Russell Vought's daughter has cystic fibrosis and is helped by a miracle drug wholly or partially developed from NIH research and grants. He wants to cut it to the bone. These people have no moral standing, only rank hypocrisy and power grabbing fantasies of total control and domination.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/project-2025-vought-medical-funding/

Trump won a plurality of the vote and his disapproval ratings are rising fast:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

Harris won 75 plus million votes and that is not exactly a small minority.

Trump and Co. do not have the mandate they think they have.

Bill Kristol of all people is one of the best voices against Trump and Trumpism out there. He is a lot better than some of the older Democratic politicians who are apparently resenting the volume of calls from their constituents.

There is literally HIV being transmitted from mom to baby because of the illegal shutdown of US AID and now Trump’s State Department wants to spend 400 million dollars on Tesla cyber trucks. This is not about efficiency. It’s a smash and grab.-Brian Schatz

Musk and Trump have no right to lecture anyone about waste, fraud, and abuse and letting a bunch of 19 year old hopple heads into the data proves it more so.

Co-President Musk is apparently ordering the GSA to sell or to look into selling hundreds of Federal Buildings including buildings that hold Senate offices.

Make of this what you will but Senate Republicans have been letting the leopards eat their faces for a while now.

Depends on how he does in the next ten months perhaps or he quicky discovers that the leopards ate his face too.

Marshall correctly points out that Trump has effectively turned himself into the Mayor of New York with his pardon of Adams: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/donald-trump-is-now-the-mayor-of-new-york

"The letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove states explicitly that DOJ will review the matter again after the November mayoral election and decide then whether to reinstate the charges.

So think what this means. Adams isn’t off the hook. He’s essentially been given 10 months to perform for his freedom. Perform for Donald Trump. Indeed, Bove said explicitly that one of the reasons Adams shouldn’t have been charged is that being on trial takes Adams’ focus away from helping Donald Trump with mass deportations out of New York City. (Again, they’re refreshingly candid about why this is happening.) And news just broke that Adams will be meeting tomorrow with Trump border “czar” Tom Homan. Homan says he hopes to “reach an agreement where his officers will help my officers.”

I wonder if Adams will drive a hard bargain."

At the very least, Musk is Co-Counsel of the U.S. Government

Things are changing quickly. Josh Marshall also argues Resistance in 2016 was quite different than what people remember: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/gaming-out-going-head-to-head-with-the-trumpist-scourge

“The Resistance” is a specific word about a specific time and it is one mainstream discourse has already significantly made a pejorative, not in every case for bad reasons. But why the difference between Trump’s first term and this one? Some of it certainly is just a deep demoralization coming out of the 2024 election. But the fundamental reason is that at a very basic level most people thought Trump’s first election was an accident, and not just Democrats. Most of Trump’s own party was fundamentally hostile to him, though they were happy to make use of him to pass favored legislation. Part of this was the pure shock of the event. Part of it was that Trump lost the popular vote by a significant margin, the first time since 2000. He also just scraped by in the critical northern swing states. Then just after the election, information began to emerge about Russia’s interference in the election and Trump’s connivance in that interference.

At a very basic level, Trump’s victory seemed not just bad or in some sense unfair but an accident. Because it seemed like an accident, there was a perception that mass protests, mass delegitimizing of his presidency might simply break it. Maybe it would all just fall apart and he’d resign. That, in many ways, was the premise behind the mobilization around airports in the first days of his presidency, the Women’s March and more.

I am absolutely not criticizing these efforts. I’m trying to place them in a particular time and with a particular set of assumptions. The 2024 election was very, very different. It’s wrong to say that people voted for every last thing that is happening now or whatever he happened to say at one point or another on the campaign trail. That’s not how voting works. At least a quarter of the electorate votes with only the vaguest sense of what each candidate is proposing. But it is certainly true that almost everyone had a general sense of what kind of person Trump was and what kind of president he’d be. He’d already been president, after all. What’s more, the entire campaign had been run with the clear understanding that Trump winning was a very real possibility. So people couldn’t vote for him thinking it was a throwaway vote with no consequence. He didn’t just slip through. It was a very close election. But he won a plurality if not a majority of the vote and he reclaimed the industrial midwest.

This led not only to a profound demoralization that Democrats are only now emerging from. It also made his presidency seem far less fragile than it had seemed when it was perceived as (and to some degree was) an accident eight years ago. The logic of mass demonstrations and other kinds of performative resistance just doesn’t play the same way. People are also in the midst, very much the targets of, a far-ranging shock and awe campaign from which they are only now after a couple weeks recovering their wits. So some of the difference people are noting isn’t just demoralization or giving up. It’s a rational response to a different set of circumstances. A few big hits won’t end this. This is for the long haul.

There are various things about the Trump I resistance that now seem dated, ephemeral or even cringe. But things evolve. We can look back at those things and learn from the excesses and areas of wasted energy. But we shouldn’t give in to the shallow cynicism that looks on the opponents of Trumpism as somehow more discreditable than Trumpism itself. The situation is different so it calls for different tools and strategies. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some of the Democratic torpor of the first weeks of the second Trump presidency is just what it seems like: demoralization, some people wanting to simply check out. But it is also (and I expect increasingly so over time) an accurate perception that everyone is now in this for the long haul. None of this will be quickly shortcircuited and endurance and canniness are as important as aggression or display.

Is everyone ready for Red, White, and Blueland

Game recognizes game: Trump drops Eric Adams corruption probe: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/nyregion/eric-adams-charges-doj-trump.html

Trump doubles down on permanently exiling Palestinians from Gaza: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/world/middleeast/trump-gaza-us-takeover.html

Is it worth it Jaybird?

Judge McConnell ruled that Trump Admin is defying its order: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/trump-unfreezing-federal-grants-judge-ruling.html

We are in a very bad place

Trump wants to kill Medical Research: https://jabberwocking.com/trump-wants-to-wipe-out-medical-research/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/blue-state-law-red-state-law

I only knew knew about Britt’s velvet pushback because of a tip from a TPM Reader. I’m pretty confident there are similar reports from other Senators and representatives in similar positions. As Philip Bump notes here, NIH funding in red states is more likely to go to colleges and universities than in blue states. But it’s the pattern I want to highlight: blue states going to the courts and red states (or at least their political stakeholders) trying to work directly with the administration. As I said, I don’t think this will survive as an across the board policy. There are too many pro-Trump or Trump-adjacent stakeholders affected. But it’s a view toward a different kind of politics or state we could be heading toward: cash and prizes for supporters and nothing for opponents.

There are different and important permutations to this model. We start with cash and prizes for red states and nothing for blue states. But if institutions in blue states declare their love for Trump maybe something can be worked out. These are powerful inducements for political subservience and compliance. I had a number of knowledgable observers tell me last night that that was the obvious next step.

We’ll have to see where and how this plays out. My understanding is that there are both strong administrative law arguments against this and, in addition to that, an additional statute forbidding it which I’m told was put in place after Trump tried something similar in his first term. Of course, the administration’s global strategy seems to be that laws restricting his use of his executive powers are all unconstitutional. This amounts to saying that the opponents have a strong case on the law, even with right-wing judges. But we need to see if the law still matters.

Today in Trump announcements:

1. 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum on Monday so the price of beer is going up;

2. He might be playing with not paying some debt/treasuries: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-says-some-treasury-notes-may-not-be-real

White Afrikaners move to distance themselves from Trump and Musk: https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3lhomzxafys27

Marshall thinks it will destroy academic medical research in the United States. Trump tried this in his first term but was blocked by Congress

We are going to be offering asylum to white Afrikanners: https://bsky.app/profile/gmbutts.bsky.social/post/3lhmvuytvwk24

You aren't going to get what you think you are going to get.

Next up in Bend the Knee:

1. "Effective Monday 2/10/25, NIH indirect rate capped at 15%. Applies to existing & future grants.

—> Deep budget cuts & program closures coming to a university near you.

Is this the break the glass moment for university administrators who have been silent so far about the attack on science?"

2. Trump issues an EO on South Africa which sure as hell makes it look like Musk is the real President and deeply upset about Apartheid ending

Yesterday, one of the gizmocrats was forced to resign because of unearthed racists posts including ones calling for normalizing Indian hate. Today a man married to an Indian woman and with three half-Indian kids calls for his reinstatement: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/07/us/trump-administration-updates#vance-doge-staffer-racist-posts

DOGE is not government. It is the shocktroops of Musk’s coup

Musk's sanctum santorum: https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

People are stranded in the middle of clinical trials including with devices implanted in them because of the cuts to USAID. Rubio announces USAID's staff will go from 14K to 249 with only 12 in Africa: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.u04.uwUS.LsuSP-cSzcLO&smid=url-share