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Weekend Listening: Should America Continue to Aid Ukraine? Bari Weiss

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Elbridge Colby (left) and Bret Stephens. (Photo illustration by The Free Press; headshots via U.S. DOD and Getty Images)

Two years ago today, Russia invaded Ukraine.

The costs of the war have been unbelievably high. Half a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have either been killed or wounded. The U.S. alone has spent $113 billion supporting Ukraine. And an aid package that includes another $60 billion is stuck in Congress.

Part of the reason for that legislative limbo is public opinion here in America. Sentiment at home has shifted radically over the past two years. Back in 2022, 66 percent of Americans thought we needed to help Ukraine pursue a full victory even if it meant getting into a prolonged conflict. But several recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans now oppose additional funding to support Ukraine.

On the ground, Ukraine has suffered a series of setbacks of late. Last weekend, the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka fell to Russian forces. The Biden administration says that’s a direct consequence of congressional inaction.

On this episode of Honestly, a debate: Where is all of America’s aid to Ukraine going? Is the case for additional support for Ukraine really so clear cut? Even if you believe that it is, what has all of this sacrifice gotten Ukraine—and the U.S.? Can Ukraine even win this war? And is victory in Ukraine really as important to America as many politicians claim it is?

We invited two experts on to this week’s episode of Honestly to grapple with these questions:

Bret Stephens is a Pulitzer Prize–winning opinion columnist for The New York Times. His book, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, foresaw much of today’s world. Bret worries that the world is on the precipice of World War III. Isolationism, he argues, only contributes to global instability.

Elbridge Colby is co-founder of The Marathon Initiative think tank. He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under President Trump, and he is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Colby believes the United States must make difficult defense choices in an era of great power competition. Ukraine, he argues, should not be the top priority.

To listen to our conversation, click below. Or scroll down for an edited transcript. 

And once you’ve heard the arguments, tell us what you think in the comments: Would suspending aid to Ukraine be a historic mistake—or the strategically correct call? 

On what America’s role in Ukraine should be, and why:

Bret Stephens: Well, America’s role should be to assist the Ukrainians militarily, primarily. I think Europeans ought to do the bulk of economic assistance so that they can dictate the terms of the end of this war, regain the territories they have lost, not just since 2022 but since 2014, and demonstrate that democracy, which is what Ukraine is, in alliance with NATO and the United States, can defeat the new axis of autocracy and dictatorship that is defined by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Khatami’s Iran. I fear that if we don’t pursue that strategy, if we don’t finish what we started, then what Russia is now doing in Ukraine is going to be a prelude to what it might be doing five or ten years down the road to other European states, including NATO member states, which we are treaty-bound to defend.

So despite the headline cost, it is cheap for us, not only because $100 billion isn’t what it used to be but because Ukraine is doing the hard fighting, defeating, decimating the Russian military so that we don’t have to face this kind of confrontation ourselves in a few years. The second aspect, I would add, is that if Russia is able to win in Ukraine, it will be a signal to other autocracies like China, like Iran, that America is weak, that it’s on the defensive, that it has lost its appetite to fight or even support its allies in the long term. And we are going to be confronting not just a problem in Donbas, but all along the frontiers between free societies and dictatorships.

Bari Weiss: Bridge, what do you say? Is $113 billion in American aid cheap, as Bret says? And would a Ukrainian defeat send that signal, as he suggests, to all of those other autocrats across the world?

Elbridge Colby: Well, it’s far from cheap. It’s actually very expensive. And I think that’s an important point to kind of center on. I mean, the U.S. role in Ukraine, first and foremost, should be defined in terms of our overall interests and our capability to address the global threats that we face. I think the really important thing here is the primacy of the China challenge and how far we are behind where we need to be. The nonpartisan Rand Corporation assessed that we are on a trajectory for basically defeat in a war over Taiwan.

Secondly, this is not just about will. This is about capability, and capability and will are interrelated. And we don’t have a military to fight concurrently in multiple theaters. And of course, the political situation in this country is saying people don’t want to add on massive additional defense spending. So I think Russia is very dangerous, actually. I think that Ukraine’s cause is basically just. I think it’s a democracy. It’s an imperfect democracy, but that’s not really my primary way of looking at it. I’m looking at how much is it in U.S. interests? I think Ukraine’s self-defense is in U.S. interests, but it’s a secondary, or distinctly secondary, interest compared to our primary interests in Asia. And I think the main thing that I would say is that we have to be judicious with what we ask of the American people and American voters, and we’ve already spent well over $100 billion, and that’s a great deal of money and a great deal of political will. So my view is we, like a prudent business, even if we’d like to keep all our franchises open, we have to adapt to the competitive market.

Look, I think it’s essentially a talking point that Ukraine will determine the fate of Taiwan. And the best thought experiment for this is, if it were true that the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine would determine the future of Taiwan, the number one state interested in Taiwan’s future is the People’s Republic of China. China would intervene directly in the Ukraine conflict because it deeply cares about the resolution of the Taiwan issue. Instead, China’s doing what I would expect them to do, which is trying to prolong the war, sap American resources and resolve in a long and potentially desultory conflict. It actually helps even explain why the Chinese haven’t helped the Russians with direct military aid. They’re trying to avoid paying the full cost. 

On why a growing number of Americans oppose more aid for Ukraine:

BS: I still think most Americans—I haven’t looked at the most recent polling, but at least as of a couple of months ago, as I recall—most Americans still support our position in Ukraine. Where it’s collapsing is in the Republican Party. Second reason is I think President Biden has been singularly uninspiring, not only in making the public case for defending Ukraine—no real public speeches, no sustained effort at using his bully pulpit to persuade Americans—but also a war strategy which amounts to trying to make sure that Ukraine doesn’t lose by giving them just enough to fight on, but not doing enough to ensure that they win and and win rapidly. But the third aspect is the collapse of courage and moral clarity, if you want to use that term, I use it advisedly, among a terrifying number of Republicans. You just saw Lindsey Graham, Lindsey Graham, okay, John McCain’s wingman, a guy who went again and again to Ukraine to talk about how important it was to have resolve there, to vote no in the Senate earlier this month when it came to providing that support for Ukraine. He’s doing it for one reason and one reason only, which is that he is cowering, like so many other Republicans, in the face of the demagogic position of their party leader, Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump returns to the White House, God forbid, the Republican internationalism that defined presidencies from Eisenhower through Nixon and Reagan and Bush and the second Bush, and it served us well, is going to collapse. And we’re going to have a Republican Party that is every bit as narrow-minded and ultimately as foolish as the Republican Party that we had going all the way back to the days of Alf Landon in the 1930s.

BW: Bridge, what do you say to the average, let’s say, MAGA voter, who says, why should America have sent a dollar to Ukraine?

EC: Well, I spent a lot of time trying to think about how to make the case for why Americans should be prepared to intervene, albeit more selectively, than, I think the kind of logic that Brett is talking about. So I think what I take is, you know, what’s in the Americans interests is, yes, you cannot be isolated from the world and hope for the best. Another sort of line of difference between Bret and me, and that I see with a lot of the sort of more traditional or quote unquote, kind of neoconservative Republicans in the Senate, for instance, is they seem to hope to kind of like browbeat or press this sentiment back into a corner and then sort of get the Republican voters to, say, support doubling defense spending. 

On the state of the war in Ukraine:

EC: It’s not totally impossible that the Ukrainians could again achieve significant advances. However, I think most serious analysis says that the conflict has largely reverted to the mean of what we’d expect, which is a large-scale, attritional conflict in which both sides have adapted. And so Ukrainian advantage, that they very commendably and heroically exploited in the first year or so of the war, have tended to be neutralized now. And so the Russians now have learned a lot of things, and unfortunately, have the advantages of mass. And if you read what the Ukrainians themselves are saying, this is actually the outcome. Stalemate might be not be the best outcome, but a good outcome because unfortunately, I think what the Russians are probably trying to do is gradually trick the Ukrainian forces and eventually break the will along the lines of what happened to the German army in 1918. So I think that is a possibility. There’s probably going to have to be a significant level of effort and possibly even increases in support to Ukraine, even to achieve that relatively moderate—think of the war in Korea—very unsatisfactory endpoint. I think that’s realistically—and a worse outcome is possible.

BS: Well, right now it’s not great because the Ukrainians are rationing their artillery. They haven’t gotten the military support that they depended on for their early victories. And yet they’re holding on. The front lines really haven’t changed that much. They have essentially regained control of their side of the Black Sea, which means that they can continue to ship grain out to the rest of the world. You know, if you asked the average American what the state of the Civil War was in the summer of 1864, they would say, it’s horrible. Look what just happened in the wilderness in Virginia and at Cold Harbor. And then the next thing you know, Sherman takes Atlanta, is marching toward the sea, toward Savannah. And the war is looking much better. Same thing with World War I in March of 1918. It looked like Germany was about to win. They effectively defeated the Russians. They were within a few miles of Paris. And then things turned around.

BW: What would victory look like? In other words, if Ukraine gives up some of its territory, if it gives up part of Crimea, if it gives up part of the Donbas, will that be defeat, or is that baked in at this point?

BS: It’s Ukraine dictating terms to Russia, not Russia dictating terms to Ukraine. And it is probably an end state where Ukraine regains a lot of its territory, maybe not all of it, and becomes a NATO member state or gets the kind of security guarantees, if not membership in NATO, then,, say, the United States offers to Israel or other major allies where we don’t put in troops, but we guarantee the supply of advanced weaponry, and we essentially ensure that that there’s no way in which their adversaries can capably defeat them. 

On the aid package stuck in Congress that includes $60 billion for Ukraine:

EC: Well, I think the problem with the bill is that its priorities are totally out of whack. I mean, as I’ve said, I support some reduced level of aid to Ukraine that’s genuinely consistent with the prioritization of the Pacific. I also support aid to Israel. Again, that doesn’t detract from our weapon stocks or ability to fund improvements in our lagging position in the Pacific. So instead of having $61 billion for Ukraine, we should be thinking more about $61 billion for the first island chain and so forth in the submarine industrial base. As Congressman Mike Gallagher said, nobody’s idea of a restrainer or anything called the levels of support for Taiwan and the Asia Pacific a joke. And I don’t think a lot of the concerns that we’ve touched on were really materially or seriously addressed in the bill, for instance, the idea of a strategy for ending it, how the Europeans would step up, etc. So you know exactly what the legislative package is a revision. I personally—I’m not an expert and I wouldn’t you know, I don’t think it’s necessary to be too strict about it, but I think it should reflect the actual priorities of the nation, which, by the way, are the stated priorities of the administration and the Republican administration and the Department of Defense, which is to put China first, which we’re not doing.

BS: All legislation in all of American history has been a sausage factory. Why are these things together? Because the administration calculated that pro-Israel Republicans are going to be loath not to support Israel, so it seemed like a politically good calculation. In an ideal world, would these things be separate? Yes, of course they would be. We would be giving Ukraine $60 billion in aid, but we would also be increasing, by a lot, our defense spending, our defense posture, in the Indo-Pacific. I mean, Bridge and I actually, this conversation that we’ve had, I suspect disguises large areas of agreement between us. I have been sounding the alarm about the state of our navy, our air force, our overall defense posture in our defense industry for probably, I don’t know, ten years, at least. But right now, the issue is Ukraine needs help. It is urgent. If we don’t help it now, we’re not necessarily going to have an opportunity to do it in the future. And this was the political formula that did, in the end, win the ascent of 70 U.S. senators. I wish there had been more Republicans among them. 

On Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin:

BS: Tucker Carlson is following in a long tradition of useful idiots or willing dupes who have gone to dictatorial countries and taken a look at a subway system or a skyscraper or some kind of Potemkin village and declared that they’ve seen the future and it’s so much better. You can go back to the journalism of Lincoln Steffens and his visits to the Soviet Union back in the 1920s. You can think of Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times correspondent, who lied about what was happening in the Soviet Union, misreported what was happening in the Soviet Union during the mass starvation of the Ukrainian people, on and on to other useful dupes who have gone to North Korea and sung its praises. Tucker is a particularly revolting example because I know that he knows better. So what’s on display is an idiocy. It’s cynicism. And that is—it’s one for the record books.

EC: My view is fundamentally different, which is, I think these concerns about intervention, these concerns about the, you know, amount of spending and a greater cynicism and skepticism about the foreign policy establishment and the quote unquote, rules-based international order and the legacy system and so forth are very real and indeed growing. And so, Tucker, who I admire and like—I disagree with him on a number of things, but I think he is actually representing that and actually for myself. And to give an example of that, I asked his question to President Trump about why it was worth defending Montenegro when I was doing my book, because I think that is a very real question. Why exactly is it in Americans’ interest to risk war, nuclear war, to defend Baltic states? That is not an obvious question. And in a world in which it’s a more real prospect, it deserves a serious answer. 

You know, the criticism that I often get is, “Bridge, why are you giving aid and comfort to those who are saying we should reduce the defense budget?” My view is that I’m trying to come up with a policy that a Republican president or frankly, any president, but certainly a Republican president, could actually plausibly pursue, and that the American people could sensibly, as they actually exist, real existing Americans, could actually plausibly support. And I think that’s different. And that’s where someone like Tucker, you have to engage with. And the fact that Tucker has become so skeptical and cynical should be an alarm for people, even if you disagree with him, as I do on a wide number of things. 

Final arguments, and more on Tucker:

BW: I think the reason for his resonance is because we are living in a country that is full of people that are demoralizing and despairing, and that is—like he is a symptom of that. How do we change that? Because I think that that’s something, regardless of the strategy you think we should pursue in Ukraine or China, that you both would agree on, that living in a country where people don’t have a sense that it’s worth fighting for is not a good thing, if we are in a period, you know, that is the most dangerous since the ’70s or arguably since the 1930s. I’ll let each of you respond to that.

BS: Bridge talks about trying to create a middle path between two extremes. I listen to him, and I think that his middle path is, in fact, a case of falling between two stools because failing to support Ukraine and failing to help them at least rapidly bring the war to a positive conclusion as they see it is not going to help us husband our resources. It’s going to invite challenges on multiple fronts. By the way, we’ve been witnessing that in the Middle East as well as the United States, faces challenges from the southern end of the Red Sea to Iraq and Iran and Lebanon and elsewhere. And those are going to continue to multiply. Maybe it’s a sign of my age, but one of my reference points is the run-up to the Second World War. What happened in that? World War II didn’t start. World War II was a collection of regional conflicts that the Western powers effectively left untended, that rows and rows like water in separate cups until they finally overspilled and became a single global conflict.

One of the reasons I’m so afraid is that I’m watching that happen now because we are not sufficiently doing enough to drain the conflict in Ukraine. We’re not doing enough to drain the conflict in the Middle East by standing up to these dictatorships when the advantages are on our side. So what happened in World War II is we waited and waited until the advantages weren’t so clearly on our side, and we found ourselves in a genuinely mortal struggle for survival against evil dictatorships. I’m depressed to listen to Bridge, who’s obviously a very sharp and talented guy, express admiration for someone as demagogic as Tucker Carlson, whom I really see as the Father Coughlin of our day. I don’t know to how many people Tucker is speaking, but you put your finger on the problem there, which is that he is speaking to a society, to a country, or to at least a demographic that has lost its ability to think of the possibility of American success. And I think that very much resembles the America of the late 1970s, a similar period of inflation, malaise, and a certain kind of defeatism and despondency.

The best answer to that, the best cure for that, is not to feed the despair and despondency or the cynicism or the lavish praise for dictators who murder journalists of whom Tucker, by the way, is not. The right response to that is to persuade people in free societies that their prosperity and security is better assured by standing up to aggressive dictatorships while they can, while the costs are relatively low and manageable before they become unmanageable. And the simple case is this: Would you rather treat your cancer at stage one or stage four? Everyone would tell you stage one. This is what we need to do now. I’m afraid we’re in stage two, but the sooner we treat this cancer, the growing metastasizing of dictatorships, they’re aligned, the deepening of their alliances, the safer we’re going to be at home, the more prosperous our children’s future will be as well.

EC: I guess the fundamental thing I would say is I think we should look at how successful Bret has been in convincing the American people who appear to be clearly moving in the opposite direction. And so the question is, if we’re going to get super real, we can’t afford to invest in political strategies that don’t work. I think you’re right that Americans are feeling demoralized. And my basic view is, the elite has done very poorly over the last 25 years. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the 1990s. When President Clinton left office—and I was not a huge fan of his—but the budget was almost balanced. China was a blip on the horizon. Race relations were pretty good. We weren’t in any major wars. And you look 20 years later and things are pretty bad. The economy has been deindustrialized. Economic growth has slowed significantly. There’s essentially like an invasion coming into this country, several major wars that have not ended successfully. Massive debt and structural deficits where it’s not even clear that we’ll be able to pay the entitlements that people have been promised. This is a bad situation. So this explains a lot of the skepticism of people.

And of course, that I’m not even mentioning things like Russiagate and the 51, you know, agents, intelligence people and stuff that you could go on and on and on where people feel like, wait a minute. How much has this been working? I mean, if you were thinking in 1995 about the American foreign policy establishment, it’s actually not bad. If you were looking in 1973, people were very, very skeptical. So, I mean just to be super real, you have to engage with it and meet people at least part-way. And I think that’s the way that I look at what Tucker is saying. Again, I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, but I mean, he is, I think, probably the most influential figure on the right. And that is not just going to go away. You’re not just going to persuade people. And the proof is in the pudding that you haven’t. So we’re like, are we going to address the problem, or are we going to pretend like we’re just going to be able to turn away from the iceberg?

If we actually followed my strategy more in World War II because even though Japan bombed us, we had a Europe-first strategy because that was the decisive theater at the time. And we also made common cause with the evil empire, which Stalin’s empire was worse than Gorbachev’s or Andropov’s. I agree with a lot of the threat analysis, like take your cancer analogy. Well, I would say that Ukraine is like a skin, like a melanoma thing or a growth on your arm. It’s potentially dangerous but manageable. China’s like an acute heart disease. It hasn’t happened yet. But if it does you could die like right now. And that’s the way I look at it. And I’m saying—I’m trying to convince those people who are increasingly just totally tuning out the old foreign policy stuff, just totally tuning it out. Eric Schmitt, the senator from Missouri, pointed out that every senator who’s under 55, Republican, who was elected since 2017 or 2018 voted against the supplemental. That is where things are heading. So it’s either going to end up, I think, like what I’m talking about, or like closer to Rand Paul. And that’s the situation. I think the way to avoid ending up where Rand Paul would be is by taking their concerns seriously and trying at least to meet them part-way.

BS: The good news is, at least 70 senators still see it my way. And if I had a melanoma and heart disease, I would take them both seriously. 

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The NSA’s “Big Delete” Judd Legum

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National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. (Photo by NSA via Getty Images)

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”

The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.

The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the “Big Delete” is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA’s internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with “Data Science Development Program interns” to “understand the false-positive use cases” and “help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives.” Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating “unintended downtime” of “mission-related” websites.

While Trump’s executive order claims to target “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” the NSA’s banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that “confirmation bias” — the tendency of people “to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect” — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

The government memory hole

Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online “without clarity on what had been changed or removed.”

An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages “found 662 examples of deletions and additions” since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.

One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums’ “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”

Following Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals, multiple federal websites have removed transgender and intersex people from the acronym “LGBTQI,” NBC News reported. On the State Department website, a web page that used to provide resources for “LGBTQI Travelers” now addresses “LGB Travelers.” The Social Security Administration has made similar changes, with a page heading now reading “Social Security for LGBQ People.” Some agencies, including the Department of Education, have removed web pages with LGBTQ resources altogether.

On X, Elon Musk’s United States DOGE Service is celebrating the deletions:


We started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so we hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch


Federal agencies have also been scrubbing websites for mentions of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.” The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications issued a directive to “archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” the Guardian reported. Resources on the Forest Service website, including the Climate Change Resource Center and the Climate Action Tracker, appear to still be unavailable. The Department of Transportation website replaced the phrase “climate change” with “climate resilience.”

Among the agencies with the most deleted web pages is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which took down over “3,000 pages,” according to the New York Times. In one example, data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks important health metrics, was temporarily unavailable, only to come back online later with “at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.” A banner on the top of the CDC website states it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

Last week, the Trump administration was sued by Doctors for America, a physicians’ group, for removing health resources and data from government websites, arguing that it “deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients.”

 

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The Vibe Shift Comes to the Super Bowl. Plus. . . River Page

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It’s Monday, February 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Why USAID is the wrong hill for Dems to die on; why Trump is flooding the zone; how American educators are conning kids; and much more.

But first: The Super Bowl.

Boring game, huh? The Eagles beat the Chiefs in a 40–22 blowout that will have pleased my colleague Joe Nocera, but will not be remembered as a classic.

The Super Bowl isn’t just a game, it’s a cultural barometer—and sometimes, a crystal ball. In 2016, Beyoncé danced on the Super Bowl stage to her new song “Formation,” flanked by backup dancers dressed like Black Panthers. Controversy ensued, foreshadowing the great war over woke that would dominate for years to come.

This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up—the first sitting president to do so—and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies—Canadian rapper Drake.

Speaking of Canada, even the ads couldn’t escape the vibe shift. In the wake of Trump’s proposed, but currently delayed, 25 percent tariffs against Canadian goods, the province of Ontario ran an ad reminding Americans that Canucks are important trade partners and good neighbors, eh bud?

Speaking of “bud,” Bud Light launched a new ad to convince America they aren’t woke anymore. Still reeling from its disastrous 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which spurred an effective conservative boycott, the beer’s new commercial featured Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis—a comic who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for affecting a Chinese accent on a podcast. (Read Anson Frericks’ great essay on the Bud Light saga.)

Bud Light wasn’t the only company with a subtle rebrand. After a backlash last year over their support for trans women participating in female sports, Nike launched a new ad putting female athletes front and center. The tagline: You can’t win, so win. Well, maybe they can’t win because they’re competing against biological males, Nike. Still, the ad is about female sports and features only female athletes, which is radical conservatism by Nike’s standards.

And the least subtle rebrand of all? Hardee’s—or, for some reason, Carl’s Jr., if you’re west of the Mississippi—brought back its sexy bikini ads after ditching them eight years ago. The real MAHA? Make America Horny Again.

Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats

On Friday, a judge temporarily blocked Musk and Trump’s plans to put 2,200 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staffers on paid leave, in response to a lawsuit brought by two unions. The judge also reinstated 500 employees who had already been placed on leave. The order will remain in effect until midnight on Valentine’s Day, and the judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday. The unions argued that the government was violating the Constitution and harming workers by taking them out of their jobs.

Unions and judges aren’t the only ones trying to stand in the way of Musk and Trump’s plans for USAID. Congressional Democrats have suddenly become USAID’s greatest defenders, leading a rally in Washington to protect the agency.

The D.C. crowd may have cheered them on but the rest of the country won’t, says Free Press columnist Ruy Teixeira. He points out that most Americans agree that the U.S. spends too much money on foreign aid, and the working class is particularly skeptical of foreign handouts. In their rush to shoot down Musk, have Democrats aimed the gun at their own feet?

Read Ruy’s new column, “Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats.”

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This week, one mysterious and presumably wealthy reader is offering free FP subscriptions to readers who prove that they unsubscribed from a legacy media outlet. That’s right. That means free podcasts, free TGIF, and free access to a backlog of God-only-knows-how-many articles. Send proof to tgif@thefp.com, and do it fast: You have to be one of the first 100 entrants to win. What counts as “legacy media”? Use your judgment: The New York Times certainly counts. Paying for articles on CNN.com for some reason? That counts. Cosmo too. The Washington Post? Absolutely. How much more money does Bezos really need? Highlights magazine is an edge case but if you can make the argument, we’re all ears. Happy unsubscribing!

Tyler Cowen: Why Trump Is Flooding the Zone

The first month of the Trump administration has been a whirlwind: dozens of executive actions on everything from DEI to birthright citizenship; short-lived trade wars; massive restructuring of the federal bureaucracy; and so many Truth Social posts. His latest move? Signing a proclamation making February 9 the first Gulf of America Day while aboard Air Force One flying over said Gulf en route to the Super Bowl. It all seems so chaotic—even those of us who are paid to keep up with it all barely can. But is there a method to the madness? Economist, polymath, and podcaster Tyler Cowen says yes.

Read his latest article, “A Unified Theory of Trump’s Hyperactive Start.”

How American Educators Are Conning Kids

The state of America’s public education is bleak: U.S. students are further behind in reading and math than they were in 2012. American kids in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles are performing worse than they did in the early 1990s, and the “achievement gap” between our highest- and lowest-performing students is now one of the worst in the developed world. In a shocking new report, Free Press journalist Frannie Block writes that instead of solving the problem, educators in a number of states are covering it up.

Read Frannie on “How American Educators are Conning Kids.”

In other Frannie Block education news, her reporting on Qatari influence in American education was cited in Congressional testimony last week.

Can the FAA Be Fixed?

The shocking midair collision above the Potomac last month has prompted many to ask whether America’s air-traffic control system needs reform. The answer, writes John Tierney, is yes—and urgently. He describes an outdated system that still uses paper and pen instead of infrared and high-resolution cameras. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees America’s skies, has delayed modernization for decades. Will this crash provide the impetus for long-overdue reform?

Read John Tierney: “America’s Air-Traffic Control System Is an International Disgrace.

(Olivier Douliery via Getty Images)
  • A new CBS/YouGov survey found Trump has a positive approval rating across all age groups—with younger voters particularly enthused. The poll found 53 percent of voters approve of the overall job Trump is doing—a higher level of approval than he ever reached during his first term.

  • On Friday, Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble. Yesterday, Trump predicted that his administration will find “billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” at the Defense Department. Yeah, probably. But it’s still unclear whether or not cuts will be possible. Elon’s potential role in searching the Pentagon has already raised conflict of interest concerns, given that his companies SpaceX and Starlink have contracts with the government. Plus, there is an open constitutional question about the administration’s ability to stop funds already appropriated by Congress.

  • Then, early Saturday morning a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury records and payment systems, and ordered the Trump advisory board to destroy any material they’ve already downloaded. The ruling was the result of a suit brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general who say that giving Musk and his team access to Treasury data puts Americans’ private information at risk. Musk says that the judge who ruled against DOGE should be impeached.

  • Trump ruled out deporting Prince Harry on Friday during an interview with the New York Post, saying “he’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” He went on to say that he believes the prince is “whipped” by his American wife, former actress Meghan Markle. It’s part of a long-running feud: The Duchess of Sussex called him “divisive” and “misogynistic” during his 2016 presidential run, and Trump has since repeatedly criticized the couple over their reported disagreements with the royal family.

  • The CDC says nearly 100 people became sick with an unspecified gastrointestinal illness on board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. The maritime cesspool left Tampa on February 1 en route to Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, before returning to port Saturday. It’s the sixth disease outbreak the CDC has recorded on a cruise this year. Disease-ridden, numerous, and rat-like as they scurry about from port to port, cruise ships are the vermin of the sea and it’s high time we called an exterminator! Clean them up!

 

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February 9, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

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On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/protecting-second-amendment-rights-7b90/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/09/trump-courts-block-early-agenda-00203230

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/judge-blocks-trump-administration-plan-usaid-workers-leave-00203205

https://www.gao.gov/press-release/gaos-work-yields-70.4-billion-savings-federal-government-fy23

https://oig.ftc.gov/what-you-need-know-about-office-inspector-general

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines_c1AfT3R.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5129353-gop-support-for-musk-influence-with-trump-falls-dramatically-poll/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bama-senator-howls-like-stuck-pig-after-she-sees-nih-cuts-impact-in-state

Bluesky:

donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lhpxjdo6gk2y

atrupar.com/post/3lhrce37puk2l

joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lhr2d6nuck2f

X:

steve_vladeck/status/1888581987532788100

AaronBlake/status/1888582415137780065

emptywheel/status/1888616052004946080

Msdesignerlady/status/1888356802028585190

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