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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Screw-up [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-25
We begin today with some additional observations from Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg (in a conversation with David A. Graham of The Atlantic) about being the recipient of leaked war plans by members of Trump’s national security team.
Jeffrey: The actual conversation that they have is fascinating, and in a certain way impressive. It’s nice to see that they’re disagreeing with one another. It’s very useful for the public to know that the vice president has a more hands-off approach than other members of the administration. One of the things that I found interesting was that when a person named “S M” in the chat, who I took to be Stephen Miller, comes in and says, “As I heard it, the president was clear,” this kind of shuts down the conversation. It suggests that Stephen Miller can be in a conversation with, among others, the vice president of the United States and still can get his way. (Miller did not reply to a request for comment or confirm that he is “S M.”) David: In addition to the question of how secure Signal is, this is also notable, because without this report, none of these conversations might be preserved for posterity. You note that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz set some messages to disappear after a week or so. Jeffrey: This is an interesting question: Are they using Signal because it’s convenient? Are they using Signal because it disappears? According to the experts Shane interviewed, the administration should not have established a Signal thread for such conversations in the first place, but once it did, what one is supposed to do legally is copy an official government account, and that government account will then send these threads to the National Archives for posterity, for research, for accountability. But if you’re using a disappearing-text app, I don’t know. That’s one of the questions that I’ve asked and have not gotten answered yet.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo records an even more disturbing tendency about the way in which this administration handles national security information.
Note that no one in the chat is saying, “Hey, we sure it’s cool to be talking about this on Signal?” Or, “Should we be worried this is an insecure channel?” That and the simple logic of the matter tells us this is commonplace in the new administration. You think Mike Waltz got fat fingers and accidentally added Goldberg on the first time out? Not likely. Especially in the national security domain many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the US government. The US government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the national archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed. This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the US government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess.
Rebecca Hamilton of Just Security proposes that three of the democratic institutions under attack by the Trump Administration need to think collectively.
Through the fog of norm-defying news, at least one pattern is clear: President Donald Trump is targeting three bulwarks of democracy and the rule of law: lawyers (law firms and legal service organizations), academics (universities), and journalists (independent news media). His emerging playbook is to bully some of the most privileged institutions in these fields to publicly submit to his agenda. Law firms including Covington and Burling, Paul Weiss, and Perkins Coie; universities like Columbia; and media outlets like the Associated Press have been the first targets of Trump’s spectacle of attempted subordination. They will not be the last. [...] If journalists, lawyers, and academics are going to be able to play the role that they need to perform as bulwarks of democracy and the rule of law, they and their employers must begin to think and act in collective terms. One source of expertise lies in the people and institutions in marginalized communities throughout this country and around the globe who have had decades of experience in navigating a world where simply looking out for one’s own best interests is insufficient for individual or collective survival. Examples across time and place are endless: resistance work by Black communities in the United States from the slave-era through to today, coordination across ethnic lines to succeed in the Delano Grape Strike, or to run Sudanese Emergency Response Rooms. In these examples and untold more, different groups have worked to build trust and develop a collective reflex such that when one group is targeted others ask: How can we help you? Now is the time to learn from them.
Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson of The New York Times take a look at the Trump misinformation machine.
Mr. Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with false or misleading statements — 30,573 of them, or 21 a day on average, according to one tally. Back then, though, aides often tried to play down or contain the damage of egregious falsehoods. This time, Mr. Trump is joined by a coterie of cabinet officials and advisers who have amplified them and even spread their own. Together, they are effectively institutionalizing disinformation. While it is still early in his term, and many of his executive orders face legal challenges that could blunt the impact of any falsehoods driving them, Mr. Trump and his advisers have ushered the country into a new era of post-truth politics, where facts are contested and fictions used to pursue policy goals. [...] In a lecture last month, Kate Starbird, a scholar of disinformation at the University of Washington, described it as a “machinery of bullshit,” one built over time by design. She said it “has become intertwined with digital media, has been effectively leveraged by right-wing populist movements and is now sinking into the political infrastructure of this country and others.”
Finally today, as everyone knows, I have two governors for all intents and purposes.
The governor of my home state was called “that woman from Michigan” by a tacky shoe salesman.
The governor of the state where I have lived for over 30 years spoke at the 2025 Human Rights Campaign Dinner in Los Angeles last night.
In Los Angeles?
That shade is real!
Everyone try to have the best possible day that you can!
[END]
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