2.14 Six other prosecutors follow Sassoon and resign, including lead Adams prosecutor Hagen Scotten, who writes, “[A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
2.13 Danielle Sassoon, a Republican serving as the top Manhattan federal prosecutor, quits after declining to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams as requested by President Donald Trump‘s Justice Department. “I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record,” she wrote in the letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Sassoon said she was “confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” which include bribery, soliciting illegal donations, wire fraud and conspiracy. Her letter adds that prosecutors were prepared to bring another indictment against Adams that would charge him with conspiracy based on evidence that the mayor “destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.” She said her office was also prepared to allege further details about Adams’ involvement in a “fraudulent straw donor scheme.” Echoing criticisms from political observers, she also argued the Justice Department’s memo amounted to a “bargain” with the mayor. “Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case,” Sassoon wrote.
2.13 Paul Fussell, in a 1988 essay quoted in the Times: “Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can’t have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out not to be the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and the world will go on as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else’s expense or do and undergo things it’s not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of the innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It’s also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets or knives, if not in Germany, Italy or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.”
2.12 James Carville, on the “Politics War Room” podcast, mocked “the people [who hold out hope that] “’some responsible conservative Republican is going to save us from this. They didn’t come, they’re not there, okay? Let’s just get over it, they’re not coming, the cavalry is not coming, the courts are not coming, nothing.. . . This is a government by billionaires, for billionaires, of billionaires, and that’s all it is. . . .Gaza? He just wants all of his friends to get rich, they want to open casinos on the coast, they don’t think about you,” he said. “All of this stuff is a giant shakedown effort, and I think that is — you’re not gonna get it perfect, but you have to give people a credible explanation of this craziness because it’s inexplicable. I think the way we’ve got to look at it is through the eyes of a billionaire.”
2.12 Wheatfield
2.11 Ford Motor chief executive Jim Farley: “Let’s be real honest: Long term, a 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canada borders would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we’ve never seen.”
2.11 Elon Musk: “If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”
2.11 Mohamed A. El-Erian on Bloomberg: “In the last few days, it has become clearer that the administration is iterating toward a multi-pronged tariff strategy that promises quick wins on several fronts, albeit with the risk of longer-term damage depending on both how frequently duties are used, and how companies, households and other countries respond to them. Viewed through the lens of game theory, trade is an intrinsically cooperative game. Playing it uncooperatively can benefit the more powerful party in the short term … But the longer that international trade is played as an uncooperative game, the bigger the welfare losses to everyone participating, including the US.”
2.11 Clive Crook on Bloomberg: “America’s retreat from liberal trade, if it persists, will rank among the greatest unforced policy errors of modern times. The shift is not just potentially momentous but also, in many ways, deeply puzzling. The US stands as a global economic champion, and reaps the benefits this provides, because of its unsurpassed ability to constantly reconfigure itself through innovation and competition. Given that ability, the bigger the market, the greater the rewards. The US flight from liberal trade disowns the very traits that have made the country rich.”
2.11 Gettysburg. Final visit?
2.10 Jonathan Chiat in The Atlantic“Bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump. 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 compelling evidence. (Adams has denied the allegations.) 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.”
2.9 Eagles beat Chiefs in the Super Bowl, 40-22.
2.9 Tom Robbins dies at 92.
2.9 Dave Jensen dies.
2.8 While traveling on Air Force One to the Super Bowl, Trump spoke to the press pool and had this exchange: Reporter: “You’re going to meet with first responders today, but you pardoned people who assaulted first responders –” Trump: “No, I pardoned people that were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government. I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government. That’s who was assaulted. They were treated unfairly. There’s never been a group of people in this country – outside of maybe one instance that I can think of, but I won’t get into it – that were treated more horribly than the people of J6. So, no, I didn’t assault – they didn’t assault – they were assaulted and what I did was a great thing for humanity. They were treated very, very unfairly. There’s never been anything like it.”
2.8 Visiting Greg and Susan Schmidt in Pittsburgh.
2.6 Karen Tumulty in the Post: “To say that what is happening now is a constitutional crisis is to put it too mildly. Let’s call it what it is: a constitutional collapse. Congress’s abdication of its constitutional powers and responsibilities to an executive branch run amok — or, you might say, run-a-Musk — would surely have horrified the Founders. “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” James Madison wrote. But during Donald Trump’s first weeks in office, he has begun to unilaterally dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was created by Congress. He set a target on other parts of government with a legislative mandate, including the Education Department. He put a block on trillions in funding that lawmakers appropriated to a host of federal programs, until a court order stopped him. He fired 17 inspectors general without giving the 30-day notice to Capitol Hill required by law. The framers clearly never envisioned a Congress that would be so supine in the face of such a barrage. Or a Senate majority that would, rather than advise, merely consent to such preposterously unqualified Cabinet choices as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services, Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. Or that the people’s representatives — even if they belong to the president’s party — would stand by as Elon Musk and his Band of Bros, without seeking the “legislative authority” that Madison thought was necessary, upended the civil service protection that lawmakers put in place for government workers more than a century ago. And while they were at it, rummaged through federal systems that contain the private information of tens of millions of Americans.”
2.5 Ginny and I join other progressive geezers in Albany to protest the 
recent activities of Caesar Trumpus Augustus and his consul Musky. We chanted Delay, Deny, Defend!, which was about as much as we could do at the moment. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in the dark days of December 1776. Hang tough–soon it will be time for us to cross the Delaware.
2.5 Patricia Lopez on Bloomberg: “Canada may have had to make minor concessions to Trump this week, but it didn’t come out the loser of this [tariff] showdown. That would be the US, which has shown itself a risky, unstable partner willing to throw away generations of trust and goodwill.”
2.4 New York Times: “Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave. . . .Hosting Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Trump said that all two million Palestinians from Gaza should be moved to countries like Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by Israel’s campaign against Hamas after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
2.3 Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup. As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at USAID on administrative leave—staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on X yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today. This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.
2.3 Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” says Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.
2.3 CNN Nightcap: “At the risk of sounding like a crank, here are just some of the highlights of the Trump 2.0 White House so far: Elon Musk, the unelected mega-billionaire, reportedly sicked a pack of Gen Z engineers on the Treasury Department’s payments system as part of a broader attempt by the executive branch to wrest control of US government infrastructure, including the humanitarian agency USAID; Trump fulfilled a campaign promise to impose trade restrictions on Mexico and Canada and then abruptly changed course Monday (more on that in a moment); the president broke with well-established protocol to speculate about the cause of a plane crash that killed 67 people, heaping blame on Democrats and hiring practices that embrace diversity; the administration emailed 2 million federal workers with a legally murky offer to resign, sowing widespread confusion and anger; the White House froze hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants, then rescinded the order, then said the order still stood, leaving thousands of organizations in limbo. In sum: No one knows what the heck is going on.”
2.2 September 5. Gripping!
2.2 Mort Kunstler dies at 97.
2.2 Elon Musk: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
2.2 Beyoncé wins her first album of the year Grammy for “Cowboy Carter.”
2.1 Trump imposes tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China; later in the day, he suspends the tariff on Mexico and Canada.
2.1 After the administration ousts a top career official, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gives Elon Musk’s deputies access to a sensitive Department system responsible for trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments.