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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Hands off! [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-06
We begin today with Alaa Elassar, Shania Shelton, and Mina Allen of CNN and their coverage of the thousands of protest marches against Donald Trump and Elon Musk that took place all over the United States and the world.
Millions of people took part in protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk across all 50 states and globally on Saturday, organized by a pro-democracy movement in response to what they call a “hostile takeover” and attack on American rights and freedoms. [...] Nearly 600,000 people had signed up to attend the events, some of which took place in major cities like London and Paris, according to Indivisible, one of the organizations leading the movement in collaboration with a nationwide coalition that includes civil rights organizations, veterans, women’s rights groups, labor unions and LGBTQ+ advocates. Organizers say they have three demands: “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”
Carlos Molina of El País in English notes that the American tourism industry will likely suffer due to Trump’s imposition of tariffs on America’s significant trading partners.
The U.S. was the third most-visited country in 2024, welcoming 72.3 million travelers, and ranked first in tourism-related revenue, earning some $194 billion, according to the latest data from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). [...] While there’s no direct correlation, the imposition of tariffs, the retaliation by affected countries, and the broader economic fallout of this tariff war with key partners is fueling a growing backlash against the U.S. — one that could eventually translate into a tourism boycott. In February, when Trump first floated the idea of applying tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S., the number of Canadians crossing the border by car dropped by 24% compared to the same period in 2024, and U.S. carrier United Airlines also sharply reduced its flights from Canada. [...] The steepest tariffs target countries whose tourist numbers grew the most in 2024. China, which ranked tenth with 1.62 million visitors (2.24% of the total), saw its exports slapped with a 34% tariff. This could significantly hinder a promising and fast-growing market of high-spending tourists who tend to stay longer than average. Chinese tourism to the U.S. surged by 50% in 2024 — the highest growth among the top 10 countries, according to WTTC — and had been expected to continue expanding rapidly. India and China, both in the Asia-Pacific region, experienced similarly strong growth in U.S.-bound tourism last year — up 24.3% and 21.4%, respectively. But while outbound tourism from Europe had already rebounded to pre-Covid levels by the end of 2023 and even reached record highs in 2024, Asia’s recovery has been slower due to ongoing travel restrictions and a focus on promoting domestic tourism.
A former aide for John Kelly during Trump 1.0, Kevin Carroll, writes for the Guardian and pinpoints a pretty good reason why specific Trump officials were using Signal for planning the attack on the Houthis.
Trump dismisses this scandal, now under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, as a witch-hunt, and his followers will fall in line. But every senator who voted to confirm these national security officials, despite doubts regarding their temperaments and qualifications, quietly knows that they own part of this debacle. For fear of facing Republican primary challengers funded by Elon Musk, these senators failed in their solemn constitutional duty to independently provide wise advice and consent regarding nominations to the US’s most important war cabinet posts. How would the senators have explained their misfeasance to service members’ bereaved families – their constituents, perhaps – had the Houthis used information from the Signal chat, such as the time a particular target was to be engaged, to reorient their antiaircraft systems to intercept the inbound aircraft? I happen to have served in Yemen as a sensitive activities officer for special operations command (central). Conspicuous in their absence from the Signal chat were uniformed officers responsible for the recent combat mission: the acting chair of the joint chiefs of staff Adm Christopher Grady, central command’s Gen Michael Kurilla and special operations command’s Gen Bryan Fenton. These good men would have raised the obvious objection: loose talk on insecure phones about a coming operation jeopardizes the lives of US sailors and marines standing watch on warships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, naval aviators flying over the beach towards the target, and likely special operators, intelligence officers and human sources working in the shadows on the ground. You don’t need 30-plus years in uniform to know that holding a detailed yet insecure discussion about a pending military mission is wrong; the participants in the chat knew, too. They just didn’t care, not as much as they cared about keeping their communications from being legally discoverable. They’re safe in the knowledge that in a new era without benefit of the rule of law, Patel’s FBI and Bondi’s justice department will never bring charges against them, for a crime which uniformed service members are routinely prosecuted for vastly smaller infractions. As the attorney general made plain in her remarks about this matter, federal law enforcement is now entirely subservient to Trump’s personal and political interests.
James Ball of Prospect Magazine does a deep dive into possible futures for the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network.
A globe-spanning network with unparalleled access to the world’s communications, Five Eyes is now facing its greatest challenges since its establishment in 1946. Trump has appointed unreliable figures who have shared conspiracy theories to some of the US’s most sensitive intelligence roles. He has threatened to expel Canada from Five Eyes. No-one knows what might be coming next. [...] Five Eyes partners have “unparalleled levels of integration, with many shared capabilities, operations [and] common objectives”, the 2023 document notes. In practice, this means that British and American spies often work physically side-by-side, looking at the same data with the same tools. [...] Politics well beyond the intelligence world will also have ramifications for how Five Eyes works. Further breakdown of diplomatic relations between the US and Canada couldn’t help but affect the alliance; Trump may threaten any other member tomorrow. And the US has already cut off Ukraine from its intelligence once (though this was reinstated). Given this order included instructions to allies not to share any intelligence which had used any US systems or capabilities, this also stymied the UK’s ability to try to fill the gap. Five Eyes clearly might need to change with the times.
Words like “moxie” or “chutzpah” or even “trolling” don’t quite describe Jasmine Mithani’s reportage for The 19th News.
President Donald Trump issued a proclamation recognizing National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month — one that differs from similar recognitions issued in his first term both because of its focus and because Trump himself was found liable for sexual abuse in 2023. The proclamation, issued Thursday evening, is narrowly focused on blaming “a dramatic increase of sexual violence in our neighborhoods and communities” on “the invasion of illegal aliens at our southern border,” pointing a finger at the Biden administration’s immigration policies. [...] The statement erroneously claims that assaults by undocumented immigrants are one of the leading causes of sexual violence in recent years. In reality, most victims of sexual assault are harmed by someone they know. Eight out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, according to data from the Department of Justice.
Tiffany Hsu of The New York Times writes that by continuing to pull down data and other resources from government websites and destroying or hiding public records, the Trump Administration is altering the ability of future American generations to know their history.
Clea Calcutta of POLITICO Europe writes that while Marine Le Pen’s conviction on embezzlement charges should make Jordan Bardella poised to become France’s leader of the far-right, he might not want to measure the drapes in the Hôtel Matignon just yet.
With Marine Le Pen’s presidential aspirations having been derailed by an embezzlement conviction, Bardella has emerged this week as the most likely candidate of France’s largest far-right party for the 2027 presidential election. Slick, photogenic, ambitious and just 29 years old, Bardella has long been seen as the heir-apparent in the National Rally when Le Pen, 56, steps away. But what on its surface appears to be a once-in-a lifetime lucky break is, on deeper inspection, little more than a poisoned chalice. For starters, Le Pen has conspicuously declined to endorse a possible Bardella candidacy, instead vowing to fight for the opportunity to run herself after all. Tuesday’s decision by an appeals court to rule on the case by summer 2026 gives her a sliver of hope. It’s made more difficult for her protégé that Le Pen is almost universally worshipped within her party. None of her allies appear ready to tell her that endorsing Bardella now, rather than waiting for the courts to rule on her case, is the safest way to protect her movement.
Finally today, Se-Woong Koo writes for The New York Times that even with Yoon Suk Yeol’s removal from the presidency in South Korea, that country remains as bitterly divided as it has ever been.
South Korean politics has long been plagued by a deep rift that stems largely from the decades-long division of the Korean Peninsula between North and South. This split South Koreans into two opposing political camps — an anti-Communist one led by an authoritarian elite that favors a hard line against North Korea, and a leftist, pro-democracy camp that advocates working toward reconciliation with Pyongyang. After decades of military dictatorship, South Korea finally achieved full democracy in 1987, and the nation prospered. But that basic underlying fault line has widened to the point that the two parties that now dominate politics — Mr. Yoon’s right-wing People Power Party and the center-left opposition Democratic Party of Korea — view each other as enemies locked in a fight to the death. It’s a battle fought with character assassination, indictments and now a chilling new precedent set by Mr. Yoon’s resort to martial law. The task of governing the nation has taken a back seat. Mr. Yoon is just the latest in a long line of presidents brought down in this “Game of Thrones” environment. During the nation’s formative decades, electoral manipulation and coups (and one assassination) were the standard means by which presidents rose and fell. After democracy took hold, the tactics softened, but it remains essentially the same old game, an unending cycle of political vendetta more characteristic of a banana republic than a developed democracy.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
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