'm not sure Trump is near collapse, but he might be. His net job approval numbers are certainly crashing fast:

But Trump aside, I agree that Democrats should play possum. They have loads of time before the midterm elections, and in the meantime it's impossible to figure out what their best strategy ought to be. Trump and congressional Republicans control everything anyway, so just let them. They'll eventually need to make a deal over the budget, and that's plenty soon enough to start up a bit of bargaining.

Then sit and wait to see how things shake out. Allow Republicans to create their own problems and then attack. By then Dems will know what to do and can energetically go out and do it.

I read a piece a few hours ago suggesting that although the hard-right AfD did well in today's German election, they actually underperformed their polling. So I checked:

Not only did AfD not underperform, there wasn't a single party that differed from its final poll figure by more than one percentage point. That's good polling!

Now, I used the German YouGov poll for comparison to the final results, and there were other polls that had AfD at 22-23%. So I think you can safely say that AfD didn't exceed expectations. But most likely they didn't fall very short either.

POSTSCRIPT: Some of this has to do with whether endorsements from J.D. Vance and Elon Musk helped or hurt the AfD's cause. My read of the evidence is that it most likely had no effect one way or another.

Today is Election Day in Germany. Here's what they're up against:

Since the middle of 2019, Germany's GDP is down by 0.16%. By comparison, over the same period US GDP is up 13%. That's 80 times more.

It's remarkable how much conflict of interest Elon Musk has with the federal government he now so strongly controls. A few examples:

1. Musk has been fighting with the FAA for years over regulation of SpaceX, culminating in a couple of large fines levied against SpaceX last year. Musk wanted administrator Michael Whitaker out and said so in no uncertain terms. And guess what? After the election Whitaker announced he would resign years early before Trump could fire him.
2. The NHTSA is America's premier highway safety agency. Among other things, this makes it the agency in charge of investigating crashes of driverless cars—like Elon Musk's Tesla. But unlike Google's Waymo, which cooperates with the NHTSA, Tesla decidedly doesn't:
   

   Musk has accused NHTSA of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations and recalls.... NHTSA has mandated that Tesla and other automakers using self-driving technology report crash data on vehicles, a requirement that Tesla has criticized and that watchdogs fear could be eliminated.

   No matter. Musk is in charge of firing workers, so he decided to slash nearly half the jobs at the specialized unit overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles:

   “If the question is, will this affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles, then yes, it will,” said one terminated engineer. “The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small. Now it’s almost nonexistent.”

   It must be nice to complain about over-regulation and then actually do something about it by firing half the regulators.

3. Donald Trump has ordered the removal of all 8,000 EV chargers installed at government buildings nationwide. Why? It's one thing not to build any more, but why demolish the ones that are already there?
   This might just be part of Trump's baffling animus toward electric cars, which has also manifested itself in his order to "pause" construction of a nationwide network of charging stations being built with infrastructure funding. But it's also worth pondering who else has a profitable network of high-speed chargers that doesn't need any competition. That would be Elon Musk and Tesla.
4. When he took office, Donald Trump promised to end the federal $7,500 subsidy for electric vehicles. Once again, this may just be part of Trump's jihad against EVs, but it's worth noting that it would likely help Tesla:
   

   “Take away the subsidies. It will only help Tesla,” Musk wrote in a post on X as he campaigned and raised money for Trump in July. Auto industry experts say the move would have a nominal impact on Tesla — by far the largest electric vehicle maker in the U.S. — but have a potentially devastating impact on its competitors in the EV sector since they are still struggling to secure a foothold in the market.

   It's all a zero-sum game. Subsidies might benefit Tesla, but they benefit smaller EV companies a lot more. Getting rid of them now would be a big net positive for Tesla.

5. When the Ukraine war started Elon Musk immediately activated his Starlink network for use by Ukraine's military. But that turns out to be a two-edged sword:
   

   The US has threatened to cut off Ukraine’s access to Starlink — the global satellite network that has proven essential on the battlefield — if Kyiv does not accept the White House’s deal to exchange its rare earth minerals for continued security guarantees, according to anonymous sources.... “Ukraine runs on Starlink. They consider it their North Star,” the source told Reuters. “Losing Starlink... would be a massive blow.”

   This is less an example of Musk benefiting from his control over government than it is the opposite. The government, it turns out, can benefit by knowing Musk will cooperate with them since he doesn't want to lose his access or inadvertently annoy his patron Trump.

6. Musk has long promised to make X into a payment app. If he does this he would be regulated by, among others, the CFPB, the consumer protection bureau created in the wake of the financial crisis and long loathed by Republicans. Can you guess what Musk wants to do with the CFPB? Cut staff? Nope. He wants to eliminate it entirely, and he might just be able to do it.

Donald Trump keeps prattling about how the Gilded Age from 1870 through 1913 was the richest era in US history. Why? Tariffs.

Nobody with a room temperature IQ should buy this obvious foolishness, but just in case you need evidence, here it is:

The most prosperous era in American history is . . . right now. We are ten times richer than we were during the Gilded Age.

You don't even need to bother engaging with women's disenfranchisement; Jim Crow; widespread poverty; poisonous food; rampant political graft and corruption; the Panic of 1873 and again in 1893 and yet again in 1907; child labor; and 12-hour workdays under foul conditions. Just forget about all that stuff. We were ten times poorer back then than we are today. That's enough to know.

There's not a lot to report. My oxygenation continues to be good and my colon virus appears to be gone. I'm eating more, which makes my doctor very happy. Marian even brought me a Sausage McMuffin from McDonald's this morning, along with some lovely orange juice.

But—who cares? My breathing is still so shallow I can barely move in bed, and there seems to be no improvement in either the flu or the pneumonia. That's what really matters, and none of my doctors has any clue how long they're likely to last. Another week? Two weeks? No one knows.

In the end, every efficiency doge eventually becomes a micro-manager drone. Here is Elon Musk's latest:

The official follow-up instructions from OPM are even worse:

In the cult world of Office Space, these are the infamous TPS forms that everyone has to fill out weekly. They are practically an icon for insecure managers who prefer paperwork to simply keeping occasional tabs on their staff.

In any case, a few million federal workers are now required to fill out this pointless paperwork and email it to HR—who will do God only knows what with a few million emails. The only good news for workers is that HR probably thinks this whole thing is as stupid as they do.

POSTSCRIPT: I wonder whose idea this was? Elon Musk, who really does want to micro-manage everyone? Or Donald Trump, who has never managed a large organization and came up with a brainstorm that this might help him wrap his arms around the bureaucracy?

As you know, Donald Trump has been recently trying to extort Ukraine out of half its mineral wealth. The odd thing about this is that Ukraine doesn't have very much mineral wealth:

Revenues from Ukraine’s resources would be directed to a fund in which the United States would hold 100 percent financial interest, and that Ukraine should contribute to the fund until it reaches $500 billion.... That figure far exceeds the country’s actual revenues from resources, which were $1.1 billion last year.

Trump has also been nonsensically insisting that Ukraine started the war even though we were all there and saw Russia cross the border and try to run a tank column into Kyiv. And he's been calling Zelensky a dictator even though if there's a dictator around it's obviously Vladimir Putin.

What the hell is going on? It's easy. In 2019 Trump asked Zelensky for dirt against Joe Biden in return for military aid. Zelensky declined and Trump was impeached. Trump has felt aggrieved ever since.

There's nothing complicated here. Trump is motivated by revenge and now he's finally getting it. He's a simple man.