More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Tariffs, Totalitarianism, and America’s Entrepreneurs

During the 2024 campaign, the Felon promised to lower consumer prices "on day one."  That has not happened and with the Felon's tariffs on autos about to increase car prices by thousands of dollars, a host of other products and materials about to soar in cost, thousands fired from jobs, the stock market down for the 6th week in a row, and consumer confidence plummeting, the MAGA base is being played for fools. If economic issues had truly been what motivated many working class voters to vote vote for the Felon, they ought to be screaming bloody murder.  The silence of so many who whined incessantly about prices under Joe Biden to date is telling - racism against a non-white woman candidate, bigotry, hatred towards minorities, and even contempt for women appear to have been the true unspoken motivating factors.   Putting aside the fact that America's standing in the world is in a shambles, many American businesses are about to pay dearly for the Felon's ugly agenda, and it's not just automakers.  One Nobel prize winning economist described the current mess as follows:

I thought I’d say something brief today about the auto tariffs. There’s lots of economic analysis out there (spoiler: they’re bad). Let me add two observations: what these tariffs say about America as an ally (worthless) and what the response to criticism says about the Trump administration’s mindset (totalitarian).

On the first point, I’ve seen surprisingly little discussion of the legal basis for these tariffs. U.S. law gives the president a lot of discretion to impose tariffs without prior legislative approval, but the process is still supposed to be constrained by rules. There are, or are supposed to be, specific situations in which the president is allowed to impose tariffs, beyond “he feels like it.”

Trump seems determined to treat our allies as enemies, with a special animus toward Canada. And this systematic destruction of any credibility America might have as a trusted partner is a even bigger story than the impact of tariffs on consumer prices or real GDP.

On the second point, the other day Larry Summers declared that administration claims that foreigners will absorb the entire cost of tariffs are “ludicrous.” I’m not sure why this declaration was considered newsworthy; Larry was only echoing what every economic principles textbook and 95 percent of economists say  . . . 

Still, Larry’s statement did inspire some headlines, and got a response from Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. Did Bessent explain why he thinks the administration is right and almost the entire economics profession is wrong? No: he immediately accused Summers of being, in effect, a paid protestor . . . .

This isn’t how democratic governments respond to criticism. Even if you’re sure you’re right, you’re supposed to acknowledge the possibility that critics are sincere unless there’s clear reason to believe otherwise. But Trump and his minions already have a totalitarian mindset, in which there is no such thing as legitimate skepticism of the Leader’s proclamations. Anyone who expresses doubt, whether it’s Larry Summers or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, must be a corrupt globalist, or a woke radical left-wing Marxist, or maybe both. . . . . Do people in the business world still think Bessent is a sensible guy who will exert a stabilizing influence on Trump policies?

A piece in The Atlantic looks at the real harm many businesses now face as they are caught between the prices of tariffs and American consumers.  Here are excerpts:

Over the past two months, Stuart and Susan Rosen say they have paid nearly $30,000 in tariffs to the American government. Their Burbank–based small business designs costume jewelry, manufactures it in China, imports it to the United States, and sells it to department stores and online boutiques. When Donald Trump took office, he slapped a 10 percent tariff on their imports, and then another 10 percent.

Tariffs cause “a little disturbance” and require “a little bit of an adjustment period,” the president has conceded—and the Rosens confirmed. Their retail partners have declined to increase in-store prices for their necklaces and earrings, leaving their business with no choice but to eat the cost of the levy. “Trump gets online and says, This is great! These tariffs, we’re going to make a lot of money,” Susan told me. “Well, you’re stealing money from me.”

After this adjustment period, Trump has promised, the tariffs will “protect our businesses and our people.” Business owners will dump their foreign trading partners and foreign firms will invest in the United States. Companies will hire American workers, open American factories, and buy American goods. The trade deficit will decline and employment will go up.

It sounds great. But it is not happening. Many entrepreneurs, such as the Rosens, have no practical way to onshore their supply chain. If they managed to do so, their jewelry would cost more than imported jewelry, making their business uncompetitive. If the tens of thousands of American firms relying on imported goods did the same, the country’s rate of productivity growth and consumers’ purchasing power would go down. “If we try to make every damn thing here, it’s a road to poverty,” Kimberley Clausing, an economist at UCLA, told me. “The idea that there’s going to be some sort of long-term benefit is hogwash.”

The White House is not creating a little disturbance in service of making America rich again; it’s creating a huge disturbance in service of making America poor again.

This 21st-century push for 19th-century industry is about hope for the future and, perhaps even more so, fears from the past. From the 1970s to the 2000s, deindustrialization and globalization eviscerated the country’s heartland, the Steel Belt corroding into the Rust Belt. It would be hard to overstate the financial and social ramifications: persistent depopulation, permanent income loss, severe regional inequality, increasing drug overdoses, rising political polarization, ascendant right-wing populism.

A self-proclaimed “tariff man,” Trump has taken these arguments to extremes, bellowing that foreign countries are ripping off Americans and promising to eliminate the country’s trade deficit.

But there is a difference between using trade policy to generate new jobs and to restore old ones, as Trump wants to do, promising to take the country back and make it great again. “Rectifying the bad things we went through in the past—and I am not minimizing that there were costs—this is not going to fix that, and I fear that it’s holding out false promise,” Chad Bown of Peterson Institute for International Economics told me. Tariffs aren’t reparations.

Trump’s nostalgia notwithstanding, the American economy was not more prosperous when a large share of its workers were toiling on assembly lines. Fifty years ago, the middle class was larger and inequality was lower. But wages and household incomes were smaller, and consumer goods were much more dear.

Trade liberalization and automation made most Americans better off.

Trump’s crackbrained understanding of trade economics threatens to reverse those welfare gains, and without aiding the Rust Belt. He insists that tariffs are paid by foreign exporters, when they are paid by domestic businesses and consumers, as the Rosens show. He argues that the United States’ trade imbalances indicate that other countries are taking advantage of us, when it simply means that we sell fewer goods and services to foreign nations than we buy from them.

China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization and decades of automation beforehand did damage the Rust Belt economy. But economists told me that trade policy has no way to reverse the phenomenon. Washington cannot dictate where business executives choose to build new plants; those decisions take into account not just tariffs but tax incentives, labor rules, the location of ports and highways, and local employment conditions.

When companies build plants in the United States today, they look nothing like the Manhattan garment factories and Big Three assembly lines of yore. Automation has diminished the number of manufacturing positions globally; countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh have seen most of their job growth in the service sector. Given the high cost of labor in the United States, manufacturing firms tend to invest heavily in robotics, machine tools, and AI systems. In the 1930s, the biggest Detroit auto plant employed more than 100,000 workers. Hyundai’s new electric-vehicle plant outside Savannah is expected to employ 8,500.

Modern factories tend to be not unitary production facilities but nodes in complex, globe-spanning networks. A car finished in Illinois might contain components from Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Germany,  with parts crossing in and out of the United States multiple times during assembly. “If you don’t have tariff-free access to those parts, your car is going to be more expensive than the same-quality car made in South Korea or Germany,” Clausing told me. Tariffs would make it “harder to make things in America, not easier,” . . . . multiple rounds of tariffs on a vehicle produced inside and outside the United States. Tariffs, she told me, “could decimate the U.S. auto industry.”

Trump’s proposed tariffs do not emphasize strategically important or high-tech industries, as prior administrations have done. As a result, “we’re going to reallocate production away from stuff we were good at making and towards stuff that we’re not good at making,” . . . . Other countries that have engaged in this kind of autarky have generally given up, Clausing noted. “You realize that you can’t make everything yourself and it ultimately makes your citizens poor.”

Trump’s enormous tariffs would increase consumer prices and limit the quantity and quality of goods available for American households to purchase. The policies would kill off firms reliant on imported goods or parts. The misallocation of investment capital would make the country less vibrant in the long term.

The Rosens were looking into getting an exemption from Trump’s tariffs, on the basis that they could not find a domestic fabricator for their jewelry. I asked what would happen if the exemption did not come through. “That’s the question,” Stuart told me. “We’re very loyal to our employees. I mean, we’re stupid! What can you do?” They hope that their retailers would agree to raise retail prices. If they don’t, the Rosens might not make it through Trump’s adjustment period. They would go out of business again.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Team Trump Enables Foreign Spies

The "Signalgate" debacle continues to dominate the news cycles with far too many congressional Republicans shrugging off the shocking security breach as no big deal - avoiding a MAGA cultist primary challenge is more important than the nation's security.  The entire episode underscores the contempt the Felon's regime has towards security experts and the unchecked arrogance of his unqualified cabinet appointees.  Add to this the Felon's and his regime's fondness for Vladimir Putin and Russia and denigration of European allies, it's a wonder any former allies continue to share any sensitive information with their American counterparts.  But the problem extends far beyond "Signalgate" and has made America's national security vulnerable to foreign hackers and spies alike as laid out in a column in the New York Times. Indeed, with cut backs or elimination of cybersecurity efforts, thousands of disgruntled fired federal employees, and the diverting of security efforts to hunt out Tesla protestors and foreign university students, America's enemies must be cheering and salivating.  Here are highlights from the Times column:

If you’re running the security directorate of a hostile nation, savor this moment. It’s never been easier to steal secrets from the United States government. Can you even call it stealing when it’s this simple? The Trump administration has unlocked the vault doors, fired half of the security guards and asked the rest to roll pennies. Walk right in. Take what you want. This is the golden age.

In its first two months, the Trump administration has made move after move that exposes the government to penetration by foreign intelligence services. It’s not just the group chat about forthcoming military strikes that The Atlantic revealed on Monday — although that was, to be clear, as audacious and ridiculous a security breach as there has been in decades. The administration short-circuited the process for conducting background checks on top officials, turned tens of thousands of people with access to government secrets into disgruntled ex-employees and announced it was lowering its guard against covert foreign influence operations. It installed one of Elon Musk’s satellite internet terminals on the roof of the White House, seemingly to bypass security controls, and gave access to some of the government’s more sensitive systems to a teenager with a history of aiding a cybercrime ring, who goes by the nickname Big Balls.

In his first term, President Trump caused an uproar by revealing intelligence to the Russian ambassador that was routinely withheld from America’s actual allies. This is something different: the erosion of America’s ability to keep any secrets at all. The second Trump administration is treating security like just another stale Washington convention, an annoying impediment to its ambitions to move fast, break the bureaucratic state and replace it with an all-powerful executive.

Major adversaries pray for this level of chaos, confusion and opportunity. A secretive Chinese network is trying to recruit fired U.S. government workers. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service states with “high confidence” that foreign adversaries are trying to “capitalize” on the Trump administration’s mass layoffs. But the Chinese Ministry of State Security or the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate aren’t the only ones who stand to profit from the Trump administration’s disregard for even minimal operational security. Intelligence gathering has become easier for everyone.

A program from a single Israeli spyware maker, the NSO Group, has been deployed in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Hungary, India, Mexico and Rwanda. “Now the junior varsity countries can come in and succeed,” Frank Figliuzzi, the F.B.I.’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, told me. “You don’t need to be very sophisticated.”

This should be the time to batten down the hatches. But the Trump administration has other priorities. Around 1,000 F.B.I. agents have been diverted from their regular duties to scrub the case files of Jeffrey Epstein. (Even in New York City — a hotbed of foreign intelligence activity — the F.B.I. field office is “all hands on deck” on the Epstein review.) Meanwhile, the Justice Department stopped its investigations into the possible compromise of New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams by foreign governments. A seven-agency effort to counter Russian sabotage and cyberattacks has been put on hold. Personnel from the bureau’s counterterrorism division have been newly asked to pursue those who vandalize Teslas, while the new Joint Task Force Oct. 7 investigates “illegal support of Hamas on our campuses.”

As for that mortifying incident in which a journalist was invited into a supposedly super-triple-extra-confidential conversation with top military and intelligence leaders, it’s hard to know what’s worse: not being aware who was in the group chat or conducting the chat on mobile phones.. . . . A chat, however, is only as secure as the people using it. Just a few days ago, the Pentagon issued a warning that Russian hackers were tricking people into mirroring their Signal group texts to a second device. Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, joined a chat anyway — and he did it from Moscow.

Mr. Witkoff has since said that he was using a secure, government-issued device. But there’s no way to make a phone completely unhackable. . . . . The people at the center of Signalgate — the national security adviser, Michael Waltz; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; to name a few — all know this. They all served in the military. They no doubt heard innumerable lectures from counterintelligence experts about all the different ways an adversary can make off with sensitive data. But this is an administration that actively, proudly rejects expertise. It casts those who have it as the corrupt old guard, the real enemy, the “deep state,” and it touts its own refusal to heed them as proof of its legitimacy and righteousness.

This is an administration that makes a weekend Fox News host the leader of the world’s largest military, puts a conspiracy-minded podcaster in charge of the F.B.I., and has at its pinnacle a reality star turned president. Blunders like this are an inevitable consequence.

“Of course they have their WhatsApp groups and their Signal groups,” Matt Tait told me. Mr. Tait is a well-connected cybersecurity consultant and a former analyst at GCHQ, the British signals intelligence service. “Fundamentally, they don’t really trust the civil service that are working for them, and don’t really see any of the constraints that traditionally people would follow as applying to them at all.”

So if you’re running a foreign intelligence service, relax. You’ve got time. This fiasco could’ve been a wake-up call to the Trump team, an opportunity to overhaul their security procedures and maybe stop courting disaster on quite so many fronts. This administration has decided to go hard in the other direction. “Nobody’s texting war plans,” Mr. Hesgeth told reporters, after being exposed for doing just that. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Trump 2.0: Not Ready for Prime Time

Two things in my view stand out about the Felon's cabinet: (i) it has more billionaires than anytime in recent memory, and (ii) many of the appointees were not qualified or competent for their positions yet were nonetheless approved by spineless Senate Republicans.  A third attribute might be the arrogance of many of the appointees.  The consequences of the incompetence of the Felon's appointees was writ large when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, disclosed that he had been included in a group chat with senior officials discussing war plans for a strike against the the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed militia, in Yemen.  There are so many things wrong with this story, not the least of which is that the chat did not occur through secure government means.  Indeed, on March 18th, a Pentagon-wide advisory went out one week ago warning against using the messaging app Signal, even for unclassified information. While many in both parties in Congress are fuming, Speaker Mike Johnson, ever proving his worthlessness, is shrugging off the whole debacle and the Felon is blaming the journalist for being at fault rather than his unqualified appointees. A column in the New York Times lays into Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with a drinking problem.  Here are excerpts:

I don’t know how Pete Hegseth can look service members in the eye. He’s just blown his credibility as a military leader.

On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published one of the most extraordinary stories I’ve ever read. President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, apparently inadvertently invited Goldberg to join a Signal group chat (Signal is an encrypted messaging app) that seemed to include several senior Trump officials, including Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.

A National Security Council spokesman told The Atlantic that the chat “appears to be authentic.”

No one apparently noticed Goldberg’s presence, and he had a front-row seat as they debated Trump’s decision to attack the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed militia that had been firing on civilian shipping in the Red Sea.

Then, at 11:44 a.m. on March 15, the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” sent a message that contained “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying and attack sequencing.”

This would be a stunning breach of security. I’m a former Army JAG officer (an Army lawyer). I’ve helped investigate numerous allegations of classified information spillages, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat.

There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that. It would normally result in instant consequences (relief from command, for example) followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.

Federal law makes it a crime when a person — through gross negligence — removes information “relating to the national defense” from “its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted or destroyed.”

It’s way too soon to say whether Hegseth’s incompetence is also criminal, but I raise the possibility to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of the reported mistake. A security breach that significant requires a thorough investigation.

What example has Hegseth set? That he’s careless, and when you’re careless in the military, people can die. If he had any honor at all, he would resign.

A full description of what happened can be found at The Atlantic in a piece by Goldberg.  Here are some excerpts:

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. . . . . The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president. 

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM!

The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.

Read the entire piece.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Trump and Musk Continue to Threaten Social Security

Donald Trump, a/k/a the Felon, and Elon Musk in my view have several things in common: (i) both are malignant narcissists, (ii) both believe they know everything on any topic, (iii) truth and veracity are unknown concepts, and (iv) both could care less about average working Americans. On the latter point, the Felon gives lip service to caring about his working class and rural base, but when the rubber hits the road, his policies are harmful to his base - other than the very wealthy - and ever policy is motivated by either a desire for retribution or to slash federal spending in order to give trillions of dollars to the very wealthy.  During the 2024 campaign, the Felon stated that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would not be cut - I know, when does he ever not lie - and now he has unleashed Musk on Social Security bringing office closings, restriction on telephone claims and consultations, not to mention fear on the part of millions of retirees.    Historically, tampering with/cutting Social Security has been the third rail of American politics, but Must (and by extension the Felon) seems oblivious to this political reality or, even more likely, he is so arrogant that he simply does not care.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the current situation that ought to be sending off alarms with congressional Republicans despite their otherwise willingness to prostitute themselves to the Felon:

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.

Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention. Back then, he had yet to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a leader of DOGE, he’s opened an unexpected crusade against Social Security.

Musk recently called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and claimed that it’s rife with waste and fraud. DOGE staffers have gained entry to the Social Security Administration and obtained sensitive taxpayer data, and the Trump administration has cut the agency’s workforce by thousands. Earlier this week, Social Security officials announced changes that could make it harder for retirees to access their benefits. These moves—and Musk’s rhetoric—have frightened voters, who have jammed congressional phone lines and town-hall meetings to register their concerns. And they’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who could pay for Musk’s decisions in next year’s midterms.

If Musk wants to meet his goal of cutting $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll have to do a lot more than eliminate USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and even the Department of Education. He knows the real money is in the three pillars of America’s social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said earlier this month. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”

Republicans have learned that going after these programs carries a huge electoral risk. Musk, apparently, has not. . . . . Musk has “been quite successful in business, but he is clearly not very popular, and his DOGE actions are making him less popular,” a senior GOP strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking a fight with the president or his wealthy lieutenant. “He will end up being a heavy weight around the neck of not only President Trump but Republicans generally.”

Most elected Republicans have been careful to avoid criticizing Trump or Musk. But as DOGE has continued to assail Social Security, some have started feeling pressure from their constituents.

Trump might be able to claim a mandate from voters to justify some of his early cost cutting; he’s long criticized foreign aid, for example. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, he repeatedly vowed to preserve entitlements, even when some in his party wanted to trim them. Republicans have relied on those promises to try to reassure voters that their benefits are safe.

Musk’s offensive against Social Security, however, has made those claims harder to sustain. And Trump himself has amplified some of Musk’s most specious charges about the program. During the president’s address to Congress earlier this month, he said his administration had identified “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security. But the examples he cited—people born in the 19th century supposedly still getting checks—were almost certainly data-processing errors that reflected the program’s antiquated computer systems, not fraud.

The administration’s attempts to reduce fraud could jeopardize legitimate recipients. Beginning next month, people will no longer be able to call the Social Security Administration to file for benefits or update their banking information. . . . The new requirements could be a particular hardship for older beneficiaries who live in rural areas—a constituency that leans heavily Republican. . . . . “If they kill the ability to phone Social Security with questions, that will cause real problems with seniors,” the GOP strategist warned. “This would give Democrats an opening."

Polling backs up the strategist’s claims. In a survey released yesterday, the Democratic firm Blueprint read respondents a list of 20 different facts about Musk and what he has done with DOGE, then asked which ones they found concerning. The four examples that respondents worried about most all involved possible cuts to Social Security. “This is what Democrats need to get through their heads: It’s all Social Security right now,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s pollster, told reporters during a briefing.

What Trump and Musk are doing now is far different from what Bush proposed two decades ago. His plan called for structural changes to Social Security that would allow recipients to put their benefits into private investment accounts, which Bush argued could yield more earnings for beneficiaries while extending the fiscal solvency of the program. Davis was serving in the House when the public rejected Bush’s idea. He offered a reminder that Trump and Musk might want to consider: “When you move too far, too fast in politics,” Davis said, “the voters pull you back.”

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Trump Versus the Federal Courts

The Felon increasingly acting as if he is a monarch - or perhaps more on point, a Mafia crime boss - who is above the law and not answerable to the constraints of the federal courts which ultimately determine what the law is and which so far have largely ruled against and sought to block the illegal actions of the Felon and his minions and co-president Elon Musk.  A op-ed in the New York Times by Judge J. Michael Luttig  who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006, looks at the ongoing contempt the Felon is exhibiting towards the federal courts and any judges that do not rubber stamp his illegal actions. Luttig is optimistic that the courts will prevail although, personally, my confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court siding with the rule of law is marginal given that in justices Thomas and Alito we have two unfit members of the Court - Alito seemingly believes he is in the infamous court of Star Chamber when not acting as an inquisitor for the Spanish Inquisition - and three of the other justices are questionable.  Hopefully, the desire to maintain their own power and authority may tip the balance and see the Court uphold the legal smack downs the Felon and his regime have suffered to date.  Here are column highlights: 

President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago.

Mr. Trump has yearned for this war against the federal judiciary and the rule of law since his first term in office. He promised to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he has long mistakenly believed is the federal government’s partisan “weaponization” against him.

It’s no secret that he reserves special fury for the justice system because it oversaw his entirely legitimate prosecution for what the government charged were the crimes of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election and purloining classified documents from the White House, secreting them at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. He escaped the prosecutions by winning a second term, stopping them in their tracks.

But unless Mr. Trump immediately turns an about-face and beats a fast retreat, not only will he plunge the nation deeper into constitutional crisis, which he appears fully willing to do, he will also find himself increasingly hobbled even before his already vanishing political honeymoon is over.

The bill of particulars against Mr. Trump is long and foreboding. For years Mr. Trump has viciously attacked judges, threatened their safety, and recently he called for the impeachment of a federal judge who has ruled against his administration. He has issued patently unconstitutional orders targeting law firms and lawyers who represent clients he views as enemies. He has vowed to weaponize the Department of Justice against his political opponents. He has blithely ignored judicial orders that he is bound by the Constitution to follow and enforce.

There has been much talk in recent weeks of this constitutional crisis, in which the president has defied and stonewalled the federal judiciary as he has sought to consolidate his power. The Republicans who control Congress have already demonstrated their fealty to Mr. Trump. All that is left to check his impulses is the nation’s independent judiciary, which Alexander Hamilton deemed “essential” to our country’s constitutional governance. A country without an independent judiciary is not one in which any of us should want to live, except perhaps Mr. Trump while he resides in the White House.

Last week, he tossed more matches into the fire he has long been stoking against the rule of law.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump called for the impeachment of Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, after the judge ordered a pause on the deportation to El Salvador of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants said to be gang members.

For good measure, Mr. Trump called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” All this because Judge Boasberg wanted first to determine whether the administration was correct in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport the Venezuelan immigrants without a hearing. It’s called due process, which is guaranteed by the Constitution to ensure that no person is deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

Within hours, the tectonic plates of the constitutional order shifted beneath Mr. Trump’s feet. The chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr. — the head of the third branch of government — rebuked the president in a rare missive.

No one wants murderers or other criminals to be allowed to stay in this country, but to rid the country of them the president first must follow the Constitution. Judge Boasberg doesn’t want to assume the role of president; the president wants to assume the role of judge.

At a hearing on Friday, in a further development in this showdown between the president and the judiciary, Judge Boasberg expressed skepticism about the administration’s use of a wartime statute to deport immigrants without a hearing to challenge whether they were gang members, as the government has asserted. “The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning,” he said.

He also said he planned to “get to the bottom” of whether the Trump administration had violated his temporary order against the deportations.

Mr. Trump seems supremely confident, though deludedly so, that he can win this war against the federal judiciary . . . . The very thought of having to submit to his nemesis, the federal judiciary, must be anguishing for Mr. Trump, who only last month proclaimed, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” But the judiciary will never surrender its constitutional role to interpret the Constitution, no matter how often Mr. Trump and his allies call for the impeachment of judges who have ruled against him.

If Mr. Trump continues to attempt to usurp the authority of the courts, the battle will be joined, and it will be up to the Supreme Court, Congress and the American people to step forward and say: Enough. As the Declaration of Independence said, referring to King George III of Britain, “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Mr. Trump appears to have forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War to secure their independence from the British monarchy and establish a government of laws, not of men, so that Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” in 1776, “in America the law is king.

If the president oversteps his authority in his dispute with Judge Boasberg, the Supreme Court will step in and assert its undisputed constitutional power “to say what the law is.” A rebuke from the nation’s highest court in his wished-for war with the nation’s federal courts could well cripple Mr. Trump’s presidency and tarnish his legacy.

And Chief Justice Marshall’s assertion that it is the duty of the courts to say what the law is will be the last word.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty