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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Eric Adams fallout continues [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-17
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
The real victims of Eric Adams’ NYC corrupt bargain might go to Gitmo Thousands of NYC immigrants are in the crosshairs of the corrupt deal Eric Adams made with Trump's Justice Department. And yet we’re not paying nearly enough attention to the real victims of Trump’s lawyers’ indecent proposal and Adams’ narcissistic willingness to go along with it. When I think of political rot that’s eating away the Big Apple, I see people like Isabel Miranda, a 39-year-old recent refugee from Colombia who lives in a midtown Manhattan shelter with her two young children and is scared her family could be ripped apart by the next knock from Trump’s federal “mass deportation” cops. “It makes you desperate; you go out, and they look at us as if we were delinquents who came here to destroy the country, and that’s not the case,” Miranda told NBC News in her native Spanish recently. “We contribute, too, because we work hard and we do the tough work ...The only thing I ask for is that my children remain safe, because I can’t go back to Colombia.”
This crooked Eric Adams deal is not fading from the news.
John Harwood/Zeteo:
Republican Lawmakers Are Cowards. Here's Why The moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party is the gaping chest wound of America. Democratic strategists and commentators have spent weeks diagnosing the party’s ills, for good reason: They just lost an election they expected to win. But for the American body politic, that represents the equivalent of examining a sprained ankle while ignoring a gaping chest wound. The gaping chest wound is the moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party. The GOP’s descent into nihilism has become so familiar as to almost escape notice. Indeed, the reason Democratic shortcomings attract more scrutiny is that serious-minded people now take for granted that only Democrats remain capable of running our government consistent with the rule of law.
The Economist:
Elon Musk is failing to cut American spending DOGE has so far disrupted everything in government bar the deficit In large part this is because of the way America’s budget is structured. The government is on track to spend $7trn this year. Nearly two-thirds of this consists of mandatory expenditures on Social Security and health insurance. Interest payments account for over 10%. That leaves a quarter of the budget for discretionary spending, a category which in theory is somewhat easier to trim—except that half of it goes on defence and Republicans would like to increase such spending. In other words, no matter how aggressive DOGE is, its actions are focused on barely more than a tenth of the overall federal budget.
Seth Masket/tusk:
Why Trump's targets are so specific and the pushback is so vague A new podcast episode on the first three weeks of this administration In some ways, it’s a relatively obscure set of targets. USAID, the Treasury payment system, indirect costs at NIH, etc. are things that the vast majority of Americans have never heard of. For the most part, people are unaware that these programs have enormous impacts on lots of different aspects of the government and American life. What’s more, to the extent people know much about these programs, they probably don’t like them. Americans tend to have a vastly inflated estimation of how much foreign assistance the U.S. provides and they want that (arbitrarily high guess of a number) reduced. Singling out USAID sounds like a good idea to many of them, especially the sort of folks Trump wants to impress.
x Here are the highlights:
- 57 CDs whose workforce is over 4% federal employees (another 36 has between 3-3.99%)
- Partisan breakdown: 30R - 27 Dem
- 18 are in Trump-won states. 8 are in Harris-won states — Blake Allen (@Blake_Allen13) February 16, 2025
Read it here on Threadreader.
Noah Smith/Noahpinion:
Trump's economy is already in trouble Not all of it is his fault, but warning lights are flashing, and his policies aren't helping. Over the past 35 years, Americans have become used to a particular cycle of macroeconomics and presidential politics. First, a recession will strike during a Republican President’s term in office, and disgruntled voters will bring in a Democrat to fix things. This happened when Clinton came in after the recession of 1991 (which was more severe than people tend to recall), and when Obama got elected after the financial crisis hit in 2008. It might be a stretch, but you could even think of Biden’s election after Covid as an example of this. Anyway, the second part of the cycle happens when the economy recovers under the Democratic President, and the nation turns its attention back to culture wars once again — and brings in a Republican, because America is a fairly socially conservative place. This is what happened in 2000 with Bush, and in 2016 with Trump. This cycle neatly explains why the economy typically does better under Democrats1… A little bit of this is probably due to Democratic policies, like Obama’s stimulus. But the most important reason for the pattern, I think, is just that Democrats tend to get elected when the economy is bad, and the economy tends to bounce back on its own.
Greg Sargent/The new republic:
Trump-Musk Scandal at USAID Takes Unnerving Turn With Vile Leaked Memo Can Trump and his top advisers really just act with total impunity? Or is there, just maybe, a price to be paid for starving poor people and un-indicting a corrupt mayor? There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually matter. A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”
Matt Robison discusses trump’s plans with insider Ryan McConaghy:
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