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February 19, 2025
Trump war on media
Former word
Marco Rubio, 2016 : “For years to come, there are many people on the right...that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well.”
Polling update
Newsweek - A SurveyUSA poll of 2,000 adults showed that a majority (51 percent) said they approve of Trump's job as president. A total of 45 percent said they disapprove, giving Trump a net approval score of plus 6 points.
When broken down further, the results show Trump has stronger approval ratings in rural areas (59 percent) than in suburban (48 percent) and urban areas (51 percent).
The SurveyUSA poll was conducted between February 13 and 16, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
A Morning Consult poll, also released Tuesday, showed that 50 percent of voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president, compared to 47 percent who disapprove.
Yahoo - President Donald Trump's approval rating has ticked slightly lower in recent days as more Americans worried about the direction of the U.S. economy as the new leader threatens a host of countries with tariffs, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found. The six-day poll, which closed on Tuesday, showed 44% of respondents approved of the job Trump is doing as president, down from 45% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted January 24-26. Trump's approval rating stood at 47% in a January 20-21 poll conducted in the hours after the Republican's return to the White House.
A CNN poll shows that only 8% of Americans view Russia positively. 61% see Russia as an enemy, and only 4% as a partner. Only 9% like Putin. 52% support Ukraine using US weapons in Russia.
NY Times - About 29 percent of voters approve of Congress, according to a Gallup survey released on Wednesday, a jump of 12 percentage points since last month and the highest approval rating that a long-despised institution has scored in four years. But what is really behind this sudden positivity for the typically reviled legislative branch? A 42-point surge in approval among Republican voters.
Trump regime update
Elon Musk’s claims of Social Security fraud don’t hold up
NBC News - President Donald Trump has waged a campaign to slash government waste with the help of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, but experts say his budget plans will substantially add to the country’s debt. Trump is slashing the U.S. Agency for International Development and government diversity, equity and inclusion policies as he moves to implement steep tax cuts in his agenda, but experts note nearly half of government spending is taken up by Social Security, Medicare and defense....
Without reductions in these major areas, half of all remaining government spending would have to be eliminated to pay for the planned tax cuts, a plan experts say Congress would not approve. While Trump and Musk continue tackling other smaller government agencies to slash spending, Republican leaders have plans to ramp up the $825 billion military budget and request at least $150 billion for border security and immigration enforcement.
MSNBC - Elon Musk’s destructive DOGE operation is turning its sight to the Internal Revenue Service,
and things are already looking dicey. There are reports that sensitive
taxpayer information could be misused, and that potential cuts to the
IRS’s workforce could cause a headache for taxpayers this tax season —
as well as serve as an unexpected gift to rich tax dodgers.
According to NBC News, an IRS employee affiliated with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency
is “expected to seek access” to the Integrated Data Retrieval System,
which “contains information such as taxpayers’ individual master files,
taxpayer identification numbers, retirement account information and
details on pending adoptions.”
Time - The Trump administration has fired about 1,000 newly hired National Park Service employees who maintain and clean parks, educate visitors and perform other functions as part of its broad-based effort to downsize government. The firings, which weren’t publicly announced but were confirmed by Democratic senators and House members, come amid what has been a chaotic rollout of an aggressive program to eliminate thousands of federal jobs. The plan is led by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency, an outside-government organization designed to slash federal spending. Adding to the confusion, the park service now says it is reinstating about 5,000 seasonal jobs that were initially rescinded last month as part of a spending freeze ordered by President Donald Trump.
Stupid Trump stuff
Donald Trump said the White House will continue to ban the Associated
Press from official events until the wire service agrees to relent and
call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” Deadline reports.
Every Ridiculous Thing Republicans Want to Rename After Trump
Newsweek - President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he directed the Justice Department (DOJ) to dismiss all remaining U.S. attorneys from former President Joe Biden's era, claiming unprecedented politicization.
Boing Boing - Making way for things like a Roseanne Barr residency or "The Complete Tucker Carlson Experience," Trump's credibility lacking National Art Center in Washington DC is reported to have cowardly canceled the Gay Men's Chorus without telling anyone.National Symphony Orchestra bass player Jeffrey Weisner writes:
We were scheduled to perform for the first time with Gay Men's Chorus of Washington on May 21st as part of World Pride in Washington DC. The concert was abruptly canceled without explanation and removed from the KC website. I know about this only because my husband Silvio is in the Chorus and was there when they were informed.
Boing Boing - Calling BS on the Trump Administration's attempts to block trans people from serving their country, United States District Court Judge Ana Reyes rained all over their stupid parade. Judge Reyes rightly pointed out there are much more significant problems than pronouns in the military if the USAS is at all impacted by a pronoun. Showing the ridiculousness of their argument to Trump's DOJ likely won't stop them, but a court order might."Can we agree that the greatest fighting force… is not going to be impacted in any way by less than one percent of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them?" she asked.
Independent, UK - President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would unilaterally impose 25 percent import taxes on American purchases of automobiles, pharmaceuticals and microchips
as early as April 1 despite fears that doing so would supercharge
inflation rates he promised to tame during his campaign for the
presidency last year.
CalltoActivism - Holy shit. Trump says Zelenskyy “should have never started” the war with Russia. Putin started the war by invading Ukraine. He is literally spreading Putin talking points from the podium. What a disgraceful asshole.
Trump court cases
Roll Call - The Supreme Court could rule as early as this week on whether Special
Counsel Hampton Dellinger should be reinstated and given access to his
office, the first legal clash to reach the justices during this Trump
administration over congressional protections for some federal
officials.
Federal judge allows Department of Government Efficiency staff access to Department of Education databases, including federal student loan information (More)
Judge Tanya Chutkan declined to grant a request by 14 state attorneys general to temporarily bar Elon Musk and his associates from accessing data at seven federal agencies and moving forward with their efforts to slash the government work force. Follow live updates
Trump going after election security
Slate - In its crusade against federal agencies, the Trump administration is targeting our election system, making potentially dangerous reductions to protections that help keep elections free, fair, and secure. On Friday, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.
The work of CISA and the EI-ISAC has been central to election security in the United States for most of the past decade, providing state and local election officials with critical tools and assistance to defend against cyber and physical threats to election systems. These steps and other recent blows to federal election guardrails were foretold in Project 2025. Understanding the playbook will help us be ready to push back when the next shoes drop.
See No Nazis, Hear No Nazis
Hartmann Report -- One of the enduring mysteries in today’s American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans.
Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP’s base, all just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it’s being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to?
And why are America’s mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today’s captive Republicans?
Elon Musk, Trump’s #1 campaign donor and co-president, threw two Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes following Trump’s inauguration, causing the media to fall all over itself trying to make excuses for his behavior. Actual, declared Nazis and white supremacists were thrown into an ecstatic tizzy, however, with the Ohio Proud Boys posting the clip with the words, “Heil Trump!”
The neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe posted the Musk clip with the Waffen SS lightning-bolt emoji; their leader, Christopher Pohlhaus, wrote: “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it.” Other neo-Nazi, Nazi, and white supremacist groups across the web jumped in to celebrate the salute, as Rolling Stone extensively documented. - More
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