3.24 The Alto Knights
3.22 Shawn, Tim Hart, Paul Lindstrom and I went to Madison Square Garden yesterday, and saw the Rangers defeat Vancouver 5-3.
3.21 Christian Sheppard inThe Ancient Wisdom of Baseball: “Every baseball game, if viewed from the right angle, reenacts an ancient myth. Carlton Fisk steps to the plate. Odysseus draws his bow. Two scenes separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years both present the same dramatic climax. A hero takes his chance to prove his excellence. He succeeds. Zeus illuminates the moment with lightning. The chorus of the crowd thunderously applauds. The hero has come home. Happiness ensues.”
3.21 Ron Charles in The Washington Post: “No teenybopper ever swooned over the pages of Tiger Beat as ardently as I once pored over every new issue of Spy magazine. Teaching undergraduates at a little Christian college in the cornfields of Southern Illinois, I didn’t know many of the magazine’s gilded targets far away in Manhattan, but the blend of style and satire that editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen published was everything I yearned to be a part of. This week I’ve been reading Carter’s chatty new memoir, “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.” It’s like a bound edition of my old vision board. “Looking back, I honestly don’t know what I was thinking,” Carter confesses with humility that’s equally winning and insincere. “Who was I to start a magazine that poked holes in the bloated egos of the city’s grandees?” Huddled in his office at Life magazine, he and Andersen jotted down 100 potential story ideas for a new publication of “wit, satire, and what Kurt called literate sensationalism.” Inspired by Looney Tunes, London’s Private Eye, The Washington Post’s Style section and Mad magazine, they wanted “a bemused detachment but witheringly judgmental.” Despite a flock of blue-blooded investors, Carter and Andersen never had enough money. They borrowed furniture for their tiny offices. The staff writers earned just a little more than $5,000 a year. (Although Christopher Hitchens liked the idea of Spy, he wasn’t willing to write for the fee they could pay.) Nevertheless, when the first issue appeared in 1986, “its sheer shock value made Spy an early hit,” Carter writes. “We wrote about and lampooned everybody who was part of New York’s social and professional life, and circulation soared. There had been nothing really like it before, and it caught the city by surprise.” Tina Brown, George Steinbrenner, Henry Kissinger (“the socialite war criminal”) and so many others were gored. “It was never great to find yourself in the pages of Spy,” Carter notes. “But it was worse never to be mentioned.” He recalls Nora Ephron feeling relieved — and then “slightly miffed” that she’d been left out. Of course, everybody threatened to sue. Gore Vidal even threatened to sue because Spy claimed he was so litigious. But a celebrated case brought by CliffsNotes ended up broadening the rights of parody in the United States. Other legacies are harder to judge. The first issue of Spy contained a feature on the 10 most embarrassing New Yorkers, including a “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump. Astonishingly, almost 40 years later, that crack still stings the world’s most powerful man. White House communications director Steven Cheung issued an unhinged statement last week to the New York Times calling Carter “a washed-up has-been who can barely put a coherent thought together because he suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his tiny brain.” Clearly not. “When the Going Was Good” is full of droll memories. Spy is the focus of just one chapter in this storied life, but the Spy gang holds a special place in Carter’s heart. “They knew Wodehouse and Perelman and Waugh,” he writes. “And they were as versed in funny stories from the old National Lampoon as they were in high-minded criticism in The New York Review of Books. It was positively Hellenic. What set them all apart were their brains and wit. A whole generation of gifted writers flew through our offices, some staying for years, before heading off for the more lucrative playing fields.” Carter eventually followed them onto one of those more lucrative playing fields — Vanity Fair — but the Spy years still glow: “We had a hoot.” From afar, so did I.
3.20 Peter Wehner in The Atlantic: “Trump’s vindictiveness—relentless, crude, and capricious—has reshaped the emotional wiring of many otherwise good and decent people. He tapped into their fears and activated ugly passions that in the past had been kept at bay. In the process, he created a MAGA community that provides its members with a sense of purpose and feelings of solidarity. A clinical psychologist who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly told me that primal fear is an immediate, instinctual response to perceived danger. Trump was reelected, at least in part, because Americans were told for a very long time to feel very afraid. These Americans believe they will lose their country without Trump. For those in MAGA world, the feeling is: If you’re not for me and you’re not for Trump, you have no place here. The culture war is, for them, a real war, or very close to it, and in real wars, rules have to be broken and enemies have to be destroyed. “We’re not reasonable,” Steve Bannon told my colleague David Brooks last year. “We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.” “Many people truly believe their country is under siege,” the psychologist I reached out to told me, “and they must abandon compromise to save their country. Decency, faith, compassion, and respect are irrelevant in wartime. If one believes their livelihood and legacy is threatened, there is no time for curiosity or compassion.” My Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch wrote to me that one thing that’s surprised him is, among Trump’s supporters, “the sheer energy that’s generated by transgression. The joy of breaking stuff and hurting people. It’s a million-volt battery.” He added: “I don’t think this ends after Trump. He has raised a half generation of ambitious men and women who have been (de)socialized by his style. The most successful businessman in the world is a troll. It’s just what smart people do.”
3.20 Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, in a speech in New Mexico: “I don’t believe in health care and human dignity because I’m a Marxist. I believe in these things because I was a waitress.”
IMG_4975 (1) 3.20 On a walk by the Mohawk, we heard wood frogs waking up.
3.19 Black Bag. Stylish and entertaining.
3.19 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “Trump keeps saying that all he wants to do is end “the killing” in Ukraine. I am with that. But the easiest and quickest way to end the killing would be for the side that started the killing, the side whose army invaded Ukraine for utterly fabricated reasons, to get out of Ukraine. Presto — killing over. Putin needs to enlist Trump’s help only if he wants something more than an end to the killing. I get that Ukraine will have to cede something to Putin. The question is how much. I also get that the only way for Putin to get the extra-large slice that he wants and the postwar restrictions that he wants imposed on Ukraine — without more warfighting — is by enlisting Trump to get them for him.”
3.19 Eduardo Porter in the Washington Post: “Today, American politics finds itself precariously perched on a disjointed tangle of propositions and beliefs. A coalition has emerged on the right that rejects globalization on the old left-coded grounds — that trade benefits global capital and keeps the working man down — while at the same time championing lopsided tax cuts skewed to benefit corporations and the wealthy, tax cuts financed by cutting programs for the poor like Medicaid. While America’s improbable alignment of priorities may not have been replicated anywhere else yet, it is likely to reverberate around the world. The United States’ unusual policy stance is not just about trade and taxes. Much of its political class has turned against the institutions underpinning the liberal democracy it long claimed to champion and coalesced around a rejection of the infrastructure underpinning the globalized order that followed the end of the Cold War. There is now a bipartisan plan to emasculate the World Trade Organization, built by the United States to organize trade and help anchor peace. But other institutions — NATO, the United Nations — are vulnerable too.”
3.19 George Will in the Washington Post: “Trump is the taunter of Canada, coveter of Greenland, threatener of Panama, re-namer of the Gulf of Mexico, scourge of paper straws and demander that Major League Baseball “get off its fat, lazy ass” and enshrine Pete Rose in Cooperstown. He fulminates about everything. (Does he even know for what he promises to pardon Rose? Tax evasion, not betting on baseball.) The in-your-face-all-the-time trophy goes, however, to Trump’s apprentice. The black-clad, chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk is a master of the angry adolescent’s dress and of the now-presidential penchant for vulgarity. (“LITERALLY, F— YOUR OWN FACE!” Musk responded with a meme to an X user who annoyed him.)”
3.18 Will Saletan in The Bulwark: “Last week, standing in front of the White House with Elon Musk, Trump mused again about erasing the Canadian border. “When you take away that artificial line . . . and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that,” he boasted. “Plus Greenland,” Musk added. And Trump chimed in: “If you add Greenland . . . that’s pretty good.” Two days later, in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump brought up the idea of absorbing Canada. “This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it—between Canada and the U.S. [It] makes no sense.” Rutte tried to humor the president. When Trump talked about annexing Greenland—essentially threatening Denmark, the island’s sovereign state and a founding member of NATO—the secretary general pleaded, “I don’t want to drag NATO in[to] that.” Instead, he praised Trump for having “started the dialogue with the Russians” to end the war in Ukraine. Good luck with that. Trump will never see the war through NATO’s eyes. He sees Ukraine through Putin’s eyes. They’re the same eyes through which Trump stares hungrily at Canada, Greenland, Gaza, and the Panama Canal. They’re the eyes of a predator.”
3.18 David Frum in The Atlantic: “Trump promotes tariffs as a way to shift the costs of financing the government from Americans to foreigners. His commerce secretary suggests that tariffs might do away with the need for income taxes altogether. Income taxes fall most heavily on the affluent; tariffs fall most heavily on the middle class and poor. Trump has sold his party on tariffs as a way to redistribute the cost of government away from his donors to his voters.
3.18 NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, who were stuck in space for nine months, safely splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
3.17 Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic: “The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water.”
3.17 Rep. Paul Tonko town meeting at Schenectedy High School. More than 500 people in attendance. The Democrat Tea Party in utero.
3.17 “Border czar” Tom Homan, on Fox News, saying he plans to continue the aggressive roundups and deportations despite court rulings and injunctions halting them: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”
3.17 Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant BYD unveiled a new charging system, dubbed “Super E-Platform,” which it purports can as charge its latest model vehicles in just five minutes, allowing them to go 250 miles. By comparison, Tesla’s Superchargers take 15 minutes to charge and provide a range of 200 miles. To support the new technology, BYD plans to build 4,000 ultra-fast charging stations across China.
3.16 Jesse Colin Young dies at 83.
3.15 Nita Lowey dies at 87.
3.15 The Lehman Trilogy at Capital Rep, with Ginny and Tim Hart, followed by dinner at db brasserie, where we saw two of the actors. Also, we saw the largest Nipper in the world at 991 Broadway.
3.14 Dwight Garner, reviewing When the Going Was Good, in the New York Times: “[Graydon Carter] founded Spy magazine with another Time refugee, Kurt Andersen. Raising the money was a trial. The first issue appeared in October 1986. God, Spy was smart and jolly and elegant and mean. It was like a new planet coming into view. If you weren’t there, imagine it as Gawker with a pedigree that arced like a Bose speaker. “They knew their Negronis from their stingers,” Carter writes about the contributors. “They knew Wodehouse and Perelman and Waugh. And they were as versed in funny stories from the old National Lampoon as they were in high-minded criticism in The New York Review of Books.” Spy took its tone from, among other places, the British magazine Private Eye and from Bugs Bunny, because the latter is so “cool, collected and funny in the face of adversity.” The magazine blended humor with serious reporting. It took aim at the city’s elite, including the staff of this newspaper. The blows were high and low. An example: After the magazine bestowed the epithet “churlish dwarf billionaire” on the businessman Laurence Tisch, who’d bought CBS and fired and bullied its employees, Tisch had his minions complain. This allowed Spy to print a correction for the ages: Tisch “is not, technically, a dwarf.” Imagine that tone over issue after issue. It hurt to be mentioned in Spy but it was worse to be ignored. The magazine tweaked the collective sensibility of a generation and ushered in the 1990s as a distinctive decade. Many of its contributors went on to write for “The Simpsons” or “The Late Show” with David Letterman.” If you poke the establishment with enough energy and insouciance, eventually you will be invited to become part of it. Spy didn’t make money, and Carter and Andersen were forced to sell it in 1990. (It staggered on for a few dismal years without them.)”
3.14 Terry McDonnell on Graydon Carter in Alta: “Spy’s caustic profiles and celebrity takedowns tickled every schadenfreude nerve in media culture. Even the graphics were irreverent, with dense, information-packed layouts. Most importantly, Spy’s voice was like catnip. [Kurt] Andersen called it “literate sensationalism.” Graydon wanted “a bemused detachment but witheringly judgmental.” The first issue led with a cover story titled “Jerks: The Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers”—influenced by Private Eye in the U.K. and the Mad Magazine and Looney Tunes of the editors’ youth; that is, the approach was more than vaguely anarchic—like smuggling a reporter into the Bohemian Grove disguised as a waiter. Graydon enlisted the esteemed [Clay] Felker and Rolling Stone founder Jann [Wenner] as advisers, but those were treacherous times. Without mentioning that he was about to become editor of rival Manhattan, inc., Felker told Graydon that Spy was never going to attract readers, was hopeless, and should be shut down. They never spoke again. Jann was more helpful, suggesting that Spy’s media column focus on the previously unmockable New York Times. The paper’s former feared executive editor and his wife, a ranking editor at Vogue, became “Abe ‘I’m writing as bad as I can’ Rosenthal” and “bosomy dirty book writer Shirley Lord” in Spy’s bridge-burning column by the pseudonymous J.J. Hunsecker—the name of Burt Lancaster’s lethal gossip columnist in Sweet Smell of Success. The most powerful people in the movie business got the same treatment in the Industry, a column written under the pseudonym Celia Brady—a bastardization of the narrator’s name in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. CAA head Mike Ovitz and his partner, Ron Meyer, worried they might have to close down the agency after Spy ran its secret client list. A private detective was hired to track down Ms. Brady, whose identity, along with Hunsecker’s, remains a secret.
What fun, except for anyone Spy wrote about; or was it? Nora Ephron told Graydon she’d be relieved when she opened her issue and didn’t find herself but then become slightly vexed that maybe she didn’t matter. When Spy ran a photograph of Jill Krementz, the wife of Kurt Vonnegut, identifying her as “champion namedropper and celebrity photographer,” Kurt called Graydon, hanging up with “If you don’t already have cancer, I hope you get it.” I’m sure Kurt was being funny, but there were many who weren’t kidding at all, like Larry Tisch (who was described as a “churlish dwarf billionaire”). Gore Vidal threatened to sue for being called litigious. And then there was Donald J. Trump. Needing the money, Graydon had taken a GQ assignment in 1983 to profile Trump “at the beginning of his florid tabloid residency.” “The Donald,” as he was then known, hated the story, especially the detail that his hands looked freakishly small. The “short-fingered vulgarian” became one of Spy’s biggest jokes, and Graydon’s ridicule became the most effective antidote to Trump’s self-puffery and bullying all the way to the 2016 rally. Marco Rubio: “You know what they say about guys with small hands…” It is hard to overestimate Spy’s impact, but by 1990, it was in trouble financially. It was selling 150,000 copies a month, but cash flow was tenuous and expenses dwarfed original projections. After what Graydon describes as a “long and wrenching conversation” with his partners, it was decided that Spy had to be sold. ”
3.14 Alan Simpson dies at 93.
3.13 Adrian Wooldridge on Bloomberg, on DOGE’s firing of a handful of federal inspectors general who conduct audits and weed out fraud: “Trump might argue that we no longer need the IGs because DOGE is doing a much better job of going after fraud and abuse. But DOGE is an opaque body, beholden to one man, Elon Musk, which seems to be more interested in eliminating woke ideology than in traditional metrics of efficiency. All these boring rules and unglamorous organizations have played an important part in making business great. Business has both a moral and a practical obligation to save them from destruction.”
3.13 Bloomberg’s editorial board: “For all the chaos and confusion the Department of Government Efficiency has caused, it has so far saved the government nothing. The Congressional Budget Office found that federal outlays increased by 7% in February compared to last year, while the deficit grew by 5%. Supporters insist that DOGE just needs time. Don’t buy it: Only Congress, not freelancing commissars, can make lasting changes to federal spending.”
3.13 Richard Haass on MSNBC: “This is without precedent in history. The United States has built an [international] order for 80 years. Europe’s been a central part of it, along with our allies in Asia. Normally, orders end in one of two ways. Either somebody rises up to overthrow it, like, say, Germany and Japan did in the thirties, or it crumbles from within, the way the Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire crumbled. [Trump] is tearing it down, brick by brick, and it’s not like [he] has anything to put in its place that’s better.”
3.12 Athol Fugard dies at 92.
3.12 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. Once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics. The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed. Four years of this will not work, folks. Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors — foreign and domestic — will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown and we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown. You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.”
3.11 Jacob Hacker, Yale political scientist, quoted in the Times: “Democrats should embrace a more forthrightly left-populist stance on economics in response to the oligarchic takeover of American democracy. The diagnosis for Democrats shouldn’t be moderation as such, but a deeper embrace and prioritization of economic populism. . . . Democratic voters are going to follow whoever effectively takes on Trump. The biggest challenge is the longer-term party-building that’s needed to address the party’s biggest problems: conservative dominance of social media platforms; poor governance in blue states and cities (which hurts the brand and causes voters to locate in more affordable red America); the party’s organizational weaknesses (which have a to do with the decline of its traditional mass base of organized labor); and the fact that Democrats are the party of government in an anti-system era. . . .[The threat Trump poses] may create leverage for tackling these big problems without the internal pushback that has doomed such efforts in the past. Democrats have a chance to become the party of change, seeking to re-democratize the corrupt lawless system that Trump and Musk are creating. For this to happen, there must be broader social mobilization, not just a Democratic elite response, and the party must revitalize its own aging leadership and adopt a strong, optimistic, and economically forward-looking orientation. Very dark possibilities loom for Democrats — and democracy — otherwise.”
3.10 In a Cuomo for Mayor fundraising letter, Melissa Derosa writes “Thank you again for your friendship and support — and, really, no pressure if you decide to forego.”
3.10 Adrian Woolridge on Bloomberg: “There has never been a better time to be anti-American. Trump embodies everything critics of the US have always warned about, multiplied several times over. Yankee arrogance? He and Vance, in the Oval Office, shamelessly bullied the leader of a nation victimized by the Russian aggression. Yankee imperialism? Trump bragged to a cheering Congress that he will take over Greenland “one way or another.” Yankee incompetence? His tariffs are destabilizing global stock markets and downgrading his own economy.”
3.10 Siddhartha Mukherjee in the Times: “It came as a surprise for me, then, when Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease doctor and a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory Board, said that public health was nearly dead. . . .Dr. Gounder was referring to what she calls the “unglamorous public infrastructure” — the interlocking institutions that function constantly and invisibly and don’t depend on private enterprise or personal decisions. Yes, we conquered Covid, but “if we are inclined to think of our victory against Covid as a public health success,” she warned me, “we should really reconsider.” What seemed to succeed, instead, was a deployment of private enterprise (backed by state subsidies): the invention of vaccines by pharmaceutical companies; their delivery in significant measure through private hospitals and clinics; the ascendancy of private decision making by individuals, schools and businesses; and the surveillance of the pandemic by 
private institutions. Covid was a privatized pandemic. It is this technocratic, privatized model that is its lasting legacy and that will define our approach to the next pandemic. It solves some problems, but on balance it’s a recipe for disaster. There are some public goods that should never be sold. Dr. Gounder checked off the basic mechanisms by which public health experts confront a pandemic: They create systems to understand and track its cause and spread; they identify the people most at risk; they deploy scalable mechanisms of protection, like air and water sanitation; they distribute necessary tools, such as vaccines and protective gear; they gather and communicate accurate information; and they try to balance individual freedoms and mass restrictions.”
3.10 A day for feathers at the Mohawk River: we saw chickens on the run (2 roosters and 3 hens), and a bald eagle in flight.
3.10 Markets tank. Investors ditch tech stocks en masse. The tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 4%, its worst day since 2022. The Dow fell nearly 900 points, or 2%. The S&P 500 fell 2.7%. Bitcoin fell below $80,000 for the first time since November.
3.9 Trump, asked by Fox’s Maria Bartiromo “Are you expecting a recession this year?”, responds: “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing. And there are always periods of — it takes a little time. It takes a little time. But I don’t — I think it should be great for us. I mean, I think it should be great.”
3.9 Ginny (far left, maroon sweater, comfy yellow chair) meets with the rest of the Saratoga County resistance cell.
3.8 Shawn and I see the Wheeling Nailers top the Adirondack Thunder 6-4.
3.7 Ron Charles in The Washington Post: “Trump recently decreed that English is America’s official language, but deceit has become its authorized vernacular.”
3.7 Catherine Thorbecke on Bloomberg: “Beijing is betting its vastly cheaper and more accessible AI services will end up being what the rest of the world chooses. If Washington doesn’t pivot to policies that promote American leadership in accessible and open-source products, it could quickly see China close the technology gap, while losing swaths of global customers to firms under the sway of Beijing.”
3.6 The Coat Room, in Saratoga Springs. Good!
3.6 An anonymous Republican, quoted in The Washington Post: “Trump has core strengths and is in better shape with a sustainable base than the Illuminati in the DMV/NYC believe.” At the same time, “Trump is now on much thinner ice than he/his administration/supporters understand. Elon Musk with a chainsaw is not what the country signed up for. Musk numbers are moving quickly to negative and sooner or later, that rebounds to Trump. . . . GOPers had better hope the economy stays in one good, solid piece.”
3.5 Stephen L. Carter on Bloomberg: “For the first time in over a century, beards are coming to be seen as markers of the ruling class. And not just because when JD Vance took the oath, he became the first bearded vice president since 1909. The beard, which in my lifetime has been treated as synonymous with oddball, has become a thing again.”
3.5 George Will in the Washington Post: “Secretary of State Marco Rubio . . . swooned on X: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before.”. . . He is, however, right, in his fashion: No president has ever before “stood up for America” this way, by turning U.S. foreign policy 180 degrees, away from supporting democracies toward rewarding war criminals. (Nine days before Donald Trump’s Oval Office berating of Ukraine’s president, the Financial Times website presented video of Russians murdering unresisting Ukrainian prisoners of war.) In a future X post, Rubio might elaborate on how courage featured in this reversal. Or in Trump’s pique about what he considers Ukraine’s insufficiently reiterated gratitude for the assistance Ukraine received from the Biden administration. So smitten is Trump with Vladimir Putin (“genius”), he cannot fathom that the Russian leader surely considers him a weakling. Putin knows that Trump knows, but is too servile to say, who invaded whom on Feb. 24, 2022.”
3.4 French Senator Claude Malhuret: “Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is crumbling, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fueled jester in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you. The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is all about. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down before Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan. Never in history has a President of the United States capitulated to the enemy. Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media. This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution. I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor. Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops. Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to submit or resign. Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin. The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it. What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with its first principle being the prohibition of acquiring territory by force. This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries. Mine is Greenland, Panama and Canada, you are Ukraine, the Baltics and Eastern Europe, he is Taiwan and the China Sea. At the parties of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, this is called “diplomatic realism.” So we are alone. But the talk that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated. Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, the demographic collapse show that it is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.”
3.4 Roge Karma in The Atlantic: “If you were setting out to design a trade policy that would harm the economy while undermining political support for its leadership, you might come up with something like the tariffs that Donald Trump just imposed on Canada, China, and Mexico. The new tariffs will raise prices for American consumers, weaken the American auto industry, and prompt severe retaliation from America’s top trading partners. With respect to China, a case can be made that tariffs would promote U.S. national security and domestic industry if they were targeted and well designed. But Trump’s blanket 20 percent tariff on all Chinese imports is neither. Meanwhile, the 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico are utterly incomprehensible. There is no grand economic vision, geopolitical strategy, or even political logic behind them. International trade, like all areas of public policy, is a game of weighing costs versus benefits. Trump’s tariffs are the rare policy that might turn out to represent nothing but cost.”
3.4 Dana Milbank in the The Washington Post: “Trump implemented the largest tariff increase since 1930, abruptly reversing an era of liberalized trade that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War. He launched this trade war just three days after dealing an equally severe blow to the postwar security order that has maintained prosperity and freedom for 80 years. Trump’s ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, followed by the cessation of U.S. military aid to the outgunned ally, has left allies reeling and Moscow exulting. The Kremlin’s spokesman proclaimed that Trump is “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations” in a way that “largely aligns with our vision.” And our erstwhile friends? “The United States launched a trade war against Canada, its closest partner and ally, their closest friend,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin: a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.” It only makes sense if, against all evidence, you believe, as Trump apparently does, that Americans were better off 95 years ago than they are today.”
3.4 In an address to Congress, Trump says Elon Musk was helping to find wasteful government spending, including “$8 million for making mice transgender.” In fact, it was research into `transgenic’ mice.
3.4 Trump puts tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China take effect. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “This is a very dumb thing to do.”
3.4 Ginny and I join protesters at the State Capitol.
3.4 Selwyn Raab dies at 90.
3.2 Anora wins Best Picture. Adrain Brody and Mikey Madison take lead acting awards. Will Leitch in the Washington Post on February 28: “Anora is a movie that understands that the vast, seemingly forever-growing nature of inequality doesn’t just take away opportunity; it takes away control of your own life. Ani realizes this too late, not that it would have made a difference. Anora is fun and bawdy and often quite hilarious and riveting. But it’s also sad and draining in exactly the way it feels to be on this planet and in this country in 2025. Winning best picture would be a historic surprise. But it would also feel like a breakthrough — even a desperate plea for help.”
3.2 Warren Buffett, interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning: “Tariffs are actually — we’ve had a lot of experience with them — they’re an act of war, to some degree.”
3.1 Andrew Cuomo announces that he is running for mayor of New York
3.1 Michael Tomasky in TNR: “Presidents can declare martial law. Several have, during wartime or other national emergencies. And a president can do almost anything he wants to under the Insurrection Act. The act, according to expert Joseph Nunn, is “a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code.” Nunn also writes that in theory, a president could federalize any armed group and call it a militia, “including members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other private militias.” Knowing this, does it make more sense to you that Trump is putting Patel in charge of the ATF? If you think I’m being hysterical, I’m sorry, it’s you who are naïve. Trump has already orchestrated a coup against the United States in which he wanted to see his own vice president hanged. What more proof of his intentions do you need?”