Saturday, February 15, 2025
Trump/Musk May Energize Virginia's Elections for Democrats
Virginia Democrats have a new message for the tens of thousands of federal workers who will vote in their state elections this fall: Republicans stood by silently as President Donald Trump came for your jobs.
The state’s off-year races are often a bellwether for the national mood a year before the midterms. But they are poised to take on even more significance this November because so many government employees and contractors who live in Northern Virginia are experiencing firsthand the impact of the Trump administration’s attempt to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
For Democrats, who have the thinnest of grips on the House of Delegates and are eagerly seeking to reclaim the governor’s mansion, it may be an opening.
“Of course it’s going to have an impact on the elections of Virginia, because we are seeing put into motion the potential destruction of massive amounts of our economy and of the very work that people have dedicated their lives to on behalf of our country,” said state Del. Dan Helmer, the Democratic campaign chair for the Virginia House of Delegates.
[I]n recent days, they [Democrats] have started to zero in on Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency as a foil, painting the tech mogul as an unelected South African billionaire wreaking chaos on everyday Americans.
At Trump’s behest, Musk has used DOGE as a beachhead to attack the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, USAID and the Department of Education. DOGE has offered buyouts to thousands of federal workers and threatened layoffs to those who don’t take it.
And if Musk and DOGE have given national Democrats an opening to make an argument against Republicans — Musk himself is less popular than Trump, according to recent polling — the Virginia elections may stand as a test case.
The state is home to more than 140,000 federal workers, many of them concentrated in the northernmost counties closest to Washington. And there are even more contractors who work for companies dependent on the funds Musk has sought to “delete.” The state also has some areas deeply entwined with the military and its contractors, such as Hampton Roads, that are likely to be affected by cuts.
Helmer and others are betting voters will decide to take out their frustration at the Republicans controlling the federal government on the Republicans in Richmond.
“Unlike Republicans who are crowing in Washington right now, Republicans in Virginia are almost silent,” Helmer said. “They are not speaking on the floor to Trump’s agenda. They are not celebrating the work that’s being done in Washington. They know in their hearts that this is hurting their constituents.”
Democrats are optimistic, but they have limited room to grow. . . . . Democrats already hold every state House seat in Arlington and Fairfax counties — the areas closest to Washington and most impacted by DOGE.
Still, Hampton Roads has some potentially competitive districts. And then there’s the governor’s race. Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic front-runner, criticized Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in a recent MSNBC interview for his alignment with Trump, while stressing the economic impact of the buyouts and cuts proposed by DOGE.
“The idea that we would have a president and a governor who is standing by as said president says, ‘We’re going to push them out of the workforce?’ I mean, this is a kitchen-table issue in Virginia,” she said.
But Democrats do have history on their side. Virginia voters have been known to punish the party in the White House during off-year elections — and rarely has a White House enacted policies so uniquely targeted toward the Virginia voter.
“It will redound to the benefit of Democrats and the ill of my Republican friends,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who represents Northern Virginia. “I think there will be buyer’s remorse.”
It is crucial that Virginia Democrats retake the governor's mansion and hold both houses of the General Assembly so that can work to lessen the harm the Felon and his regime seek to inflict on everyday Virginians.
Friday, February 14, 2025
Trump/Musk Take Away Life-Saving HIV Prevention Medications
The Trump administration has launched yet another calculated attack on LGBTQ+ lives—this time by withholding access to pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP under the longstanding President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR program. While PrEP distribution has resumed under a limited waiver following a 90-day foreign aid freeze, the administration has imposed a deadly restriction: most LGBTQ+ people are explicitly excluded from receiving the medication that would protect them from HIV.
In late January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. Days later, he issued a waiver for “life-saving humanitarian assistance” that would resume some programs, including the distribution of HIV prevention medications. A February 6 memo from the U.S. Department of State, first published by UNAIDS, spells out the policy: “Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) should be offered only to pregnant and breastfeeding women.” The document goes on to declare that “people other than pregnant and breastfeeding women who may be at high risk of HIV infection or were previously initiated on a PrEP option cannot be offered PEPFAR-funded PrEP” during the foreign aid freeze.
The exclusion is part of a broader effort by the administration to defund programs that deal with diversity or gender and block aid to organizations that support transgender people. The impact is already devastating—UNAIDS estimates that since the administration’s 90-day foreign aid freeze began, more than 3,000 new HIV infections have already happened worldwide as a direct result of the policy. The organization warned on Monday that any sustained restrictions on PEPFAR funding would have catastrophic consequences for millions who rely on it for HIV prevention and treatment,. . . .
[T]he Trump administration’s funding freeze forced the closure of Fahari ya Jamii, a PEPFAR-funded HIV program in Kenya that provided services to over 72,000 people. The program, launched in 2022, focused on providing HIV tests, treatment, and prevention to high-risk groups—including men who have sex with men and sex workers. . . . . With the program shuttered, over 700 healthcare workers have been placed on unpaid leave, and over 150 clinics have shut down indefinitely.
The Trump administration’s decision to exclude LGBTQ+ people from PrEP access has been met with outrage from global health leaders. The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, an international nonprofit focused on HIV prevention, issued a stark warning:
“With this new guidance, the Trump Administration is choosing politics over science, discrimination over compassion, and ultimately, death over life.”
AVAC called the move a “death sentence for thousands of people at risk of HIV globally.”
While the Trump administration is blocking PrEP access abroad, it is also attacking it at home. A case before the Supreme Court threatens to gut the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurers cover PrEP at no cost.
At the heart of the case is Braidwood Management, Inc., a Texas company that claims covering PrEP violates religious freedoms by “encouraging homosexual behavior.” A lower court ruling already granted an exemption to the plaintiffs, and now theU.S. Supreme Court will decide whether the ACA mandate should be overturned. If it rules in favor of the plaintiffs, insurers will no longer be required to cover PrEP, making it unaffordable for many who need it most.
The Trump administration’s PrEP restrictions are just one facet of a broader campaign to erase LGBTQ+ people from federal policy. As The Advocate has reported, the administration has systematically removed references to LGBTQ+ identities and HIV-related resources from federal websites, including those of the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of State.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
MAGA Voters Who Didn’t Take Trump at His Word
Ask Trump supporters why they like the president, and chances are good you’ll hear something like: He tells it like it is and says what he means. The question, then, is why so many of them refused to take him at his word. Over the first three weeks of the second Trump presidency, a recurrent motif is that Trump does exactly what he said he would, and then people who backed him react with shock and dismay.
If you’re surprised, you weren’t paying attention—and judging from recent examples, many people weren’t. When Trump announced his plan (I’m using the word generously) to occupy the Gaza Strip and convert it into an international real-estate development, the chairman of Arab Americans for Trump, which formed to back him during the election, expressed shock and betrayal . . . . Some Arab American voters may have felt compelled to lodge a protest vote against Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, even if it meant contributing to Trump’s win, but no one should have been surprised that a guy who used Palestinian as an insult during the campaign was not a sincere champion for the people of Gaza.
Some Venezuelan Americans in Florida are feeling similar outrage. Trump continued to make gains with Hispanic voters in 2024, but this month he ended Temporary Protected Status, a designation that allows noncitizens to stay in the country, for about 300,000 Venezuelans, with more TPS designees likely to lose their status later. . . . . Some voters just convinced themselves that their own groups wouldn’t become targets.
They’re not alone. Some Kentucky educators who voted for Trump are aghast that his administration is trying to cut off federal funding that they need to keep their schools functioning, despite his campaign-trail promises to abolish the Department of Education. “I did not vote for that,” one principal told CNN. “I voted for President Trump to make America first again and to improve our lives.” The Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Trump for president, then decried Trump’s decision to pardon January 6 rioters who attacked police officers—never mind that he had promised pardons while campaigning.
CEOs and bankers who decided they liked Trump better because he favors low taxes and less regulation are suddenly chagrined to learn that he was serious about tariffs. A Missouri farmer who voted for Trump is horrified that the administration is freezing federal funding for conservation programs, even though Trump promised to eliminate environmental programs and slash government spending.
Other Trump promises were pretty dubious if you listened to the rest of his plans. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” he said. But Trump’s signature campaign ideas were large tariffs and mass deportation. Both of these are inflationary: Tariffs raise the price of goods, and mass deportation makes labor scarcer, raising salaries, which in turn drives prices higher.
You don’t need an economics degree to predict this. You just had to heed the many warnings about it, which even Fox News covered. Or you could just listen to what Trump said, as when he suggested that tariffs would pay for child care or that Biden’s encouragement of wind power was responsible for inflation. These aren’t just the kinds of comforting nonsense all politicians sometimes peddle; they’re incoherent. Since winning the election, he has downplayed his inflation promises and announced a set of tariffs that, although not fully felt yet, may already be edging prices higher. Now Trump wants the Fed to drop interest rates, which would stimulate the economy—and likely increase inflation.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Trump 2.0: Corruption Umleashed
Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump.
Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison for corruption, and his Department of Justice suspended its prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting bribes from Turkey, despite extremely compelling evidence. . . . Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the chief official making sure government employees comply with ethics requirements, including those concerning conflicts of interest. And he directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents American businesses from bribing foreign officials.
Not bad for a day’s work—but Trump wasn’t done. Today, the administration told The New York Times that Elon Musk’s financial disclosures would not be made public, allowing the shadow president to direct vast swaths of government policy with enormous stakes for his personal fortune without the public knowing the precise areas of overlap.
This time around, Trump has quietly put together a policy theme—call it “Corruption Week”—for which he has actually delivered the goods. Whether Trump did this intentionally or just had numerous pro-corruption initiatives coincidentally stacked up on his desk is hard to say. What seems clear, however, is that Trump genuinely believes in corruption as a normal and acceptable way to do business.
When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump cast himself as a master of the system who had strategically donated to public officials in exchange for favors that would advance his business career. This was not mere bluster. Trump’s breakthrough experience in business came by working the corrupt nexis between real estate and politics in New York City.
The whole trick was to gain influence among the political brokers who controlled land permitting and could dole out lucrative tax abatements.
Trump’s winning bid for the coveted land “had nothing going for it but connections,” Barrett wrote. On top of being born rich, Trump displayed a genuine talent for finding and exploiting the soft spots in the system.
Trump calls everything he opposes “corrupt”: political opposition, news reports, judicial rulings, election results, and so on.
That tactic has worked. In part because the word has grown so ubiquitous during the period when Trump has dominated news coverage, it barely registers anymore. Trump was able to continue owning a private business during his first term while refusing to disclose his tax returns, at the time a stunning violation of anti-corruption norms.
The chance that any corrupt behavior on behalf of Trump, Musk, or any other member of his administration will be exposed is significantly dampened by Trump’s decision to fire inspectors general en masse. If, by chance, some corruption scandal still comes to light, Trump has stacked the Justice Department with loyalists who will almost certainly look the other way.
You can call this hypocritical, but a more realistic description is that it follows Trump’s understanding of how power works: The people running the system operate it for their own benefit. Smart people figure out how to get in on the corruption and get rich themselves. The people who get left out are suckers.
Trump’s cynical model of the world is not purely a matter of self-interest. His suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an actual policy agenda to enable American businesses to bribe officials overseas without violating American law. Trump himself has no need to grease anybody’s palms. He therefore appears to support this reform, as it were, because he genuinely believes in it. And unlike most of his flailing efforts to advance policy objectives, his pro-corruption agenda is comprehensive and well designed. How the rest of Trump’s presidency plays out is anyone’s guess. The consequences of legalizing corruption, however, will be utterly predictable.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Trump's Orders Target the Transgender; Are Gays Next?
On his first day back in office, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, that a person’s sex is established at conception and that it cannot be changed.
Then, through a series of executive orders, he issued a raft of policies targeted at transgender Americans, a population of roughly 1.6 million. The orders cover many areas of life — schools, medical care, prisons, housing and passports — and pull the government back from accepting trans people in the military, allowing them to participate in sports and protecting them under anti-discrimination laws based on sex.
[T]he sheer volume of orders, and their language and tone, suggest to both transgender advocates and Mr. Trump’s supporters that the overarching intention is about more than policy — it’s about undermining the very idea that transgender identities are legitimate and should be recognized.
The transgender debate is divisive, with polls showing that many Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination, but also think that society has gone too far in accommodating them.
But the executive orders are notable for the way they try to frame the debate in moral terms, portraying trans people as lacking honesty and integrity, and thus unworthy of consideration when it comes to legal rights.
For instance, the orders use the term “biological reality” to imply a deliberate deception on the part of trans people, a trope that has historically been used to rationalize violence against them. In the first directive alone, that term appears six times.
The executive order on the military states that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
“This is on the worse end of the range of outcomes that I had anticipated,” said Alex Chen, director of the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy clinic at Harvard Law School. “They’re frontally attacking the validity of transgender existence, right? I don’t think there’s any other way to put it.”
[M]any supporters of Mr. Trump’s trans policies, across the political spectrum, have chafed at what they see as pressure to replace sex with gender identity. . . . . The language in Mr. Trump’s orders is channeling the anger over that cultural clash, whether it is about pronoun usage or trans athletes in women’s sports.
The president’s directives came packaged in five executive orders, adding up to more than 10,000 words. To “eradicate the biological reality of sex,” his first order says, deprives women “of their dignity, safety and well-being” and ultimately has a corrosive impact “not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”
The Trump administration’s order calls the practice of medical transition for youths “a stain on our nation’s history” and the medical guidelines “junk science.” It directs federal agencies to withhold funding for hospitals and medical schools that carry out transgender medical care for patients under the age of 19, referring to it as “maiming.”
Last week, at a hearing challenging the order, Ana Reyes, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., told a government lawyer to be prepared to answer whether Mr. Trump’s language reflected a type of animus, which could factor into the arguments over its constitutionality.
Since the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, “transgender issues have been seen under the umbrella of L.G.B.T.Q.,” Mr. Chen of Harvard Law School said. “That may have obscured the fact that we never really have had a full debate about transgender identity the way we did about gay identity.”
“I always did think,” he added, “ultimately we would have to wage the battle on the merits with the public.”
Monday, February 10, 2025
Sunday, February 09, 2025
The Felon's and Musk's Department of Paranoia
The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate USAID is many things: an unfolding humanitarian nightmare, a rollback of American soft power, the thin end of a wedge meant to reorder the Constitution. But upon closer examination, it is also an outbreak of delusional paranoia that has spread from Elon Musk throughout the Republican Party’s rank and file.
Several days ago, the administration began promoting the theory that USAID was secretly directing a communist conspiracy of unknown dimensions.
Soon Musk declared that he had uncovered explosive evidence for this belief: The agency had funneled $8 million to Politico. Why exactly the Marxist plotters at USAID would select Politico as the vehicle for their scheme—its owner, the German media giant Axel Springer, has right-of-center politics with a strong pro-Israel tilt—has not been fully explained. But Musk’s discovery soon rocketed across X, the social-media platform he owns and uses promiscuously, and became official government policy.
In fact, USAID has not given millions to Politico. The agency subscribed to E&E News by Politico, a premium service that provides detailed, fairly boring, and decidedly noncommunist coverage of energy and environmental policy. Most of Politico’s paying subscribers, according to its editors, work in the private sector. Many of them are lobbyists, who are also, as a rule, unreceptive to communist ideology, and who pay for comprehensive coverage of the inner workings of Congress and the federal bureaucracy, which holds little interest for a general audience.
Government officials themselves also subscribe to Politico and other paywalled news sources. This is because, far from masterminding intricate conspiracies, public employees are often just trying to figure out what’s happening using the same information sources available to the public. Thus USAID spent $24,000 on E&E subscriptions for its staff in 2024, and $20,000 the year before. The $8 million figure encompasses Politico subscriptions across the entire executive branch. Musk has been conspiratorially describing these subscriptions as “contracts,” as if the government is paying Politico for something other than articles about the government.
If USAID is a secret left-wing plot, leftists themselves have not been let in on the secret. Actual Marxists despise USAID, which they consider a tool of American imperialism. Jacobin, a self-consciously radical-socialist journal, has spent years railing against the agency for “stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class,” working to “augment center-right parties throughout much of the Global South . . .
Some leftists have noticed the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the hated agency, and they’re not angry. The journalist Ryan Grim, who has decidedly left-wing views on foreign policy, has optimistically asked whether Trump’s crusade against USAID indicates a desire “to unwind and reorient American empire.”
The left-wing critique of USAID is considerably more grounded in reality than Musk’s is. Although the agency carries out humanitarian works, those programs have a dual purpose of advancing American soft power and resisting propaganda from hostile countries—originally from the Soviet bloc, and today from China. Not long ago, USAID’s strongest advocates included some of the most anti-communist (and thus conservative) members of Congress.
The process by which Musk came to his conclusions does not inspire great confidence. His expertise lies mostly outside public policy. He arrived in Washington, D.C., and quickly set out to prove that he could identify at least $1 trillion in annual waste and fraud, a figure wildly out of scale with the conclusions of every serious expert. . . . . Musk has acknowledged that he has a prescription for ketamine, a drug that can cause unpredictable behavior if abused. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that people close to Musk worry that his recreational drug use—including “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” according to the article—was driving his erratic behavior and could adversely affect his businesses.
It is entirely possible that Musk genuinely thinks he has stumbled upon a vast conspiracy, rather than an anodyne plan to give public employees access to a rather staid news source. Every response he has made to outside criticism tracks the most typical paranoid thought process. He believes that politicians criticize him because they, too, are collecting “kickbacks and bribes.” He has accordingly interpreted all opposition to his moves as just more proof that he is onto something big.
The ultimate conspiracy that Musk thinks he has uncovered goes far beyond even USAID. On Wednesday, Musk reposted an X post claiming that “all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants.” Musk’s commentary: “Yes.”
Any well-functioning political party would laugh off such claims as kookery. Musk, however, has attained a unique place of power because of his simultaneous position as Trump’s proxy and the owner of a powerful communications platform. X is teeming with accounts repeating and amplifying Musk’s firehose of nonsense, spinning it into a grand narrative in which Musk has heroically exposed a left-wing, taxpayer-funded cabal that has orchestrated various disasters behind the scenes.
What remains of the conservative establishment has mostly defaulted to applying a sheen of rationality to Musk’s paranoid fantasy. . . . . “The tofu-eating wokerati at the USAID are screaming like they’re part of a prison riot, because they don’t want us reviewing the spending,” Republican Senator John Kennedy [a former law school classmate and, in my view a national embarrassment] told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “But that’s all Mr. Musk is doing. And he’s finding some pretty interesting stuff.”
The result is that Musk’s most fervent devotees can believe that he has broken open a globalist plot responsible for stealing elections and manufacturing consent for the liberal agenda, while more responsible figures can pretend he’s doing nothing more than auditing funds for waste. This is the same justification process that enabled Trump’s insurrection after the 2020 election: The true believers said Trump had uncovered massive voter fraud, while the Republicans who knew better claimed he just wanted to use his legal right to count the votes and make sure the result was legit.
The Republican establishment may now be calculating that the smart move is to go along with Trump’s and Musk’s delusions. Just cancel some government-agency news subscriptions, maybe zero out a few spending programs, and wait for the howling mob to move on to new obsessions. But if the Republican Party’s leaders have proved anything over the past decade, it’s that the paranoid demagogues they think they can control are usually controlling them.
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