2.22 Ross Douthat in the Times: “[I]t’s worth drawing some lessons from the Bush era that might apply to Trump and Elon Musk and other would-be counterrevolutionaries today. The first lesson is not to overread your mandate. Bush-era conservatism built its strong position on one overriding issue — destroying Al Qaeda and killing terrorists — joined to a broader affect of patriotism and religious piety, with moderate stances on government spending and the welfare state. It lost its mandate by expanding the War on Terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, from counterterrorism to nation-building, and also by opening its second term, after an election fought on foreign policy and same-sex marriage, by launching a doomed attempt to remake Social Security. In each case, an unrealistic ideological vision triumphed, and a broader conservative opportunity was lost. Today, Trump-era conservatism has a clear mandate to restrict immigration, fight inflation and wage war on D.E.I., and an arguable mandate in other areas, like the quest for some kind of armistice in Ukraine. It has no obvious mandate for making deep cuts to Medicaid, among other ideas that congressional Republicans are entertaining, or cutting federal funding for the National Park Service or Alzheimer’s research (to pick two examples of recent federal work force cuts from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency). In those areas and others, the administration risks reverting to the anti-government style of Republican politics that Trump himself originally defeated, and persuading Americans once again that the right can’t be trusted with ordinary stewardship. This connects to the second lesson: If you change it, you own it. . . .There are unquestionably many places in the federal leviathan where a ruthless outsider might bring about a necessary revolution. But the would-be reformers need to be aware that their efforts will be judged on performance in a crisis, not just cost savings on a spreadsheet. Maybe that means an outbreak of disease testing a reshaped Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or a Hurricane Katrina-level crisis testing a decentralized version of FEMA. Maybe it just means some unlooked-for failure of administration, akin to the botched Obamacare rollout, in the health or education bureaucracy.”
2.21 At the CPAC convention, Steve Bannon did this. “I do it at the end of all of my speeches to thank the crowd,” Bannon said.
2.21 The Yankees remove their facial hair prohibition, will now allow beards.
2.21 Matteo Wong in The Atlantic: “No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns. As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers, which we obtained, “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”
2.20 On Connor McDavid‘s goal in overtime, Canada beats the US 3-2 to win the Four Nations Face Off. Justin Trudeau: “You can’t take our country, and you can’t take our game.”
2.20 Philip Bump in the Washington Post: “Only 45 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing. The same percentage approves of his handling of the economy, formerly one of Trump’s strongest measurements. But those topline numbers fail to capture an important factor: Support for Trump and his policies is heavily dependent on support from members of his party. This isn’t exactly surprising given the extent to which Trump has long centered his politics on the priorities of his base and given his base’s broad enthusiasm for any- and everything Trump does. It’s nonetheless worth pointing out because non-Republican Americans are almost universally opposed to what Trump is doing.”
2.19 Bloomberg: The administration argues that reduced regulations and a more efficient government will produce sufficient economic growth to pay for tax cuts. It’s also threatening to add tariffs on key trade partners, and argues that they won’t hurt cost consumers and domestic producers. “None of this is likely,” writes Allison Schrager. “Yes, the government needs to cut waste and excessive regulations, and some tax cuts will boost growth. But even in the best-case scenario, the added growth wouldn’t be enough to make them pay for themselves, let alone cover the unfunded entitlements coming due in the next decade.” In fact, the administration’s failure to acknowledge tradeoffs is reminiscent in some ways of the Biden government, which thought it could spend trillions of dollars to stimulate the economy in 2021 without boosting inflation. Another problem with the House budget plan, according to Kathryn Edwards, is that it seeks to pay for the tax cuts by cutting spending, including to people that need it. The House GOP has characterized potential changes to Medicaid not exactly as cuts, but as efforts to reduce waste, fraud and abuse, and Speaker Mike Johnson has portrayed the efforts as a way to get people working. But semantics aside, Kathryn says that the budget and the GOP comments reflect a fundamental “misunderstanding of poverty” — namely, that poor people get too much help from the government and don’t work. “These myths aren’t true, which means that instead, policy needs to address the economic and labor market shortcomings that generate poverty and hardship,” Kathryn writes.
2.19 Microsoft says it has developed an “entirely new state of matter” that will make meaningful quantum computing available.
2.19 Trump administration revokes federal approval for congestion pricing. Less than an hour later, MTA officials file a federal lawsuit arguing the Trump administration was unlawfully attempting to reverse approval of the program. Trump on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Kathy Hochul: “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years, and we sure as hell are not going to start now. The streets of the city where battles were fought, we stood up to a king, and we won then. In case you don’t know New Yorkers, when we’re in a fight, we do not back down — not now, not ever.”
2.19 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “Oxford University economist Eric Beinhocker got my attention when we were talking the other day with the following simple statement: “No country in the world alone can make an iPhone.” Think about that sentence for a moment: There is no single country or company on earth that has all the knowledge or parts or manufacturing prowess or raw materials that go into that device in your pocket called an iPhone. Apple says it assembles its iPhone and computers and watches with the help of “thousands of businesses and millions of people in more than 50 countries and regions” who contribute “their skills, talents and efforts to help build, deliver, repair and recycle our products.” We are talking about a massive network ecosystem that is needed to make that phone so cool, so smart and so cheap. And that is Beinhocker’s point: The big difference between the era we are in now, as opposed to the one Trump thinks he’s living in, is that today it’s no longer “the economy, stupid.” That was the Bill Clinton era. Today, “it’s the ecosystems, stupid.” Listen a bit to Beinhocker. . . .In the real world, he argues, “There is no such thing as the American economy anymore that you can identify in any real, tangible way. There’s just this accounting fiction that we call U.S. G.D.P.” To be sure, he says, “There are American interests in the economy. There are American workers. There are American consumers. There are firms based in America. But there is no American economy in that isolated sense.” The old days, he added, “where you made wine and I made cheese, and you had everything you needed to make wine and I had everything I needed to make cheese and so we traded with each other — which made us both better off, as Adam Smith taught — those days are long gone.” Except in Trump’s head. Instead, there is a global web of commercial, manufacturing, services and trading “ecosystems,” explains Beinhocker. “There is an automobile ecosystem. There’s an A.I. ecosystem. There’s a smartphone ecosystem. There’s a drug development ecosystem. There is the chip-making ecosystem.” And the people, parts and knowledge that make up those ecosystems all move back and forth across many economies.”
2.19 Trump on Truth Social: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
2.18 Kathryn Edwards on Bloomberg: “Americans are not torn about how the government should deal with the building crisis in Social Security. Quite the opposite. In overwhelming numbers across political parties, ages and demographics, Americans want Congress to raise revenue to preserve benefits. They are more than fine with paying higher taxes to shore up the program. That’s according to a new survey from the National Academy of Social Insurance that probed American attitudes toward Social Security. The findings were clear: No cuts and no big changes to how the program works. Just fund it. . . .By opting for reform packages, respondents reveal the policies they favor the strongest. The winner by far was to eliminate or increase the taxable earnings cap, which is $176,100 and rises each year with the average growth in wages. Doing so could address up to 70% of the long-term shortfall. Also strongly favored: Not changing the retirement age; Making the cost of-living adjustment reflect elderly spending patterns, rather than average spending patterns; Allowing people in physical jobs to claim retirement at younger ages with less of a penalty; Raising the payroll tax rate Combine these ideas with a few other tweaks to Social Security and the survey revealed a reform package that 82% of Americans favor over the status quo — all while flipping the long-term financing shortfall into a surplus. Not only that, but this solution is favored by 74% of Republicans, 79% of individuals in households with incomes higher than $150,000 and 81% of individuals aged 21 to 34. No partisan divide, no class divide, no intergenerational tug of war — just a universal desire to fund Social Security.”
2.18 Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is charged with leading an extensive plot to overthrow the government after his 2022 electoral loss,
2.18 Bloomberg: “Dismantle the global trading system, turn America’s friends into enemies, tax its consumers and sink its producers in a permanent fog of uncertainty: This is not a winning formula.”
2.18 Big day for Susan Morrison.
2.17 Bret Stephens in the Times: “Putin being invited to the United States is the equivalent of FDR receiving Hitler in Hyde Park sometime after Hitler marched into the Sudetenland. Trump’s style is to be brutal with our allies — Canada, Mexico, Panama, Denmark, Europe in general — but obsequious toward our enemies. The betrayal this represents for Ukraine, which apparently will now have to pay us in minerals for our tepid support for its right to live free, will be a mark of shame for the United States for decades to come. . . .On the domestic front, I’m appalled by the decision to drop the criminal case against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, apparently in exchange for him changing his tune on immigration policy. The only silver lining is that the episode has made a star of Danielle Sassoon, the once and former acting U.S. attorney for the southern district and a former clerk for Antonin Scalia, who resigned on principle over the matter after just a few weeks on the job. The MAGA crowd will surely go after her, but she’s a reminder, along with people like Liz Cheney, of what principled conservatism looks like.”
2.17 F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
2.17 David Brooks in the Times: “If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow 
the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization. Why? The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once in power, he is the betrayer of populism. What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a prep school where the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids. Look at this administration. The president is an Ivy League-educated real estate developer. The vice president is an Ivy League-educated former venture capitalist. Elon Musk, the emperor of DOGE, is an Ivy League-educated billionaire. . . .And look at the programs they are going after. They’re not going after the programs where big budget savings can be realized — like the entitlement programs. They’re going after the programs where they think highly educated progressives work. They’re going after the foreign aid community, the scientific community, the NGO community, the universities, the Department of Education and the Kennedy Center. They are seeking to destroy the wokesters (the word they use for highly educated progressives) and D.E.I. (the term they use for what highly educated progressives do).”
2.16 Washington Post: Volodymyr Zelensky rejected a Trump request this past week that Kyiv hand over 50 percent of its mineral resources in exchange for American security guarantees. Does this not put the US on the same moral plain as Russia? Do Americans want their armed forces to be used so that corporate interests can plunder another country’s resources?
2.15 The woodpecker comes for breakfast
2.15 Donald Trump, on Truth Social: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.