Politics Archives

Thursday

February 20, 2025

Elon Musk wields chainsaw at impromptu CPAC appearance

National Harbor, Maryland Elon Musk made a surprise appearance at CPAC Thursday afternoon, where Argentinian president Javier Milei presented him with a chainsaw. “This is a chainsaw for bureaucracy!” Musk said, brandishing it before a whooping crowd. The Department of Government Efficiency chief took to the stage with Newsmax host Rob Schmitt. Musk wore his MAGA hat — “dark gothic MAGA!” as he said — a black jacket and mirror shades, which he kept on for the duration of his appearance. The X CEO called for America to “legalize comedy” and agreed with Schmitt that legacy media companies receiving USAID money from the federal government were becoming “mouthpieces for the state.

Derek VanBuskirk

Liz Truss calls for a ‘Trump revolution in Britain’

National Harbor, Maryland Former British prime minister Liz Truss began her speech at CPAC today by declaring that America has just entered its golden age with the election of President Trump. Britain, however, is in its dark age, she said: “Let’s be honest, Britain isn't working.” Truss’s concerns for the current state of the UK and Europe mirrored those expressed in Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich last week. She touched on attacks on free speech in the UK, the rise of Pakistani grooming gangs and the inability of the British government to do anything about the rise in illegal immigration.

Teresa Mull

VP Vance touts border security, energy and humor at CPAC

Vice President J.D. Vance took to the Conservative Political Action Committee stage moments ago for a sit-down interview with Mercedes Schlapp. In his signature earnest-yet-easy style, Vance reiterated his boss’s main, shared goals one month into the new administration: secure the southern border and grow the economy by unleashing American energy. While casting plenty of blame on the Biden administration throughout his talk, Vance touted the Trump administration’s early accomplishments; border crossings are already down 90 percent, he said, and “we’re just getting started.” In response to a question about fixing the economy, Vance said the key is, “Drill, baby, drill.

Wednesday

February 19, 2025

The Spectator

Bidenbucks out, DoGEbucks in?

Forget Trumpbucks and Bidenbucks: Americans could see Muskbucks (or DoGEbucks?) hitting their mailboxes if the world’s richest man has his way.This time, it wouldn’t be via payouts from X — it would be courtesy of the billions of dollars in savings that Musk claims have already come from the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DoGE) wide-ranging cuts. According to Musk, DoGE has already saved taxpayers $55 billion — and he would like to see payments sent back to taxpayers when his agency winds down ahead of America’s 250th birthday. The idea started — where else?

Grace Curley

A Trump and Musk love-in on Hannity

When your fiercest loyalists are accusing your government of being taken over by Elon Musk, who they brand a “parasitic illegal immigrant,” what’s the best way to respond? Donald Trump opted for a side-by-side interview with the X CEO on Fox News, speaking to Sean Hannity, the anchor with whom he remains friendliest. And for all the attempts — both from inside and outside the conservative tent — to drive a wedge between Trump and tech billionaire Musk, the two seemed chummier than ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMbcMO5JgEo&ab_channel=FoxNews Responding to Hannity’s claim that the mainstream media wants to see the pair get a divorce, Trump was nonplussed.

Tuesday

February 18, 2025

Derek VanBuskirk

Transportation secs duel over who’s to blame for plane crashes

The current and former US secretaries of transportation are playing the blame game following a rise in aviation crashes since the beginning of the Trump administration. Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden's transportation secretary, peppered X with questions Monday, asking, “The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?” Buttigieg's enquiries followed a string of plane crashes throughout the nation, beginning on January 29 when an American Airlines plane and a Black Hawk military helicopter collided above the Potomac River in Washington, DC, resulting in the death of sixty-seven people.

Monday

February 17, 2025

Roger Kimball

Masters of corruption

I am reliably informed that the flow of water in the Potomac River is approximately 11,500 cubic feet per second. At Little Falls, near Washington, DC, that works out to about 7 billion gallons per day. Is it enough? I ask because all the chatter we hear about “draining the swamp” is completely pointless. The swamp that is the Washington establishment cannot be effectively drained. There is no valve huge enough to handle the requisite discharge. The institutional sewers would be overwhelmed by the effluvium. No, the fetid, corrupt, woke and self-serving bureaucracy that is the seat of government can be disburdened of its accumulated muck only by more vigorous means. Repristination requires that it be aggressively flushed, not passively drained.

Josh Peterson

Who’s afraid of ghost guns?

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down by Luigi Mangione in New York City on December 4. Surveillance footage hit the internet within hours. Wild speculation spread about the strange gun in the killer’s hands. The elongated barrel, the chamber movements that signaled repeated gun jams, the lack of recoil. Was it a veterinary euthanasia gun? As it turned out, it was a homemade gun, commonly known as a “ghost gun," printed using 3D technology. And, as the furore over Mangione dies down, it’s his weapon that remains the subject of violent disagreement and debate. Two months before Thompson’s assassination, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the great ongoing ghost gun case — Garland v. VanDerStok.

Daniel McCarthy

How Trump is revolutionizing Washington

Weeks into his second term, it’s clear President Trump intends to be the most transformative force our politics has seen in a century. He seems equally determined to change the course of the world — and perhaps its map, too. Trump’s enemies can blame themselves for making this possible. They showed him that impeachment is nothing to fear: securing conviction in the Senate is nigh impossible and whatever damage impeachment might do to a president’s reputation has already been inflicted on Trump. Two impeachments and a welter of post-presidential criminal prosecutions and even convictions failed to stain Trump in voters’ eyes. On the contrary, they left him more popular than ever and discredited the institutions his opponents employed as weapons of their “lawfare.

Bridget Phetasy

Elon Musk’s critics are more autistic than he ever could be

I’ve managed to keep most of my liberal family relationships and friendships intact, even after going public about voting for Trump. Most of them shrugged and applied the principle our grandparents taught us — blood is thicker than politics. That is, until Elon Musk. He has proven to be the straw that broke the liberals’ back. Realizing that they’d rendered calling Trump “literally Hitler” ineffective, many normie Democrats and liberal commentators have redirected this energy toward the “Chief Twit." First there was the hand gesture at the post-inauguration rally.

Ben Domenech

Trump’s hundred days of shock and awe

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week. Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping.

Andy Ngo

Whatever happened to antifa?

Since the 2024 presidential election, America has been braced for violence from the political far-left — and with good reason. Extremists like antifa, the “anti-fascist” group, are explicitly aggressive. They think looting, arson and intimidation are all acceptable, and until very recently they’ve had the support of the establishment. For a decade their liberal allies gave antifa carte blanche to cause criminal damage in the name of “resisting fascism” or opposing racism. So where is antifa now? What is it planning? It’s an understandable concern. The citizens of Portland remember all too well the bouts of rioting and violence by Black Lives Matter-antifa in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.

Charles Lipson

Trump’s presidency is an ink-blot test for America

Americans are being given a national ink-blot test. Their answers tell us how a divided country sees the political landscape and what they think of President Trump’s bold efforts to reshape it. The scope for differing interpretations is illustrated by a story about one such Rorschach test. The psychiatrist shows his new patient ink blot after ink blot. No response. Finally, the exasperated doctor pleads with him to say something, anything. “Look, doc,” he says, “I didn’t come here for you to show me dirty pictures.” That’s exactly how Democrats see Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s one dirty picture after another. A few moderate Republicans share that perspective, but they are outliers in a party Trump has reshaped in his own image.

Friday

February 14, 2025

The Spectator

The many legal challenges to Trump’s Executive Orders

It was Groundhog Day in more ways than one this month. Yes, Punxsutawney Phil (accurately) predicted six more weeks of winter, but America also witnessed newly inaugurated President Donald Trump issue a flurry of Executive Orders, only to see many challenged immediately by Democratic attorneys general and paused by judges.During Trump’s first term, Executive Orders like his one restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries were challenged by Democrats and liberal activist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. This time around, many of the challenges and pauses are focusing on Trump’s work, in conjunction with Elon Musk, to slash government spending radically.

Ben Domenech

Trump puts the cartels in his sights

Consider it the first tangible example of Donald Trump’s Western Hemisphere policy made real. The president’s day-one Executive Order calling for the “total elimination” of multiple cartels is now getting its teeth in the form of a list drawn up by the Department of State designating eight different groups based across Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations, according to the New York Times.

Niall Gooch

Cost-effectiveness can’t trump everything

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency noted on X their discovery that “federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania” Tuesday. Apparently, the facility employs 700 people, over 200 feet underground, processing around 100,000 applications per year, which are then stored in boxes and brown envelopes. This processing can last many months, according to the intrepid boys at DoGE. The clear implication was that they had uncovered yet another absurd and archaic operation, needlessly long-winded and ripe for automation. I must confess this was not my reaction. I am generally sympathetic to the idea of lean, thrifty government.

Wednesday

February 12, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Tulsi caps off a big day for ‘realism and restraint’ in foreign affairs

For the proponents of what they like to call realism and restraint in foreign affairs, it’s been a banner day. President Donald Trump has initiated peace talks with Russia by sidelining Ukraine. And Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed to become director of national intelligence — overseeing eighteen agencies — on a 52-48 vote. At the White House, where she was sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump declared that Gabbard is “an American of extraordinary courage and exceptional patriotism.” The sole Republican to dissent from her nomination was Mitch McConnell who has vowed to uphold oldline Republican internationalism during what is more than likely his final term in the Senate.

The Spectator

Why DoGE should scrap the F-35

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) has set its sights on the Pentagon. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth told Axios that he will welcome “the keen eye of DoGE” to scrutinize Department of Defense (DoD) spending “very soon.”Hegseth also said he’s already talked to DoGE head honcho Elon Musk about ways to make the Defense Department run more efficiently. Though in Hegseth’s view “efficiency” does not equate to funding cuts (he wants DoD spending to increase), one quick and easy way to curb waste right out the gate would be to abandon the F-35 fighter jet, fire every senior person involved in its commission and put in place systems to ensure that such horrors never happen again.

Ben Domenech

Tulsi confirmed: Gabbard survives Todd Young’s attack on the Constitution

Despite frequent claims that Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to be director of national intelligence was in danger, repeated ad nauseam in the Washington press, ultimately she didn't even need J.D. Vance to come back to break a tie. Only Mitch McConnell broke with the rest of his Republican colleagues to oppose her confirmation, which — as I've previously written — was never in doubt once she got out of the Intelligence Committee. Yet it's worth noting one of the untoward prices paid along the way, given the egregious nature of its violation of the separation of powers.

William Edwards and Charles Lipson

DoGE will only work when government agencies compete

Elon Musk calls his Department for Government Efficiency (DoGE) the “wood chipper for bureaucracy.” He’s going to need much heavier machinery. The dysfunction across federal government is now near-impossible to cut through. For decades, these agencies have been allowed for decades to grow larger and become slower, more expensive and less responsive to the taxpayers they allegedly serve. When you think of a monopoly, you might picture the sluggish service at Blockbuster Video before streaming competitors drove it out of business. Perhaps you think of Detroit’s lousy cars in the 1970s, before Japanese imports captured the market and forced American manufacturers to reorganize and compete.