An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff

Meanwhile, it is being reported, Xi has been telling Trump how Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and must be reunited with the motherland. A meeting is being proposed. The Putin playbook is clearly an inspiration…

That is one of the current double standards on the US right at the moment. Russian expansionism is less alarming to many because Russia is a white Christian nation, and the far right in America is smitten with the Orthodox church, its muscular Christianity and patriarchy, and its staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

China, in the eyes of the US right, are godless asian communists, and thus enemies of Western Civilization.

Harding’s response to Question 6 is, IMO, spot on in terms of why we are where we are and how to make this a win-win.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-strategy-ukraine-russia-peace-negotiations

She doesn’t talk about China much, but the impact on Taiwan of taking her win-win strategy would be overwhelmingly positive.

That being said, I don’t have much hope that this will happen. Yes, what little hope I do have is pinned on my unlikely theory that Trump is trying to bring the EU/UK fully online to have a united front, Witkoff’s bumblings notwithstanding.

Here’s a sympathetic Karen Bass interview. At least, I’m more sympathetic to her than I was before watching the interview.

“Matt Welch visits Getty House for a one-on-one with Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass on the fires, ICE, Trump/Mamdani, Angela Davis/Cuba, and a whole lotta disagreement about the relationship between property rights & building new stuff.”

Even the Mayor Says L.A. Isn’t Well Governed

I’m not sure that Rubio (or his people) is the source of the leak. Given the leak of the second call between Ditriev and Ushakov, I wonder if this hasn’t been leaked to Bloomberg from one or more of the European intelligence services. I’m sure that they would rather be dealing with Rubio than with Witkoff and Vance, and they have been a lot more public in their profile since The Ancient Orange One threatened to withhold US intelligence from other NATO members.

I’d trust the Euro’s competence over Rubio’s.

I should re-read that transcript whenever I’m suffering from imposter syndrome.

On the meta subject of “what a fucking bunch of clowns”, I’m pasting what David Frum has to say about the end of DOGE, and what it has done. I understand that not many here are that receptive to conservative voices, but I like to keep my hand in and see what sane conservatives are saying (I’ve said before that I still find it incredible to regard the author of “axis of evil” in that light, but times change), so here goes:

I want to open with a few preliminary thoughts about the expiry of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE was never really a department of government. It had a kind of extralegal existence. It was a creature of the president. But in the opening months of the Trump presidency, it dominated the agenda. It created havoc across the U.S. government and across the lives of many, many government employees and many people who depend on the U.S. government for services. I think, as it expires now, almost at the end of the year 2025, I think it’s fair to render the verdict that DOGE was an almost total fiasco. It failed to achieve its own stated goals of making any impact in government spending. The fiscal situation at the end of President [Donald] Trump’s first year is much, much worse than it was under President [Joe] Biden. Total debt—not that these numbers mean anything anymore, they’re so big—the total debt of the United States is now approaching $40 trillion and will continue to climb through the Trump presidency and beyond.

The root of the problem was that President Trump maintains very high levels of spending, is raising spending on defense, has made permanent the tax cuts that were supposed to be temporary when they were passed in 2025—sorry, 2017. They were now renewed in 2025, and they will last indefinitely. And DOGE and Trump’s big plan to offset the impact of his spending and his tax cuts is his tariff regime, which, first, doesn’t raise all that much money. Second, he’s already spent the money multiple times over: He’s promised to give the money to the farmers. He’s promised to rebate the money to the American consumer. He’s promised to rebate much more than the tariffs are collecting to the American consumer. And anyway, the tariffs are probably illegal and may well shrink or disappear very, very soon. So the DOGE failed entirely in its object. But I think it is worth thinking about why it failed and what legacy it leaves behind.

DOGE failed for three main reasons. The first was it was run by arrogant people who did not take the trouble to understand what they were doing. Elon Musk approached the problem of reducing government spending as a kind of coding error, a problem of computer engineering. You didn’t need any subject-matter expertise. You didn’t need to understand how health-care programs worked or how the Department of Defense worked. Just as a website is a website is a website, so he figured that solving the problems of overspending was solving the problems of overspending. You didn’t need to know anything in particular—=; you just fired people and saw what happened later. So in their arrogance and in their high-handedness, they didn’t bother to learn anything. And so they began cutting wires, metaphorically, and discovered that they were connected—those wires ran important machines.

But second, because they didn’t understand how government worked, or understand their subject matter, what they were doing, they completely misdiagnosed the problem. Government does have fraud, of course, and it has inefficiency, of course. A lot of the inefficiency is there to prevent fraud; that’s why there’s so much paperwork, is to make it difficult for people to steal. But even with the certain undeniable amounts of fraud and inefficiency that there are in government, they’re just not big drivers of the way the U.S. government spends. Most money flows out in direct payments to people, Social Security; or it flows out in direct payment to hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid; or it flows out to pay for the national defense. You have to wrestle with those problems, and the idea that you’re going to find cases of obvious [duplication] of spending or spending that achieves nothing, especially when you don’t know how anything works, that’s just—because they were arrogant, they didn’t study the problem. Because they didn’t study the problem, they addressed the wrong problem. And because they addressed the wrong problem—looking for inefficiency and fraud—instead of actually having to reduce services to people and products, they failed.

But the last thing that they did, and this is maybe the most important, was they broke the law. Under the law of the United States, once the House approves an appropriation, once the Senate confirms the appropriation, once Congress agrees on a budget—or any kind of spending mechanism—and once the president signs it, the president’s people cannot rescind that spending. What Trump was doing was claiming, through DOGE, a power to revoke government spending that Congress had passed and the president had signed. And that’s just illegal. Now, there are some states that give the governor a line-item veto, where, when a budget is presented to him, he can strike this item or that item. And maybe that’s a good idea, and maybe that’s not a good idea. But the president doesn’t have that power, and he certainly does not have the power to rescind the spending after he or his predecessor have signed the spending. So DOGE collapsed in the end because, again, they were too conceited to find out what they were doing; therefore, they did the wrong thing.

But DOGE does leave a legacy, and that is something we need to address. When you think about What did DOGE do?, the DOGE people were, on the nicest reading of what happened, were careless, or maybe something more sinister than careless, so that’s one legacy.
The second is that DOGE did enduring harm to scientific and biomedical and climate research. The cuts made to the National Institutes of Health, the agencies that study the oceans and the air, those are difficult to undo. The people who worked in those jobs are very valuable people. Now, they’ve chosen public service either because that’s what they wanted or because they liked the benefits or because it suited their family life. But once you dispense them from public service, they will find other work to do. And you can’t simply blow a whistle and say, Okay, everybody come back. They have not been idling and collecting unemployment insurance; they’ve gone on to often more-lucrative jobs in the private sector. And it’s going to be difficult to call them back. Or they’ll be redirected from researching the kinds of things that National Institutes of Health do to the kinds of things that universities and other people do, and they’re different. So there has been a deep and enduring damage to the scientific-research capabilities of the United States government.

A third enduring change has been damage to the voice and standing of the United States. Rebuilding the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and other stations, rebuilding the public-diplomacy aspects of the State Department, again, that’s going to be a big job. Many of the important people who had very specific language skills have been lost. The integrity of the service has been compromised. The relationship with listeners in unfree countries who turn to the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, or other stations for information, that has been strained. And most important of all the public-information and public-appearance things that the United States does has been the attack on foreign aid.

The United States doesn’t spend money abroad out of random charity or being a sucker or a dupe; it does so to advance the interests of the United States. And even when it acts in the most purely humanitarian way—when food arrives in a famine zone or flood relief after a disaster—it’s building relationships with people whose governments may defame the United States, but who will remember, When I was in trouble, it was an agency of the United States government that helped me. And that may have some political impact. Tremendous damage has been done to that. Some have tried to estimate lives lost because of the interruption of the flow of aid. That may be trying to quantify something that can’t be quantified. But there’s no doubt that people have been hurt, people have been harmed, the reputation of the United States has been lowered, and this will be enduring.

The last thing, though, and one of the hardest to fix and one of the most immediately felt, has been what DOGE did do was dismantle a lot of the financial-enforcement apparatus of the United States. The Internal Revenue Service that collects revenue for the government, the Securities and Exchange Commission, those agencies were really ravaged. And maybe it wasn’t a total coincidence that the head of DOGE had contentions and disagreements with the IRS and the SEC, and they’re now much less able to enforce, that DOGE’s damage to those agencies has been ratified by the recent government shutdown in the deal to end it. President Biden put about $40 billion over a decade into modernizing the IRS, both so that they would be more responsive to consumers, but also to improve the efficiency of their tax collections. A lot of the fraud in the United States is concentrated where the money is, on the high end. It’s been estimated that a dollar put into IRS collections brings back maybe 10 times, maybe more, in revenue to the government. And all of that has been dismantled. It is much easier to cheat on your taxes. It’s much easier to defraud your investors, if you’re a publicly traded company, post-DOGE than it was before. And again, reclaiming that expertise—getting the IRS people back, getting the SEC people back, rebuilding those agencies from the ground—that’s going to be the work of many, many years, and a lot will flow by in the interim. So DOGE did permanent damage in making it easier for the very wealthy to escape paying their taxes and, therefore, putting more of the onus of funding the government on people at the middle and the bottom.

You could think of DOGE, it seems to me, as a kind of decapitation strike against the executive functions of the United States government, that a lot of the government that runs on autopilot—as the Social Security system does—it continues to function in the way that, after a decapitation strike, the different branches of a military may continue, the cafeteria service may continue to work. But the brain’s nerve that [operates] the system, those were really damaged in a profound way, and in a way that is felt immediately and will last a long time. It’s an example of how the Trump administration, in its claim to make America great, is actually making America weak and little and pitiful. The reputation of the country is less. His ability to collect revenue is less. His ability to enforce its financial laws is less. Its ability to do research, to understand the universe, to protect Americans from diseases, all of that is less—less, less, less. But the deficit, the debt, the spending—more, more, more.

What a fiasco. After all the self-congratulation of the early months of this administration, it ends in, as so much of this administration does, in failure and disgrace.

The true measure of taxes is government spending. The portion not covered by taxes will still come out of our pockets.

I had been aware that Witkoff got rich in real estate. What I had not known was how he got rich.

Basically, while Trump was making money by helping Russian oligarchs and mobsters launder money via New York apartment buildings, Witkoff was doing the same with commercial property there.

Suddenly, what we’re seeing from the two of them becomes expliciable. Unsurprising even.

Happy Thanksgiving!

President Trump has urged the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, not to provoke China 

The idea that Trump, Trump of all people, urging anyone not to be provocative? It simply boggles the mind. Next he’ll be adminishing Americans to eat healthy, no doubt.

RIP Tom Stoppard. And, relevant to current US politics and democracy worldwide:

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy,” a character says in “Rock ’n’ Roll.” “It’s the counting.”