NOW WHO'S LIVING IN AN IDEOLOGICAL BUBBLE?

Susan Crawford, the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who was endorsed by Democrats, beat the Republican Party's preferred candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 points yesterday. The biggest loser in this race is, of course, Elon Musk.

Musk and groups he backed, including his America PAC, funneled $20 million into the election through splashy and controversial tactics, including doling out $1 million checks to Republican voters and paying people $100 each to sign a petition to quell “activist” judges.

In case you didn't notice, two of those million-dollar winners had links to the Republican Party, though I'm sure most voters didn't notice.

... Nicholas Jacobs ... identifies himself as the chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans....

[Ekaterina] Diestler is a graphic designer, according to LinkedIn, for a packaging company in the Green Bay area called Belmark Inc — which has strong ties to major Republican donors. Coupled with Jacobs’ affiliation, it raises questions about how the “spokespeople” for [Musk's] America PAC were selected.

Musk made it personal, showing up in the state to dispense checks and speak on Schimel's behalf. Republicans thought that was an awesome idea:

“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag,” said Pam Van Handel, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County. “I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”

Rohn Bishop, the mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin, and former chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County, admitted that the race “throws up a bunch of warning signs for the midterm election.”

“I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote,” Bishop said. Instead, he added, “I think [Musk] helped get out voters in that he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].”

Democrats are regularly accused of being in an ideological bubble that prevents us from understanding people with different points of view, but who's in a bubble now? Anyone who can read a poll can see that Musk is unpopular. His unpopularity is made clear in survey after survey. Just yesterday, a national poll released by Marquette Law School delivered these results:

Approval of how Elon Musk is handling his work in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stands at 41%, with disapproval at 58%. Musk’s personal favorability is 38%, with 60% unfavorable.

Imagine wanting a guy who's at 38%/60% approval to be your top campaign surrogate, just because your party likes him. That's bubble thinking.

But I suspect that Musk won't stop. I'm sure he'll continue donating heavily to Republican candidates. My guess is that he'll also keep giving away million-dollar checks and paying people to sign petitions wherever he thinks he can get away with it, though I imagine he'll ask right-wing celebrities (Kid Rock? Riley Gaines?) to hand out the checks on his behalf.

Democrats should seize the moment and introduce bills in Congress and in all fifty state legislatures banning Musk-style electoral bribes. In blue states, they should pass these laws quickly and with great fanfare. If Elise Stefanik were still planning to leave her upstate New York House seat, do you think Musk would have hesitated to conduct a similar giveaway in her district? That's why these bills are worth passing in blue America. Everywhere else, they'd be messaging bills. Democrats can draw attention to GOP opposition, saying, Why do Republicans support bribery in our elections?

They should do this now in case Musk lowers his profile by leaving the government. Politico now reports that the president is telling "his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role." (We'll see if that's true.)

Democrats lost both House races in Florida yesterday, but the results were encouraging:

In the state’s conservative Sixth District, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican, had won by 14 percentage points as of early Wednesday. In November, when turnout was much higher, then-Representative Michael Waltz — now the embattled national security adviser — won the same seat by more than 30 points.

And in the First District, a Democratic House candidate appeared to have won a county that Mr. Trump had carried last fall by 19 percentage points, though she lost the seat overall.

Michel Nevin writes:

We shouldn't assume that we'll have real elections in 2026, but if we do, the supposedly comatose Democratic Party could do well.

And that makes sense. Why are Democratic voters disgusted with the Democratic Party? Because we feel that Democrats won't fight. But in election campaigns, Democrats challenge Republican ideas and promise to fight for Democratic ideas. We want Democrats to be like that all the time. But if they're like that in campaigns, and we believe they're serious about fighting after they're elected, we'll vote for them.

After that, though, they need to deliver. They could do more now: Immediately following Cory Booker's 25-hour speech on the floor of the Senate, Democrats granted unanimous consent for the confirmation of Trump appointee Matthew Whitaker as ambassador to NATO. Even if, in this case, Whitaker's approval was inevitable, they shouldn't have stopped fighting. Why be considerate of Republicans who are enabling totalitarianism?

"WE ARE GOD IN HERE"

Most critiques of the Trump administration share a common narrative: Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling critical parts of the government so they can give tax breaks to themselves and their rich friends. But what's actually happening seems much stranger.

Hamilton Nolan points out that, in fact, the policies of Donald Trump are quite like to make rich people poorer.

Generally speaking, throughout the history of modern America, the government has worked on behalf of business.... The Democratic Party tends to lean a little more towards shared prosperity and regulation, and the Republican Party tends to lean more towards raw unfettered capitalism, but both have operated in service of the basic mandate of “protect and increase America’s wealth.” ...

Trump is doing something different: He is making decisions that will clearly harm the American economy, in both the short and long term. He is breaking things that are useful to business interests.

For instance, he's destroying the rule of law. Why?

The rule of law is a necessary ingredient for long term growth of businesses. Love “free” markets? Then you love the rule of law: it offers predictability of rules, and predictable enforcement of those rules. It is the thing that allows businesses to make long term investments and sign contracts and trust that those things will be governed by a transparent set of rules that all sides of the transaction understand.... The Trump administration is not just weakening the rule of law—it is replacing it with gangsterism, which is to say, the opposite of the rule of law.... The world’s biggest and most complex corporations have been reduced to paying bribes in order to directly beg the president for their priorities, at the club the president owns. Trump is trying to make the Fed a part of his own political operation, endangering financial markets for short term political gain. And he is seriously flirting with defying federal courts and plunging the nation into a constitutional crisis that it may not recover from any time soon....

... Trump ... is busy replacing the world’s most sophisticated corporate legal regime with a system in which you must grovel at his toes in a ridiculous red hat in order to get anything done.

And as for tariffs:

Trump’s affinity for tariffs is not the act of a man doing a favor for business interests. It is the act of a guy who has a weird idea in his head and has clung to that idea for decades because he believes he is the smartest man in the world.

Nolan can't fathom why Trump is doing this, though I think he comes close when he writes, "This is interesting in the same way that the methods and predilections of a prolific serial killer are interesting."

Trump isn't the only one giving off serial killer vibes. So are Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr.:

Thousands of federal employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were notified early Tuesday morning that they were subject to a reduction in force, or RIF ... shuttering programs that directly serve and inform the American public.

The effect was felt across the CDC, as workers in the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice (DEHSP), the Division of Population Health, the Division of HIV Prevention, the Division of Reproductive Health, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control all received RIF notices today.

Dozens of other programs throughout the CDC’s national centers for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; Environmental Health; Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and the Global Health center were also impacted.

Jamelle Bouie has said that he thinks Kennedy is practicing eugenics.

I think there's truth in that, and Musk has his own ideas about who's fit and unfit:

Interesting observation https://t.co/xHD5VeS1IC

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2024

But there's a sadism about the way all of this is being done that isn't an inevitable part of eugenicism. And why does Musk -- a businessman whose best-known company sells consumer products -- happily work with a president who's giving consumers more and more reasons every day not to make major purchases? Why doesn't he seem to care whether his potential customers die in preventable ways?

These folks seem to be behaving like people who imprison and enslave the innocent in locked basements. They're going to elaborate lengths to make us suffer, for the pure power trip of it. While we often say that "the cruelty is point," cruelty appears to be so motivating to these men that it overrides other motives, like keeping the system healthy enough to sustain itself. The sadism -- the joy of forcing us to accept all of this pain and suffering -- seems to be what really matters.

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is one I used to see back in the 1980s in Amnesty International fund-raising letters: We are God in here. The phrase appeared in a statement Amnesty provided for a 1984 congressional hearing on torture:

With the government's support the torturer controls everything, even life itself. An Argentine woman, Graciela Guena, remembers the guards telling her, "We are God in here," as they repeatedly applied electric shock to her body. She lay handcuffed to the springs of a metal bed, her cries echoed by the screams of other victims and the laughter of their torturers. "They called us 'the walking dead,'" she said, "reminding us constantly that the only thing to be decided was the time of death."

"We are God in here" certainly comes to mind when I read this story:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15.

... in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

They're not admitting error because they regret what they've done. They're admitting an error they refuse to undo because they want us to see that we can't hold them accountable. (Obviously, one phone call to El Salvador's Trump-fanboy president, Nayib Bukele, could get this prisoner returned.) They are God in here -- "here" being the entire United States, and wherever else their power extends.

Obviously, in many regimes, sadism of this kind is meant to keep society going on the regime's terms. That's true here, but the sadism also appears to be an end in itself. They want us to suffer. Our suffering makes them happy. Destruction for the hell of it makes them happy. It's why they're doing all this.

I don't know what specifically happened in the childhoods of Trump and Musk (or people like Russell Vought) to make them this way. I sometimes think that Kennedy, in his childhood, experienced the assassinations of his uncle and his father and now wants to get back at the world by dealing death. Whatever motivates these people, I think we need to look beyond history and political science to understand it.

THERE ARE LEGAL SCHOLARS WHO ACTUALLY BELIEVE TRUMP COULD SERVE A THIRD TERM

I don't really know why this happened over the weekend:

President Trump did not rule out seeking a third term in office on Sunday, telling NBC News that he was “not joking” about the possibility and suggesting there were “methods” to circumvent the two-term limit laid out in the Constitution.

It's easy to imagine that Trump said this knowing that it would push Signalgate out of the headlines (although coverage of that scandal is fading, and Trump's impending tariffs will be the top Washington story very soon). But I should note that it was Trump's interviewer, Kristen Welker, who brought the subject up, although perhaps she did so because people in Trumpworld, particularly Steve Bannon, urged her to ask about the idea so it would garner headlines.

KRISTEN WELKER: So, when you're jo – I know you're joking about this, but I've been talking to a lot of your allies. They say they're very serious. You know, I talked to Steve Bannon on the record, quite frankly. So, I can just tell you. I mean, he says he's, you know, really seriously looking at potential plans that would allow you to serve a third term.

Trump, of course, couldn't back down -- backing down, in his eyes, would make him look weak, the worst possible sin in his world. But Welker seems more excited to talk about the idea than Trump.

KRISTEN WELKER: So, but I don't hear you ruling – like, in a very serious way, do you rule that out? Are you like, I can't serve a third term, it's unconstitutional? What's your thinking around it?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: A lot of people want me to do it. But we have – my thinking is, we have a long way to go. I’m focused on the current.

And, a bit later:

KRISTEN WELKER: Okay. So, but, but, sir, I'm hearing – you don't sound like you're joking. I've heard you joke about this a number of times.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: No, no I'm not joking. I’m not joking –

KRISTEN WELKER: Yeah. Yeah.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: But, I'm not – it is far too early to think about it.

If I'm guessing right, Bannon planted the thought in Welker's head, and she ran with it. She thought it would be great television. The news-making headlines would be good for NBC and good for her. Bannon saw it as an epic troll and a great distraction.

And I'm guessing that Bannon, or someone else in Trumpworld, fed Welker this scenario:

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well, there are plans. There are – not plans. There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know.

KRISTEN WELKER: Basic– Well, let me throw out one where President Vance would run for office and then would, basically, if, if you – if he won, at the top of the ticket, would then pass the baton to you.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well, that's one. But there are others too. There are others.

You might assume that this is plainly unconstitutional. Most constitutional scholars would agree. But there are dissenters.

In 1999, Bruce G. Peabody and Scott E. Gant published a paper in the Minnesota Law Review titled "The Twice and Future President: Constitutional Interstices and the Twenty-Second Amendment." Their conclusion:

Our analysis leads us to the belief that the Twenty-Second Amendment and the Constitution as a whole leave open possibilities for a twice-elected President to resume that Office.... For instance, we have suggested that a President nearing the end of his or her second term and determined to stay in office might run as Vice President with the idea that the President-elect would step aside, allowing the already twice-elected President (and Vice President-elect) to serve a third term without running afoul of the Twenty-Second Amendment's bar on reelection.

The key phrase here is "bar on reelection." The 22nd Amendment doesn't say a president can't serve three terms. It says:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

(Emphasis added.)

The 12th Amendment describes the process by which the electors of the Electoral College are supposed to vote for president and vice president. It was written at a time when electors weren't expected to merely ratify the results of the popular vote in their respective states. It says in part:

... no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Peabody and Gant's argument is that the 22nd Amendment prevents a twice-elected president from being elected to a third term, but doesn't prevent a twice-elected president from being president again. In order to determine who's eligible to be president, we have to look at Article II of the Constitution:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

In "Two-Time Presidents and the Vice-Presidency," a 2015 paper published in the Boston College Law Review, Dan T. Coenen writes:

... the Article II clause imposes no term limit of any sort on presidential service. Instead, it requires only that a President be (1) a natural-born citizen, (2) at least thirty-five years of age, and (3) a resident of the United States for at least fourteen years. Because twice-before-elected Presidents (such as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton) continue to meet each of these three (and only three) textually specified eligibility requirements, such persons are—according to proponents of the they-can-run position—not “ineligible” to be President for purposes of the Twelfth Amendment. Therefore, they remain “eligible” to seek and to hold the vice-presidency.

His belief?

Some analysts have argued that the Constitution forecloses the possibility that a twice-before-elected President can hold (or at least secure election to) the vice-presidential office. However, the text and history of the relevant constitutional provisions point to the opposite conclusion: A twice-before-elected President may become Vice-President, either through appointment or through election, and thereafter succeed from that office to the presidency for the full remainder of the pending term.

As I've said before, in reference to Trump's attack on birthright citizenship, it doesn't matter whether the vast majority of legal scholars hold one view of what the Constitution says on a particular subject -- if the right-wing mafia wants a different outcome, and if there's any scholarship whatsoever supporting that outcome, our Federalist Society courts will feel free to go with what the activist right wants. Or the courts will just make stuff up on the spot.

I'm not sure we'll even have elections in 2028 -- it seems quite possible that by then we'll be under martial law and elections will be suspended. But if we still have them -- real ones, or (more likely) Orbanesque ones that Democrats aren't permitted to win -- and if Trump is alive and determined to stay in office, I find it hard to imagine that he'll go to the Supreme Court and, in effect, ask permission to run again. That's not his style. Either he'll just run, daring fellow Republicans to challenge him and daring opponents to try to keep him off the ballot, or he'll tell his cultists to vote in the primaries for slates of "uncommitted" conventional delegates who are actually pledged to him. Then in the general election he'll tell them to back a placeholder candidate who pledges to put him back in office. (I don't think he'll trust J.D. Vance for this. I think the ticket will include loyal family members like Lara Trump and Donald Trump Jr.)

All of this assumes that he's alive and more or less functional, and that he hasn't alienated vast swaths of the country by destroying the economy, enshittifying or eliminating social services, and starting batshit-crazy imperialist wars.

I think Trump might want to be president for life because that would be a guarantee that he'll never go to prison, and because the power trip of being a dictator is life-giving to him. But maybe America will be angry enough by then to make this impossible.

HEY, GAVIN: IF THE DEMOCRATIC BRAND IS SO TOXIC, WHY ARE REPUBLICANS RUNNING SCARED IN SPECIAL ELECTIONS?

This weekend, Gavin Newsom was on Bill Maher's show doing the Democrat-bashing act that the media loves:

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Friday that the Democratic brand was “toxic” and that his party had to admit its own mistakes, delivering tough love as Democrats struggle in their fight against the Trump administration....

“The Democratic brand is toxic right now,” he said, pointing to a recent NBC News poll that showed Democrats with a 27 percent favorability rating, the lowest in at least a generation.

The epsode aired on Friday. Three days earlier, this happened:

Democrat James Andrew Malone narrowly won a special election for a Pennsylvania state Senate seat in Republican-leaning suburbs and farming communities, scoring an upset in a district that a Democrat hasn’t represented in the chamber for 136 years.

A day earlier, this happened:

President Trump on Thursday said he had asked Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, to stay in Congress rather than serve as ambassador to the United Nations, amid concern about the minuscule voting margin that Republicans hold in the House....

It ... highlighted concerns among Mr. Trump and leading members of his party about their ability to win what should be safe Republican seats in districts like Ms. Stefanik’s solidly red region of upstate New York.

And now there's this:

Republicans nationwide are turning their eyes and focus to Florida’s 6th Congressional District’s special election, occurring Tuesday, where Republican Randy Fine seeks to prevent an upset victory by Democrat Joshua Weil.

Axios reported a poll from Donald Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, showing Fine losing to Weil by three percentage points, despite the district being ruby red. Such a result would be a shock.

The 6th District was held by now-Trump National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who won the seat in 2024 by 33 points.

Republicans will probably win this race -- they lead in the early vote now. They might be trying to lower expectations so they can say they overperformed if their candidate wins. But as noted above, the GOP won this seat by 33 points in November, and Donald Trump won the district by 30 points. Any victory margin that's significantly short of that is a sign of Republican weakness.

I regularly criticize Democrats. I would have given the party an unfavorable rating if I'd been asked by NBC's pollsters. But I vote Democratic. I give money to Democratic candidates. I've volunteered for Democratic campaigns. My criticisms are different from Newsom's (and those of Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, and John Fetterman) -- I think too many Democrats, especially in leadership, are afraid to assert that the party supports a large number of very popular policies, and are afraid to attack the Republican Party for opposing those policies (and, now, for seeking to destroy a great deal of what's good in America). I think there are many, many voters who are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party -- or at least its leadership -- but who also know we'd be better off with Democrats in charge.

When reporters quote Newsom, why don't they express any skepticism about the Democrats' toxicity? They see the Malone victory. They see how special elections are scaring the GOP. They see the angry crowds at congressional town halls. They see the massive crowds at rallies headlined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat) and Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with Democrats and who's run for president as a Democrat twice). They see Donald Trump's weak poll numbers, especially on issues.

On Maher's show, Newsom said that Democrats are censorious:

“Democrats, we tend to be a little more judgmental than we should be,” the Democratic governor told host Bill Maher. “This notion of cancel culture... You’ve been living it, you’ve been on the receiving end of it for years and years and years. That’s real.”

“Democrats need to own up to that,” he said. “They’ve got to mature.”

Newsom accuses Democrats of practicing cancel culture, citing Maher, who's had his current successful HBO show for 22 uninterrupted years (and whose previous show was taken off the air after he angered Republicans). Meanwhile, under a Republican president, masked men can arrest and deport you for writing an op-ed, or attempt to deport you because you're a scientist who neglected to declare frog embryos while going through customs, as a cover-up for the real reason, which is that you criticized Russia's war in Ukraine. Can the press put all this Democrat-bashing talk about "cancel culture" in perspective, please?

Newsom also said that Democrats are condescending:

“We talk down to people,” he said. “We talk past people.”

Which of the follow do you think is more likely to talk down to people: Gavin Newsom ...

... or James Malone, who won that Pennsylvania race?

Stop treating these Democrat-bashing Democrats as if they're uttering objective truths. They aren't.

THE TRUMP INSIDER BACKSTABBING BEGINS

A day after The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he'd been included in a group chat discussing plans for a bomb attack on Houthi targets in Yemen, The New York Times published a story under the headline "Inside Pete Hegseth’s Rocky First Months at the Pentagon." I was puzzled by this story, because none of the apparent rockiness seemed particularly rocky by the standards of Donald Trump:

Even before [Hegseth] disclosed secret battle plans for Yemen in a group chat, information that could have endangered American fighter pilots, it had been a rocky two months for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and Fox News weekend host, started his job at the Pentagon determined to out-Trump President Trump, Defense Department officials and aides said.

The president is skeptical about the value of NATO and European alliances, so the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth considered plans in which the United States would give up its command role overseeing NATO troops. After Mr. Trump issued executive orders targeting transgender people, Mr. Hegseth ordered a ban on transgender troops.

Maybe Hegseth was jumping the gun a bit, but it's hard to see why any of this would have displeased Trump.

Mr. Trump has embraced Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla. The Pentagon planned a sensitive briefing to give Mr. Musk a firsthand look at how the military would fight a war with China, a potentially valuable step for any businessman with interests there....

The president made clear last Friday that he had been caught by surprise by a report in The New York Times on the Pentagon’s briefing for Mr. Musk, who oversees an effort to shrink the government, but also denied that the meeting had been planned.

“I don’t want to show that to anybody, but certainly you wouldn’t show it to a businessman who is helping us so much,” Mr. Trump said.

Trump seemed to think this was a bad idea, or maybe he was just embarrassed that the story leaked, but he didn't seem particularly angry.

Remember, Hegseth doesn't have to do a good job. He just has to do a good job by Trump's standards. Even after the China story broke, it didn't seem as if Trump was displeased with Hegseth.

But then another story appeared at CNN, under the headline "Concerns About Hegseth’s Judgment Come Roaring Back After Group Chat Scandal."

Interviews with multiple current and former national security officials this week, including career military and civilian officials, reflect growing concerns about Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon....

So far, several high-profile initiatives spearheaded by Hegseth inside DoD since he was confirmed in January— including several related to the southern border mission and a purge of “DEI” content—have either been scaled back or rescinded as he has rushed to implement changes demanded by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

This again?

The current and former officials said the rocky start underscores both Hegseth’s inexperience and his freewheeling approach to leadership. Many of his orders are verbal and based on gut instinct rather than a deliberative, multi-layered process, people familiar with his methods said.

“He’s a TV personality,” one of the sources said. “[A general officer] makes a recommendation, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ [Former Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would never be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ He’d be like, ‘We’ll take it under consideration.’”

He does things based on gut instinct rather than deliberation? He doesn't do things the way they were done by Lloyd Austin, a black man appointed by Joe Biden? And that's supposed to be bad in Trump's eyes?

What we're supposed to take away from this story is that Hegseth is on thin ice. What I took away from the story is that "current and former national security officials" want Hegseth to be on thin ice.

Then yesterday we had this Wall Street Journal story (free to read here):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.

One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon....

Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, isn’t a Defense Department employee, defense officials said....

Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting.

And also this AP story:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key position inside the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser, Hegseth’s office confirmed.

The high-profile job has meant meetings with a UFC fighting champion, a trip to Guantanamo Bay and, right now, traveling on the Pentagon’s 747 aircraft as Hegseth makes his first trip as defense secretary to the Indo-Pacific.

Hegseth's haters are clearly calling reporters (or maybe messaging them on Signal) and unloading a lot of grievances. I don't think it will work, at least for now, because Hegseth's presence takes Trump back to his happy place (sitting in front of a TV tuned to Fox News), and because Trump is determined not to admit any error in Signalgate (or Whiskeyleaks or whatever we're calling it), because he's following the Roy Cohn "Never apologize, never explain, go on offense" strategy that, unfortunately for us, has worked for him all his life.

But this tells me that the Trump/Project 2025 strategy of replacing as many people as possible with loyalist ideologues still leaves quite a few government employees who are willing to stab key Trump subordinates in the back, in some cases because their loyalty to Trump doesn't mean they're loyal to one another, and in other cases because the employees aren't loyalists -- apparently you can't purge every non-MAGA person in the federal government. Which means that there's a possibility that the Trump administration can be seriously weakened by infighting, if not now, then sooner or later.

So keep on backstabbing, folks. Eventually you might score some important kills.

KRISTI NOEM'S PRISON PHOTO OP WAS "SADDAM = BIN LADEN" 2.0

It's obvious that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's visit to El Salvador's brutal Cecot prison was part of the the Trump administration's effort to keep pumping out images of performative machismo in order to appeal to Trump's multi-ethnic, multi-generational coalition of male voters (a "badass" woman in skintight clothing is a familiar trope in male-coded popular culture):

The Trumpers know what boys like.

But there's more going on here, and it's not just that the administration wanted to change the subject from Signalgate. The Trumpers know how many stories have appeared challenging the notion that the immigrants who were rounded up and shipped to El Salvador a couple of weeks ago are all gang members. We know they were gang members because they had gang tattoos is a narrative they fear is falling apart.

NEW: @MotherJones reports that one of the men renditioned to El Salvador is Neri Alvarado, who was working in Dallas as a baker. An ICE agent told him they were questioning all men with tattoos.

Neri has an AUTISM AWARENESS TATTOO in honor of his 15-year-old brother with autism. pic.twitter.com/eufotQrax2

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 26, 2025

So they posed Noem in front of shirtless men whose tattoos sure look like gang tattoos.

But we know from news reports that there are 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners at Cecot, and only 261 of them were sent there by the Trump administration. We also know from news reports that this prison held gang members long before Trump was inaugurated again. Here's a CNN report from last November:



So there's no reason to believe that the men in the photo op include any of Trump's 261 detainees. But the administration wants to send the message that they're the same men, and counter the message that men who were rounded up had innocuous tattoos, but without saying that the men posed behind Noem are Trump's detainees.

This is a propaganda approach that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the early 2000s. The Bush administration wanted to go to war with Iraq, and wanted Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attack, but no one in the administration actually said in so many words that Saddam was the culprit. The link was always implied rather than stated, but it was implied incessantly:

From September 12, 2002, to May 2003, the subjects of terrorism and Iraq were intertwined on a regular basis. Of the 13 speeches given [by President George W. Bush] in this period, 12 referenced terror and Iraq in the same paragraph and 10 placed them within the same sentence. In 4 speeches, a discussion of terrorism preceded the first mention of Iraq, giving the impression that Iraq was a logical extension of the terrorism discussion....

Another notable construction in Bush’s speeches is the juxtaposition of Iraq/Saddam Hussein with September 11.... Seven of 13 speeches from September 2002 to May 2003, place September 11 and Iraq in the same paragraph, while four speeches place them in the same sentence. Three times in this period, Bush speeches proposed a hypothetical situation in which the September 11 hijackers were armed with WMD provided by the Iraqi government.

Noem and the Republican Party's principal communications outlet, Fox News, sent the message that the tattooed men behind Noem were the men the administration had rounded up without ever saying so explicitly.

Here's what viewers saw on Fox before the photo op took place:



The words at the beginning of this clip:

All right, it's happening today: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will step foot in the El Salvador megaprison where the "worst of the worst" was deported from the U.S. two weekends ago, and they're being held at this hour.

After she arrived and did the photo op, Fox reported:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center on Wednesday, where hundreds of alleged criminal illegal aliens are being held after the Trump administration deported them earlier this month....

Video of the tour showed Noem coming face to face with alleged members of Tren de Aragua, all of whom were shirtless and had shaved heads, while also donning white prison pants.

We'd watched the shaving of the Trump detainees' heads in mid-March, and they were wearing white uniforms, so Fox in this report Fox was connecting the tattooed men in the Noem photo op to the Trump detention without doing so explicitly.

Noem made a Tiktok-style vertical video:

She said:

I'm here at Cecot today visiting this facility, and, first of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them and have consequences for the violence that they have perpetuated in our communities. I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face. First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.

In this video, she never says that the men in tattoos who were posed behind her include any of the 261 people who were detained in America and renditioned to El Salvador. She doesn't have to. She calls them "terrorists," echoing Trump's executive order declaring Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization. She makes the link by implication.

So this meeting in February seems appropriate:



As the kids say, game recognizes game.

THEY'RE COVERING SIGNALGATE BECAUSE THEIR INSTINCTS TELL THEM THEY SHOULD, AND THEY'LL STOP SOON FOR THE SAME REASON

I've been wondering why the Signal chat scandal broke through in the media when so many other scandals linked to Donald Trump don't. Then I watched a clip of a Chris Matthews appearance on Morning Joe yesterday and it all made sense:

Chris Matthews declared the White House attack plans leak story has moved from “blunder” to “cover up” after the full texts chain including defense officials was published by Jeffrey Goldberg on Wednesday....

Matthews said:

I believe this story moved from blunder, which it was the last few days, to cover up, and the cover up began almost immediately. We saw the president after coming out of his meeting. We saw last night on Laura Ingraham’s show where Mike Waltz tried to defend himself. She was very good at pushing him and pushing him pretty well, I thought, and have to tell you she’s going to go further tonight after this information. This is classified information. It’s strike zone. It’s about an attack by the United States on the Houthis, a warfront that hadn’t gotten much attention before in this country, but it has now.

Matthews recalled his own time working as a speechwriter for late President Jimmy Carter and how national security information would flow and be protected. The former MSNBC host suggested there is more to Goldberg’s number being attached to the call than we know thus far.

He said:

There’s two stories. What was Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number doing in the office of Mike Waltz? Why did they have the phone number? Nobody’s asked this question. What, are they hanging out together? Do they talk occasionally? How come they had the number and how could it find itself into this call list of people? How did that happen? By accident? Accident?! There is no accident here. This happened because somebody did it.

Matthews worked in the Carter House during the Cold War. He addressed these remarks to a former Republican congressman who was elected in the late twentieth century, and to the daughter of Jimmy Carter's national security adviser.

This story broke through because, on foreign policy, the media still has a twentieth-century mindset. For media figures with this mindset, America is the leader of the Free World and the national security apparatus must be protected at all costs.

In this century, that's led the media to make horrible judgments -- cheerleading the Iraq War, for instance -- but this week it means that Signalgate is the most damaging story the second Trump administration has faced, even though it's far from the worst thing the administration has done.

*****

The media's knee-jerk habits made this a serious scandal, which is good, but it's likely that other knee-jerk media tendencies will end the scandal prematurely. Here's Politico Playbook this morning:

... to be clear: There is no administration in the world — beyond this one — where a blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns. Not in London. Not in Moscow. Not in Tokyo. Not in Pyongyang. Nowhere....

But whatever: Trump’s America is a rare beast indeed, and it is absolutely in the president’s gift to let this pass. The president clearly loves his top team and has his own media echo chamber to help out if he decides it’s all a “hoax.” (Sample chyron on last night’s Fox News: “DEMOCRATS ARE OVERPLAYING THE SIGNAL LEAK.”) Plus — the Houthi mission was indeed a success. U.S. military lives were not lost. And the rest of the media can’t write about this gaffe forever.

Wow. There it is: the media can’t write about this gaffe forever. After less than 72 hours!

The media wrote about Benghazi forever. The media wrote about Hillary Clinton and emails forever. But on this subject, the media is apparently getting restless already.

This is another instinct: to restore the media's preferred level of stasis and equilibrium, where Republicans are on top and the GOP gets away with even its most appalling deeds, while Democrats are the Big Fat Loser party that all normal people hate, although it somehow occasionally wins an election or two.

One set of media instincts made Signalgate a scandal, but this instinct will probably make it a non-story by next week at the latest.