I have long suspected that one reason Stephen Miller has so much control over Donald Trump right now is he played a big part of getting Trump back on his feet after the Butler shooting, which really (and unsurprisingly) rattled him for weeks. Trump’s return coincided with a particular turn to the fascist.

That’s one reason I find this exchange from NYT’s “interview” with Donald Trump interesting.

He directly tied the security of the bunker-ballroom to some trauma (he had earlier raised it, and sent a valet to get all his ballroom models).  Then they spoke off the record (one of perhaps four times they do so, aside from the call with Colombian President Gustavo Petro).

President Trump

This is a much more important thing to do. So, this is the ballroom right here. It’s beautiful. People love it. It’ll hold — it’s being designed with bulletproof glass, 4 to 5 inches thick. Can take just about any weapon that we know of. I wish I was in it about a little while ago. [Mr. Trump laughs.]

[Mr. Trump speaks briefly off the record.]

Tyler Pager

Mr. President, on the record, you haven’t even been here a year yet, and you’ve made many renovations. Are there other plans for you to make changes?

They came back on the record with a slightly different topic: renovations generally.

From there, Trump discussed a plan to add a second floor to the West Wing, because the roof that’s there now is not used given that long range rifles could hit them.

Tyler Pager

What about at the White House complex?

President Trump

I may do an upper West Wing. This area. Cover it with one floor because it needs more space. It would be —

David E. Sanger

Including the Oval? Or Oval would be separate?

President Trump

No, less. Short of the Oval. If you take the L [shape] —

David E. Sanger

So you’d put it up — there’s a second floor. It’s sort of in the attic.

President Trump

Well there’s a second floor now that was, that was meant to be a park. People don’t use it as a park. Now with long-range rifles, you tend not to use it.

[snip]

Katie Rogers

The L. Is that why you were on the roof that day?

President Trump

Exactly.

Katie Rogers

What were you doing?

President Trump

I was looking at doing office space.

Grandpa Sundown took a diversion to show a picture of Don Jr holding a rattlesnake while wearing flip-flops.

Then Trump brought out one after another model of the ballroom. When David Sanger asked him about its cost, he distinguished between the aboveground portion — the ballroom — from the stuff below ground (which has not been discussed on the record) — the bunker.

The current $400 million cost does not include the bunker.

President Trump

But I said, “Ultimately, they win.” You better be careful. So ready? Don’t take any pictures of this ’cause you’ll scare people. So I started off with a building half of the seats —

[Mr. Trump puts a model for a new White House ballroom on the table.]

— and then it just kept growing and growing, and the money kept pouring in and pouring in. No, no, please. So I started with that — started with this.

[Mr. Trump puts a model of what he said was the smaller, original planned ballroom on the table.]

And I said: “Wow, I’ve got all this beautiful land. I don’t want to waste it.” So I said: “All right. I’ll go a little bit larger.” This would have seat — seated 450 people. So I said, “Let’s go a little bit larger.” So then I said, “Let’s do this.”

[Mr. Trump removes the smaller model and puts another model for the new ballroom on the table.]

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

What’s the updated price tag on all this?

President Trump

Well, every time I make it larger it goes — but I’ll do it for — I’m under budget and ahead of schedule. You know, I’m — I’d build it larger.

David E. Sanger

Are you at about $400 million now?

President Trump

I’ll bring it in for less than — it’s, it’s ahead of schedule and under budget so far.

David E. Sanger

What’s the budget?

President Trump

Under $400 million.

David E. Sanger

And that’s just the aboveground, not —

President Trump

That’s the aboveground.

According to CNN a White House official acknowledged the security enhancements going on underground.

During a recent meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission where the ballroom was discussed, White House director of management and administration Joshua Fisher said broadly that the overall ballroom project will “(enhance) mission critical functionality,” “make necessary security enhancements” and “(deliver) resilient, adaptive infrastructure aligned with future mission needs.”

Fisher was pressed on why the project broke with precedent by starting the demolition process without the commission’s approval — and he indicated that the “top-secret” work taking place underground was the motivation.

“There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on. That does not preclude us from changing the above-grade structure, but that work needed to be considered when doing this project, which was not part of the NCPC process,” he said.

And to the NYT, Donald Trump tied the bunker-ballroom to his own sense of vulnerability.

The most important line in a court filing filed last week that disclosed DOGE was doing far more with Social Security data than then Social Security Administrator Leland Dudek claimed they were in a declaration submitted last March 24 reads, “SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.” (Docket) That, plus this discussion in the opening paragraph, is the only explanation for why the Social Security Administration (SSA) is just finding all this data now.

Based on its review of records obtained during or after October 2025, SSA identified communications, use of data, and other actions by the then-SSA DOGE Team that were potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant with the District Court’s March 20, 2025, temporary restraining order (“TRO”) (ECF 48). SSA notified the undersigned Department of Justice (“DOJ”) attorneys on December 10, 2025, of its concerns.

Something else led SSA to review DOGE access in October.

And while Debra Katz, the attorney for Social Security whistleblower Chuck Borges, claimed vindication from the disclosure, it’s not entirely clear whether Borges’ disclosures precipitated the discovery. He first came forward in August, two months before SSA appears to have started doing a real assessment of access violations, though he filed a retaliation supplement to his complaint in November.

Importantly, while Borges’ disclosures covered the revelations in last week’s filing, the most horrific of his disclosures pertained to actions that long post-date what is described in the filing, which all happened in March.

Last week’s declaration revealed the following:

On March 3, 2025, a DOGE boy sent an email with an encrypted file to DHS, copying Steven Davis (who then was the operational leader of DOGE) and a DOGE boy formally assigned to Department of Labor. SSA has not been able to break the encryption and so don’t know which 1,000 people the emailed records exposed.

The email attached an encrypted and password-protected file that SSA believes contained SSA data. Despite ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Information Office, SSA has been unable to access the file to determine exactly what it contained. From the explanation of the attached file in the email body and based on what SSA had approved to be released to DHS, SSA believes that the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.

From March 7 through 17, the DOGE boys were sending links through Cloudflare, and SSA has not bothered to ask Cloudflare what got sent or whether it still has the data.

[B]eginning March 7, 2025, and continuing until March 17 (approximately one week before the TRO was entered), members of SSA’s DOGE Team were using links to share data through the third-party server “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.

Contrary to a declaration submitted by Mike Russo on March 12, the DOGE boys had more access than he disclosed at the time.

a. Three DOGE Team members were granted access to a system containing SSA employee records for agency personnel for workforce initiatives.

b. Two DOGE Team members were granted access to a system containing personnel access information to ensure terminated employees were unable to badge into the building or to access IT systems with their PIVs.

c. Six DOGE Team members were granted access to shared workspace that would have allowed DOGE Team members to share data to which the employees had separately been granted access for fraud or analytics reviews.

d. Two DOGE Team members had access to a data visualization tool that could connect to other data sources, which could provide access to PII.

e. Two DOGE Team members had access to additional EDW schemas beyond those reported as of March 12, 2025.

On March 24 (after Russo’s declaration claimed all DOGE was doing was pursuing waste, fraud, and abuse), a DOGE boy signed a Data Agreement with a partisan group attempting to overturn some elections.

[A] political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.1 In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025 … but SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group.

From March 26 (two days after the Temporary Restraining Order in question) until April 2, a DOGE boy had access to “ten EDW schema containing” Personally Identifiable Information, but the DOGE boy never used it.

Contrary to some reporting and even more responses to the reporting on this, these abuses are not the most alarming things Borges disclosed, though they are consistent with parts of his whistleblower complaint. In truth, they provide details that make Borges’ earlier disclosures more concerning, such as that in the period when DOGE was sending data through Cloudflare, certain DOGE boys had just asked for and gotten access to the analytical warehouse, EDW.

First, around March 14, 2025, DOGE members requested access to PSNAP and SNAP MI databases for Payton Rehling and Aram Moghaddassi. Information reported to Mr. Borges indicates that proper approval through the Systems Access Management (SAM) system was bypassed for this request, which resulted in four user profiles.35 The Security Access Management process requires a written request for data access that is then either approved or disapproved by a supervisor who provides a written justification for their decision. This process is necessary for oversight of database access approvals.

Additionally, these profiles concerningly included equipment pin access and write access. 36 Equipment pin access means that instead of a user accessing data through a personal pin identifier, which would make the accessor’s actions traceable to a user, an equipment pin is used to verify the identity of a device or piece of equipment before it is granted access to a network or sensitive resources, potentially avoiding the creation of a record tied to a specific user. Giving a user “write access” means that the user will have the ability to edit data.

Granting access to databases that exceed authorized permissions violates the principle of least privilege, which holds that users should have the least amount of access necessary to do their job.37 Information provided to Mr. Borges indicates that on Monday March 17, 2025, the EDW team discovered that users had been given access to data that was reportedly not authorized through normal approval channels.38

34 An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is a central, secure system that integrates data from various sources across an organization to support informed decision-making and strategic analysis. It acts as a single source of truth, providing a consistent and reliable view of data for reporting, analytics, and business intelligence.

35 Exhibit 1, p. 5

36 Exhibit 1, p. 5

But these disclosures are entirely separate from Borges’ disclosures about what DOGE did after SCOTUS lifted the TRO in June, which is that in August — so five months after the abuses disclosed last week — SSA DOGE boys including Ed “Big Balls” Coristine with his ties to criminal hackers, created an entire copy of the SSA database and moved it onto a cloud not protected by government infrastructure.

The fact that DOGE was sending things via Cloudflare before that (and that SSA claims to be helpless to determine what got sent) demonstrates the danger of this. But it does not, remotely, address the danger.

As I said in August, when SCOTUS overturned Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander’s TRO in June, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned about the skewed harm analysis SCOTUS was adopting.

Just last week, I wrote about the requirements for granting stay applications and, in particular, how this Court’s emergency-docket practices were decoupling from the traditional harm-reduction justification for equitable stays. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5). With today’s decision, it seems as if the Court has truly lost its moorings. It interferes with the lower courts’ informed and equitable assessment of how the SSA’s data is best accessed during the course of this litigation, and it does so without any showing by the Government that it will actually suffer concrete or irreparable harm from having to comply with the District Court’s order.

[snip]

Stepping back to take a birds-eye view of the stay request before us, the Government’s failure to demonstrate harm should mean that the general equity balance tips decisively against granting a stay. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4). On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that—if improperly handled or disseminated—risks causing significant harm, as Congress has already recognized. On the other, there is the Government’s desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE’s access is lawful. In the first bucket, there is also the state of federal law, which enshrines privacy protections, and the President’s constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws Congress has passed. This makes it not at all clear that it is in the public’s interest for the SSA to give DOGE staffers unfettered access to all Americans’ non-anonymized data before its entitlement to such access has been established, especially when the SSA’s own employees have long been subject to restrictions meant to protect the American people.

We’re only finding out about these earlier, less abusive violations, because lawyers and long-replaced SSA officials made declarations that have been debunked.

We’re not finding out why SSA launched the review in October or November (though the notice reveals, “A review of the SSA DOGE Team’s actions is ongoing”), and we’re not finding out what they have learned about the more serious violations.

Yesterday, the anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration, may be forever measured in two speeches. Trump gave a long, racist grievance-fest full of false claims denying that he is actively destroying the country.

And Mark Carney gave a speech where he declared the end of American Exceptionalism.

He didn’t describe it that way. Instead, he pitched alliances of “middle powers” that continue to live by the values purportedly enshrined in the Western order, even as superpowers operate nakedly eschewing such limits.

Now, Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, has termed value-based realism.

Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.

And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

So we’re engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

[snip]

Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.

But I’d also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

Much of that speech was the speech of a two-time central banker describing how to pursue national gain; indeed, he boasted of how much he had achieved in the last year, a year when Trump has rolled out one after another framework of a deal that served as nothing more than a point of leverage.

But Carney bookended that discussion with an explicit nod to Václav Havel’s Power of the Powerless, an essay that — in 1978, over a decade before the demise of communism — envisioned combatting an ideologically driven empire by simply refusing to affirmatively perform blind obedience to the ideology anymore.

And I’m fascinated by that frame, and not even just because I was once an expert on the essay and the dissident movement from which it arose.

Havel’s essay arose from a debate about how one can be a dissident, a heated debate about the relationship between leader and led (my dissertation argued that Havel was actually on the wrong side of that debate, even while he won the mantle of leadership). But it envisioned that simple non-participation — the ethical act of refusing to affirmatively play the role assigned by ideology anymore — might build power for the powerless.

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite! Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moments thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

[snip]

This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocers superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogans. real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocers existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient; he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “Whats wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side.

Carney’s speech — the speech of the two-time central banker — barely scratches at what this ideology is, without which his reliance on Havel makes little sense.

It might be generally described as the fiction within the UN and World Trade system that permanent Security Council members ever adhered to the rules-based order.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

Carney’s statement about this fiction certainly included China…

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

But this is obviously (in the paragraph following from the rules-based order one) directed at Donald Trump and the security he has destroyed in the last year.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

In truth, I’m not sure the frame borrowed by Havel — at least as adopted in this speech by the two-time central banker — entirely works. Carney is not so much newly asserting that the world order no longer works. Trump, and especially, Stephen Miller already asserted that. As such, Carney’s assertion of a rupture is of little value; what matters are the strategy discussions of a two-time central banker on how to respond.

Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty, sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

But the reason why Canada and the other middle powers put up with the US in the last two decades — the period he addresses, the period I addressed here — is that the US broke the rules a lot, with invasions, with torture, abusing its hegemonic financial position to avoid consequences for the crash, but rarely got called on it, because the US also kept shipping lanes secure, security guarantees it now refuses to abide by itself.

I’m not sure whether Carney envisioned more, envisioned costs Trump will pay for having disavowed American Exceptionalism. Those costs may be primarily born, internalized, by Americans who have yet to understand.

Thanks to NYT’s sane washing, most people didn’t notice how nutso Trump was about Greenland until he sent his batshit note to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre the other day.

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

But Trump said more about his own fragile psyche in the interview that NYT sane washed. Donald Trump didn’t just describe his aspiration to own Greenland as necessary for his own personal psychology.

David E. Sanger

Why is ownership important here?

President Trump

Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.

David E. Sanger

So you’re going to ask them to buy it?

Katie Rogers

Psychologically important to you or to the United States?

President Trump

Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything. [my emphasis]

He also described — while explaining why he no longer had a good relationship with Zohran Mamdani — his Venezuelan invasion as a psychological success.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Do you still have a good relationship with Mamdani?

President Trump

Well, I did, but [Mamdani] hit me sooner than I thought. I thought it would take him at least a month. I mean, he hit me on Venezuela.

Tyler Pager

What did he — what did you say to him?

President Trump

He didn’t. We didn’t talk about it. Oh, yeah, we did. He called and said: “I just want to let you know. I’m going to come out against —”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

He called you beforehand?

President Trump

Uh, he called me after it was done, after this incredible military, financial and psychological success. He called me to say that, respectfully, I disagree with what you did. And I said, “Give me a reason why.” And I didn’t feel he had a reason, but he disagreed nevertheless. I would say it was politics more than anything else. Although I think it’s bad politics.

I think it’s been one of the very successful — it’s been one of the greatest military success — nobody’s ever seen anything like it. We attacked a fort with thousands of people and soldiers in that fort. You know, that was built there. It was built as a safe house with sealed doors and everything else. [Mr. Trump makes a sound like an explosion.] It was like they were paper. [my emphasis]

And he viewed it as a psychological success against the background of Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, a failure that became the impetus for modernizing US Special Forces.

Trump explicitly raised the Carter failure in response to Katie Rogers’ question about what he was thinking as he watched the operation.

David E. Sanger

Did you watch either by video —

President Trump

I did. I was, I saw it.

David E. Sanger

What — what did that feel like? You were down at Mar-a-Lago?

President Trump

It’s like watching a movie, except you’re — it’s a little bit, you know — look, you don’t know if —

Katie Rogers

Are you worried when this is happening, while you’re watching? Or what is going through your mind?

President Trump

Yeah, I’m worried that it ends up being Jimmy Carter disaster that destroyed his entire administration.

And then — after an extensive discussion with Sanger about whether the Eagle Claw failure caused Carter’s election loss that year (neither mentioned Ronald Reagan’s interventions with Iran) — Trump returned to Eagle Claw in response to a Sanger attempt to understand Trump’s “Remote Control” occupation of Venezuela. This came in a passage where Sanger, suffering from normalcy bias, attempted to probe how Trump planned to impose order on Venezuela (Trump had earlier responded to a Tyler Pager question, in one of the very few pieces of real news in the interview, that he would be running Venezuela “much longer” than a year).

Trump didn’t want to talk about occupation; he wanted to talk about which of his quick strikes was the most important.

David E. Sanger

Each one of those, sir, was a one-off, you know, attack, where you could attack and then retreat. You are now in the middle of an occupation —

President Trump

But let me ask you a question: Of the four things that we talked about —

David E. Sanger

A remote control.

President Trump

— and I did other stuff — which is the most important? Al-Baghdadi, Suleimani, this one or the Iran nuclear attack?

David E. Sanger

I think people would probably disagree on that, but I think a lot of people would argue that anything that set back Iran from getting a nuclear weapon may have been the most important.

President Trump

I would say. And yet this seems to get more — more interest in this one than the other three.

Sanger attempted to return to the question of occupation, but Trump didn’t realize at first that Sanger is talking about the occupation, not just the quick strike.

David E. Sanger

But this has got more complication for you —

President Trump

Very complicated.

David E. Sanger

Because you’re going to have years —

President Trump

Oh, I see, you mean future complication.

David E. Sanger

— future — you’re going to have years in which you’re going to have to —

Tyler Pager

You said it’s going to be more than a year.

David E. Sanger

Yeah, you’re going to have to decide: Am I sending in troops?

[Mr. Trump speaks briefly off the record.]

Tyler Pager

Mr. President, on the record, just the —

[There is cross-talk.]

Whatever got said off the record, it distracted from Sanger’s focus on the occupation, and Pager returned to issues better understood as Trump’s psyche: his confidence, his boasts (repeated elsewhere in the interview, including to explain the huge budget deficits he caused with tax cuts) that he single-handedly rebuilt the military in his first term.

Tyler Pager

On the success of the Maduro operation. Does it mean — give you confidence? Or does it mean you’re going to pursue future military action against Mexico or Colombia or other countries in the Caribbean?

President Trump

No, but it — I didn’t need confidence. I have a lot of confidence in my people, in my military. I built the military. Remember this: Our military, when I took over in my first term, was a mess. I rebuilt the entire military, and now I’m doing it even more so. So, our military’s great. And more importantly, we’re the best soldiers.

Sanger persisted, imagining that Trump, who has never studied a day in his life, studied other occupations before deciding to do his Venezuela occupation on the cheap.

David E. Sanger

Did you study some other occupations? Japan, Iraq, others?

President Trump

Yes, yes. I studied, I studied —

David E. Sanger

And what — what lesson did you draw from that, that we should know —

President Trump

That it’s highly risky.

David E. Sanger

— for Venezuela?

President Trump

That’s what I do.

David E. Sanger

OK, so —

President Trump

I looked at — I looked at some of the attacks. I studied the Carter attack. It was a disaster. I would have never done it that way.

It took Sanger some time before he figured out Trump can’t even conceive of the occupation. Trump was still talking about the quick strike attack and contemplating how it could have ended like it did for Jimmy Carter, in ignominy.

David E. Sanger

You were talking about the attack. I was asking about the occupations that followed —

President Trump

You know, they had — they had a — they had a sandstorm. Did you know that? And they decided to go forward. We would go back, and let’s hit it three days later. They wanted to go forward, and they said, keep going. Helicopters don’t work well in the sand.

Karoline Leavitt

Sir, do you want to show them the renovations?

And that’s when Karoline Leavitt, who had been trying to end the entire interview, instead distracted Trump, like one would a toddler, with a topic she knows he loves, his renovations.

Here’s your binky, Donald.

NYT did a grave disservice by sane washing this interview; indeed, Trump betrayed his fundamental vulnerability elsewhere in the interview.

Because what it shows is that Trump is literally like a toddler knocking over the Monopoly board because he’s frustrated with the rules. No matter how Sanger attempts to normalize it, Trump’s foreign policy is not (as Sanger fancies) a normal second term investment in legacy.

Rather, Donald Trump is invading sovereign foreign countries, without even the ability to consider the years-long aftermath, out of a psychological need.

One of the biggest challenges my family has faced in my lifetime is my mother’s dementia.

She doesn’t have a firm diagnosis because she manifests symptoms of Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia along with Parkinsonism, and more if we really teased out every symptom she’s had.

If you met her you’d think she was pleasant and happy, provided you met her in the morning after a good night’s sleep and chatted with her for only a few minutes.

If you had to spend any more than five to 10 minutes with her you’d begin to notice something wasn’t quite right. That window of time has narrowed; two years ago she appeared normal for 15 to 30 minutes. It’s a good day now when she can hold it together in public for 10 minutes.

Today was my turn to take my mom out for an airing. We were in the thrift shop where she loves to browse but a mere five minutes before she said something obnoxious about a woman next to her on a cell phone.

Sure, you may yourself have been tempted to say something scathing about cell phone users in shared spaces, but you’d also note whether that person was taking an important call and observe other context about the person and call. And then you’d apply your personal filter, bite your tongue, and quietly walk away.

Not my mom. I couldn’t hustle her along fast enough before her filter broke.

I had to get my mom out of the house so my sibling could take care of some security issues in the home to keep my mom safe. She can’t be left alone any more and even when home with one of us she still might injure herself or others.

In essence, she’s become a nasty preschooler regressing toward toddlerhood.

References to elderly in census documents from two hundred years ago now make sense – this woman “reverted to childhood,” a census taker wrote about a woman in her 80s.

Eventually my mom will be placed in memory care, but until then we’re going to have take measures to protect her from herself, and protect others from her.

But this post isn’t really about my mother. She’s an example of someone who needs intervention and continuous care and is getting it.

This post is about Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, who needs intervention and continuous care and is NOT getting it.

Trump’s behavior reminds me so much of my mother’s I am terrified for this nation.

We’ve locked up the car keys, hidden the credit and debit cards, secured firearms to keep them from my mom who can’t make a rational decision let alone remember what she decided minutes or hours or days ago.

But no one is protecting Trump from himself or others.

We’ve cautioned family friends that Mom has dementia and can’t be relied upon for factual observations though they often already deduced that based on her confabulations. She ate breakfast three times one morning because she forgot each time and became defensive when reminded about it.

Trump has been told, reminded, and warned about treaties and the law and he just does what he wants, as if he hadn’t been cautioned. He gets defensive. He makes false claims like having ended eight wars, and he may actually believe that. This is not the same as eating three slices of toast over three hours or distorting a memory of a shared past event.

If only Trump’s behavior was that harmless.

My mom’s obnoxious lack of a filter won’t manifest itself in the breakdown of decades-long agreements between countries. The damage from her reflexive spouting can be limited by restricting her access to public venues where she won’t offend many or is tolerated by others.

Trump, however, gets on his social media platform or on email and dumps his sundowning anxieties on long-term allies to the detriment of national security and world peace. No one is stopping him (and some may even be encouraging him).

Sometimes Trump’s lack of filter is more narrowly aimed, like saying “Quiet, piggy” to a woman journalist asking him a question. Again, he’s allowed to continue to do this while wielding the power of the presidency, and not hustled along to prevent him from continuing to be offensive let alone stop him from abusing citizens’ rights.

White House staff are apparently unwilling or unable to check Trump’s behavior, if they aren’t abusing him and his office by manipulating him into acting out to disadvantage the U.S. and possibly to the advantage of themselves and others.

My mom can no longer drive and endanger others on the road. My dad’s firearms have been locked up so that she can’t hurt herself or others if she gets paranoid. Mom can only rant harmlessly at home when anxious. Thank goodness she can’t do anything more to herself or others.

Unfortunately, Trump has the largest military force under his control. He’s murdered people by direct or indirect orders, and without adequate accountability to the American people about his use of the military. He can incite others by venting his anxieties over social media.

Same, too, for his use of force against persons residing in the U.S. whether citizens, legal immigrants, or asylum seekers. Trump does not respect the judiciary, a branch of government co-equal to the executive branch, and he fails to demand departments under his control obey the law.

I can’t tell you how many times I have seen or heard Trump over the last 10 years and recognized the same behaviors in my mom and vice versa.

The shuffling gait down a ramp. The odd difficulty with stepping over changes in elevation. Challenges gripping objects like water glasses; stumbling for the right words like oranges instead of origins; failure to grab a vehicle door handle; frequently remembering events incorrectly and making up stuff along the way.

All fairly harmless symptoms until they interact with others, and then the magnitude of difference in their consequence is everything – suddenly all of Europe is insulted and scared, or an entire group of people must scramble for protection.

This can’t continue. This must be stopped before it gets worse, and it will get worse like my mother’s dementia. We can’t rely on his family to intervene – they are venally manipulating him and generally useless when it comes to care for his person.

Congress must protect the country by restraining the executive branch. It – and by it I mean specifically the GOP congressional caucus – has abandoned its role as the check on executive overreach. This, too, can’t continue.

If GOP members of Congress expect their party to survive the next three years, they need to put on their big people pants and collaborate on how to limit the power of a mafioso with dementia. It’s disgusting the GOP has simply folded under Trump’s weight like a broken lawnchair, abdicating their role in effective governance.

We know the GOP can step up; it once did when it checked Richard Nixon.

But if they don’t fulfill their oaths of office to protect and defend the Constitution instead of protecting their own butts, the American public will look to other role models for guidance with regard to restraining an out-of-control president. Enough other countries have dealt effectively with leaders who posed far less of a threat to their nation and the world – we can learn from them, just as my family is learning how to deal with my mom.

Mr. EW and I are closing on our 25th wedding anniversary in a few months.

Yeah, us!

I raise that not because I’m expecting you all to start shopping silver (that’s what I’m supposed to buy anyway, right? Mr. EW insists it’s power tool anniversary again anyway).

I say that as a way of conveying that, in a literal sense, I have been married to Europe for (effectively) the entirety of this century.

Sure, I had an affinity before that. In a Czech class in Prague in 1997 , for example, on a day when the other American was absent, the entire class told me I seemed like a European and why didn’t I just move. Without a beat, one of them said, “But you stay there and fix it for the rest of us.” I can’t tell you how deeply I felt (and feel) an obligation to fulfill that order.

And so I think of where we go from here, both in the larger effort to defeat Trumpism, but more specifically in a week when Europe contemplates what to do about the Greenland crisis, I’m cognizant what a shitty hegemon the US has been in this century.

Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it).

The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can’t express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU, and now Trump is using the aftermath of his own jerry-rigged system — COVID fraud — as his excuse to invade Minnesota.)

I had been thinking this anyway. As we optimistically imagine things we would need to do recover from Trump, I think the US should simply reset the computer to 2000 (preferably before Bush v. Gore), and start over again. Don’t spend 20 years creating new terrorists in response to a terrorist attack. Don’t expand emergency and executive power beyond all recognition, in the process foreswearing America’s rickety Cold War claim to be an exceptional nation. Don’t bail out bankers who destroyed the global economy and, especially, wiped out the wealth of broad swaths of the population. And sure as hell don’t demand austerity in response, a betrayal of the post-war consensus that staved off the kind of malaise we’re seeing drive extremism. And whatever you do, do not grant the banksters’ counterpart, the techbros, their own chance to remake the world, mainstreaming far right extremists in the process. I feel like the coming AI collapse may be social media’s crisis point, and sadly, the techbros have prepared for it by implanting David Sacks in the White House.

Thinking in these terms does not provide immediate solutions. Reminding EU ministers how much of today’s economic malaise and immigration scapegoating arose from American failures doesn’t provide a solution. But it does provide one possible frame, one that can exploit increasing global animosity towards Trump, as a scapegoat.

Mark Carney got elected on a wave of animosity to Trump and he is not the only one.

There was a Defense One report on the National Security Strategy — not matched by any other outlet and therefore of uncertain provenance — that nevertheless haunts me. It disavows the inexpensive power projection of hegemony by imagining American hegemony as nothing more than American domination.

The full NSS also spends some time discussing the “failure” of American hegemony, a term that isn’t mentioned in the publicly released version.

“Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable,” according to the document.

In this context, hegemony refers to the leadership by one country of the world, using soft power to encourage other countries to consent to being led.

“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” the NSS states. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

I don’t think that’s right at all. Whoever wrote this, for example, seems to misunderstand how fragile an invasion of Venezuela without regime change can be — and importantly, how much worse Venezuela will be if, instead of attempting to reign in Maduro’s mafia state, instead blesses it. (In reality, America’s failures started before my designated reset date, when the US believed Shock Doctrine was a good way to cure communism rather than foster mafia states.) I don’t think the person who wrote that “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want” has considered how many advantages the dollar exchange has given the US. I don’t think the person who wrote, “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want” has thought through all the ways that coercion is more likely to backfire.

America was a piss poor global policeman, but the alternative we’re facing down now is worse for the US and worse for much of the world.

And if Donald Trump wants to embody those failures, providing a ready political response, well then, he asked for it.

Donald Trump has abdicated America’s role as a hegemon.

Well, okay then.

However else the rest of the world responds, they (we) should keep in mind that we can reject the underlying choices that created Trump as a symptom.

History is so cool.

In 1917, Denmark and the US approved a treaty (or more specifically, a convention), the guts of which are summed up in two simple paragraphs:

His Majesty the King of Denmark by this convention cedes to the United States all territory, dominion and sovereignty, possessed, asserted or claimed by Denmark in the West Indies including the Islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix together with the adjacent islands and rocks.

[snip]

In full consideration of the cession made by this convention, the United States agrees to pay, within ninety days from the date of the exchange of the ratifications of this convention, in the City of Washington to the diplomatic representative or other agent of His Majesty the King of Denmark duly authorized to receive the money, the sum of twenty-five million dollars in gold coin of the United States.

The bulk of the document spells out the details, like how long Denmark has to vacate the premises, what items go with them and what transfers to the new owners, etc.

So OK, the US bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark? What’s the big deal, you ask.

The big deal is a little clearer when you see the “Declaration” at the end, made by US Secretary of State Robert Lansing:

In proceeding this day to the signature of the Convention respecting the cession of the Danish West-Indian Islands to the United States of America, the undersigned Secretary of State of the United States of America, duly authorized by his Government, has the honor to declare that the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.

Ah. So the deal was the US gets the Virgin Islands, and Denmark gets Greenland and $25M in gold coin.

And now, Trump wants to void the deal. He ought to be careful, though, because there are other deals like this that the US made that other leaders might want to void.

In 1803, there was a little real estate deal that took three Conventions to lay out all the details (part cash, part debt-swap; involving 3 different nations), but the basic deal was this:

Whereas by the Article the third of the Treaty concluded at St Ildefonso the 9th Vendé miaire an 9/1st October 1800 between the First Consul of the French Republic and his Catholic Majesty [of Spain] it was agreed as follows.
“His Catholic Majesty promises and engages on his part to cede to the French Republic six months after the full and entire execution of the conditions and Stipulations herein relative to his Royal Highness the Duke of Parma, the Colony or Province of Louisiana with the Same extent that it now has in the hand of Spain, & that it had when France possessed it; and Such as it Should be after the Treaties subsequently entered into between Spain and other States.”
And whereas in pursuance of the Treaty and particularly of the third article the French Republic has an incontestible title to the domain and to the possession of the said Territory–The First Consul of the French Republic desiring to give to the Unit ed States a strong proof of his friendship doth hereby cede to the United States in the name of the French Republic for ever and in full Sovereignty the said territory with all its rights and appurtenances as fully and in the Same manner as they have bee n acquired by the French Republic in virtue of the above mentioned Treaty concluded with his Catholic Majesty.

[snip]

The Government of the United States engages to pay to the French government in the manner Specified in the following article the sum of Sixty millions of francs independant of the Sum which Shall be fixed by another Convention for the payment of the debts due by France to citizens of the United States.

For the payment of the Sum of Sixty millions of francs mentioned in the preceeding article the United States shall create a Stock of eleven millions, two hundred and fifty thousand Dollars bearing an interest of Six per cent: per annum payable half y early in London Amsterdam or Paris amounting by the half year to three hundred and thirty Seven thousand five hundred Dollars, according to the proportions which Shall be determined by the french Govenment to be paid at either place: The principal of t he Said Stock to be reimbursed at the treasury of the United States in annual payments of not less than three millions of Dollars each; of which the first payment Shall commence fifteen years after the date of the exchange of ratifications:–this Stock Shall be transferred to the government of France or to Such person or persons as Shall be authorized to receive it in three months at most after the exchange of ratifications of this treaty and after Louisiana Shall be taken possession of the name of the Government of the United States.
It is further agreed that if the french Government Should be desirous of disposing of the Said Stock to receive the capital in Europe at Shorter terms that its measures for that purpose Shall be taken So as to favour in the greatest degree possible the credit of the United States, and to raise to the highest price the Said Stock.

Again, lots of details passed over in these three conventions, but the essence of deal is simple: the US gets the land, and France gets cash and a settlement on the debts they owe to US citizens.

Perhaps if Trump wants to revoke by fiat the Convention with Denmark over the Virgin Islands and Greenland, President Macron might start thinking he should do the same with Trump over Louisiana.

Or there’s this, from 1867:

His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, agrees to cede to the United States, by this convention, immediately upon the exchange of the ratifications thereof, all the territory and dominion now possessed by his said Majesty on the continent of America and in adjacent islands, the same being contained within the geographical limits herein set forth, to wit: [geographic details omitted]

[snip]

In consideration of the cession aforesaid, the United States agree to pay at the Treasury in Washington, within ten months after the exchange of the ratifications of this convention, to the diplomatic representative or other agent of His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, duly authorized to receive the same, seven million two hundred thousand dollars in gold.

Again, lots of details omitted, but these two paragraphs lay out the broad parameters of the deal. Now imagine Putin wanting it back.

See, that’s the thing about international agreements. If you decide they aren’t worth the paper they are written on, other folks might agree with you and act accordingly.

Sarah Palin might want to brush up on her Russian, and I may need to be working on my French.

ADDENDUM

Don’t know how I could have forgotten this one from 1819, but I hit publish before it occurred to me.

His Catholic Majesty [of Spain] cedes to the United States, in full property and sovereignty, all the territories which belong to him, situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the name of East and West Florida. The adjacent islands dependent on said provinces, all public lots and squares, vacant lands, public edifices, fortifications, barracks, and other buildings, which are not private property, archives and documents, which relate directly to the property and sovereignty of said provinces, are included in this article. The said archives and documents shall be left in possession of the commissaries or officers of the United States, duly authorized to receive them.

[snip]

The United States, exonerating Spain from all demands in future, on account of the claims of their citizens to which the renunciations herein contained extend, and considering them entirely cancelled, undertake to make satisfaction for the same, to an amount not exceeding five millions of dollars.

Lots of other details omitted, but you get the idea.

Perhaps Trump can ask one of his minions how to say “Welcome to Mar-a-Lago” in Spanish?

From Politico.eu:

Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has long sought close ties to the Trump administration in its quest for powerful international allies and an end to its political isolation at home.

But as public sentiment in Germany increasingly turns against U.S. President Donald Trump and his foreign interventionism — in particular his talk of taking control of Greenland and his seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — AfD leaders are recalibrating, putting distance between their party and a U.S. president they previously embraced.

“He has violated a fundamental election promise, namely not to interfere in other countries, and he has to explain that to his own voters,” Alice Weidel, one of the AfD’s national leaders, said earlier this week.

Hmm . . . I don’t recall Weidel complaining when Trump, Vance, and Musk were stumping for the Afd in the last national elections in Germany.

With that as background, it’s that much more impressive that Weidel now is throwing Trump under the bus. Think about that for a minute: a would-be Führer who is underbussed by the neo-Nazi AfD is no Führer at all. And for it to be the German far-right . . . that’s really gotta leave a mark. Stephen Miller must be so sad.

Or emboldened. “These AfD folks are so soft, so lacking in strength . . . Looks like it is up to us to remind Germans of their own heritage and strength.”

The AfD is the second-largest party in the Bundestag, much to the horror of Germany’s conservatives and liberals alike, and the AfD seems to support everything Miller and Trump embrace: Islamophobia, anti-immigration, and historical revisionism, just to name a few. Even so, the AfD looks at Trump’s comments about Greenland (following his actions in Venezuela) and says “no thanks – that’s too extreme, even for us.”

Enter Mike Godwin, of Godwin’s Law fame, speaking with Politico two years ago:

So to be clear — do you think comparing Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler or Nazi ideology is fair?

I would go further than that. I think that it would be fair to say that Trump knows what he’s doing. I think he chose that rhetoric on purpose. But yeah, there are some real similarities. If you’ve read Hitler’s own writing — which I don’t recommend to anyone, by the way — you see a dehumanizing dimension throughout, but the speeches are an even more interesting case.

What we have of Hitler’s speeches are mostly recorded, and they’re not always particularly coherent. What you see in efforts to compile his speeches are scholars trying to piece together what they sounded like. So, it’s a little bit like going to watch a standup comedian who’s hitting all of his great lines. You see again and again Hitler repeating himself. He’ll repeat the same lines or the same sentiment on different occasions.

With Trump, whatever else you might say about him, he knows what kinds of lines generate the kinds of reactions that he wants. The purpose of the rallies is to have applause lines, because that creates good media, that creates video. And if he repeats his lines again and again, it increases the likelihood that a particular line will be repeated in media reporting. So that’s right out of the playbook.

And now the lines aren’t hitting in quite the same way, as the AfD (of all people!) has noticed. Nothing hurts worse that being the open-mic comedian who throws out what they think is a great punchline, only to hear the sounds of silence.

Godwin ends his interview like this:

When I was growing up and being taught the American system of government, we would always be taught that the U.S. government has checks and balances in its design, so you can’t take it over with a sentiment of the moment. But I think what we’ve learned is that the institutions that protect us are fragile. History suggests that all democracies are fragile. So we have to be on the alert for political movements that want to undermine democratic institutions, because the purpose of democratic institutions is not to put the best people in power, it’s to maintain democracy even when the worst people are in power. That’s a big lift.

“Even when the worst people are in power.”

Godwin said that two years ago, but damned it if doesn’t sound like he said it yesterday. And we are finding out now just how big a lift it is to maintain democracy with folks like that in power.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

A week ago, on January 8, Donald Trump bitched out his US Attorneys (as well as those play-acting as US Attorney) — some, apparently, by name — because they are not focusing enough on prosecuting his perceived adversaries.

Dozens of U.S. attorneys, who lead prosecutors’ offices around the country, went to the White House Thursday for what was supposed to be a ceremonial photo shoot. After Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced the group of prosecutors, Trump criticized them as ineffective, saying the group was making it difficult for Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to do their jobs, the people said.

[snip]

Among his grievances with prosecutors, Trump complained that the Justice Department hadn’t yet brought a case against one of his most prominent Democratic adversaries, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, the people said.

The department has been investigating whether Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud. The senator has called the probe a bogus attempt at political retribution.

The president criticized some specific prosecutors by jurisdiction and said he felt betrayed, the people said.

[snip]

Trump’s blowup at Justice Department prosecutors comes as the president ramps up pressure on the agency to more aggressively pursue his priorities. He has complained repeatedly in recent weeks about Bondi, calling her an ineffective enforcer of his agenda.

As WSJ noted in its story on this, the day after Trump’s tantrum, Jeanine Pirro sent a subpoena to Jerome Powell, setting off a crisis for Trump.

Also in the wake of that attack, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office decided to investigate Renee Good’s network rather than the guy who shot her, Jonathan Ross, leading to the resignation of six AUSAs in MN and possibly some in the Civil Rights Division in DC, though Pam Bondi — who looked stunning for a 59 year old a year ago but now looks like shit — now claims she fired those MN AUSAs and Harmeet Dhillon claims the Civil Rights attorneys left for other reasons.

Donald Trump has made it the top focus of his DOJ to prosecute his enemies, and as a result, DOJ has been hemorrhaging experience for a year now.

That’s on top of the singular focus on Stephen Miller’s jihad against immigrants, which has led DOJ to reassign lawyers from national security cases to immigration cases (indeed, that’s one of the stated reasons why Bondi fired Robert McBride, because the First AUSA for one of the key national security divisions in the country didn’t sufficiently chase immigration cases).

But there’s another staffing choice that became public in recent weeks.

As multiple outlets have covered and as Jay Clayton detailed in two letters (January 5; January 15) to Judges Richard Berman (who presided over the Epstein case) and Paul Engelmayer (who picked up the Ghislaine Maxwell case after Alison Nathan moved to the 2nd Circuit) — DOJ has dedicated up to 580 people (the 500 reported last week, plus another 80 added this week)  to replicating the review that over a thousand FBI personnel did a year ago, this time accounting for victim privacy and “independent privileges” not permitted under the act.

To date, the Department has employed over five hundred reviewers to review and redact millions of pages of materials from the investigations into Epstein and his convicted coconspirator, Maxwell.2 The SDNY alone, in conjunction with the Department, has dedicated significant resources (including AUSAs as well as other SDNY personnel), which this week has been supplemented by approximately 80 attorneys from the Department’s Criminal Division, who will coordinate and work with SDNY during the review of documents identified as likely to contain victim information. As part of that review, the Department is identifying not only those materials the publication of which are required under the Act, but also those that carry independent privileges as well as the need to redact victim-identifying information, among other things. Act, § 2(c).3

3 Any materials withheld on this basis of course will be disclosed in a report to Congress. Act § 3.

We still have no explanation for what the hell Bondi did in the last review, such that she has to dedicate 580 attorneys to replicate the review (though the explanation probably lies in the matters DOJ plans to claim privilege over).

But not only is the need to replicate the work that taxpayers already paid for drawing from national security cases, but it is drawing from other high profile sex trafficking cases.

On Tuesday, Judge Valerie Caproni, who is presiding over the prosecution of the Alexander brothers — who are accused of trafficking seven women and a girl (with more victims accusing the brothers) using means not that dissimilar from Epstein’s modus operandi — laid into prosecutors for delays in turning over discovery for a trial currently due to start this month.

On Tuesday, another federal judge in the Southern District of New York told prosecutors to hold off of the Epstein assignment to focus on another marquee sex crime prosecution: the case of Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander — a trio of wealthy brothers in real estate accused of using their status to rape and traffic dozens of women.

With that case set to head to trial later this month, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni told prosecutors that they need to focus on expeditiously sending over discovery materials.

“A few people can be strung from the Epstein case given that these people are on trial,” said the Obama appointee. “Epstein is dead.”

See InnerCity Press’ live tweeting here.

So here’s how Pam Bondi has used the resources at DOJ.

DOJ has been firing or chasing out personnel — about 5,500 people, according to Justice Connection, not all of them lawyers — since Trump started. A great many of those ousted were ousted, whether by choice or firing, because they refused to pursue Trump’s unethical weaponization.

That’s not good enough, Trump said last week. He needs the hollowed out DOJ to pursue his enemies faster.

Meanwhile, Pam Bondi is so incompetent or corrupt, she has to replicate work she already did, reviewing the Epstein files. 1,000 FBI personnel last March, 580 attorneys now. As a result, she’s neglecting current sex trafficking prosecutions.

And we have yet to tally what the impact of the reassignment of attorneys who focus on real national security issues. Many of them are chasing Stephen Miller’s fever dreams.