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The Three Amigos Give a Progress Report Trump’s team delivered a historic first-month briefing, touting DEI’s demise, economic gains, and global diplomacy—leaving the press stunned by the candor and transparency. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/23/the-three-amigos-give-a-progress-report/

Whatever else you can say about the  Joe Biden administration, I think you have to admit that its effort to keep the public informed about its progress in realizing the president’s agenda was impressive.  I think, for example, of the way his press secretary memorialized his first month in office.  She convened a briefing at the White House on February 20 at which three senior members of the new administration gave reports on their progress in realizing the president’s agenda and then answered questions from reporters.

What, you don’t remember that? Neither do I. I had briefly confused the masked ball that was the early months of the Biden administration with stunning performance of Trump and his team in these early weeks. There is Trump himself, of course, who thrives on his exchanges with the press. His prime lieutenants—Vice President J. D Vance, for example, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have been front and center giving talks, answering questions, and responding to criticisms.

One of the most impressive performances—it is not too much to call it historic—occurred on February 20 when press Secretary Karoline Leavitt invited Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to the podium to say a few words about the administration’s accomplishments during its first month in office. They touched on everything from Trump’s dismantling of the DEI concession in government to inflation and the economy to foreign policy, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine.

Stephen Miller, who spoke first, set the tone when he described the culture of DEI as the “illegal” practice of discrimination based on race and/or sex. What we call “diversity, equity, and inclusion” today is really just a more toxic form of the “affirmative action” mandates that have been with us for decades. The key to the success of both is based on a rhetorical sleight-of-hand.  Talk about “equality” but practice discrimination. It’s nice work if you can get it.

By ending DEI throughout the federal government, Miller said, Trump has “restored merit as the cornerstone of all federal policy; restored the full, fair, impartial enforcement of our federal civil rights laws for the first time in generations; and he has cracked down on individuals across this government and nonprofits who have engaged in illegal racial discrimination against the American people.”

The End Of The Eric Adams Prosecution : Holier-Than-Thou Federal Prosecutors Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-2-20-the-end-of-the-eric-adams-prosecution-and-hoiier-than-thou-federal-prosecutors

Since my post a few days ago about the demise of the Eric Adams prosecution, controversy has continued to swirl around the matter. On the side supporting the action of the Trump/Bondi Justice Department, several new voices have emerged to join what were previously the lonely cries of a handful of people like myself and Josh Blackman. These new voices include James Copland and Rafael Mangual (of the Manhattan Institute), writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 18; and Alan Dershowitz in a column in the New York Post on February 19.

On the other side of the argument, an ex-colleague of mine sends me a copy of an “open letter” dated February 17, and signed by a gigantic list of well over 1000 former federal prosecutors. This letter essentially adopts the arguments set forth in the resignation letter of ex-SDNY US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, including echoing some of her language. A fair description is that these guys adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, claiming to be wholly pure and above politics and devoted only to the “facts and law.” Here are some excerpts:

As prosecutors, we were rightly prohibited from making criminal charging decisions based on someone’s political association, activities or beliefs, or because of our personal feelings about them. We knew it was impermissible to treat a defendant more leniently just because they were powerful or well-connected, or more harshly because they were not. We were taught to pursue justice without fear or favor, and knew our decisions to investigate and charge should be based only on the facts and the law. . . . Against this backdrop, we have watched with alarm as these values have been tested by recent actions of the Department’s leadership. Some of you have been ordered to make charging decisions based expressly on considerations other than the facts and the law, including to serve solely political purposes. To all of you, we communicate this: We salute and admire the courage many of you have already exhibited, and that will guide all of you as you continue to serve the interests of justice. You have responded to ethical challenges of a type no public servant should ever be forced to confront with principle and conviction, in the finest traditions of the Department of Justice.

The bold is in the original.

Liz Peek: A DOGE dividend could be a win-win-win for the GOP and Team Trump

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5155741-elon-musk-doge-dividend-trump-gop

With Democrats screaming that the sky is falling with each federal workerthe Department of Government Efficiency axes, Elon Musk’s team needs some good public relations.

James Fishback, CEO of “free-thinking” investment firm Azoria, has an excellent idea.   

Fishback made headlines recently by posting on X that, “President Trump and Elon Musk should propose a DOGE dividend — a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.” 

Musk, who evidently sleeps with one eye trained on his X feed, sounded positive about the proposition, responding, “Will check with the president.” 

Why not? What better way to bring home to people the benefits of cutting waste and fraud out of the federal budget?  

Fishback explains his plan: “Our proposal for the President is simple: tax-paying households should receive $1 for every $5 of total savings that DOGE delivers. That means that if DOGE delivers $2 trillion in total savings, 79 million American households will receive a $5,000 check next summer because of President Trump’s bold leadership.”  

Imagine the benefits: 

Sending out checks will make DOGE’s success real, tangible and celebrated. Nobody dislikes getting money in the mail.
Taxpayers, whose money has been funneled into distasteful and wasteful ventures like spending $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia or $2.5 million to fund electric vehicles in Vietnam, will catch a rare break — finally! 
Democrats, who have reflexively and idiotically opposed DOGE’s efforts, will be silenced. Given their resistance — and their lack of leadership and message — they will not retake the House or the Senate in the midterm elections. Republicans will own what will come to be the most popular initiative ever undertaken by either party — reforming our bloated inefficient government and returning to taxpayers money that would have been wasted.
Additionally, the dividend will mean that the more spending DOGE purges from the $6 trillion federal budget, the bigger the checks will be. That means the country will be rooting for more cuts and more closings, cheering on Musk and his DOGGIES at every turn. 
If reducing government spending pinches growth, which it could, putting some money in consumers’ pockets would provide a valuable offset. One of the reasons the economy grew robustly while Joe Biden was in the White House is that he spent money recklessly, creating the kinds of deficits usually reserved for fighting wars or deep recessions.

The Insanity In Washington

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/21/the-insanity-in-washington/

We’ve noted before that Democrats and progressives are, with some exceptions, of course, mentally imbalanced. What we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump administration, though, is appalling. The political left in this country needs an intervention before it goes completely mad.

We say this because:

New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer on Wednesday said – from the Senate floor – “At a time when incidents in the air and on the runways in and our airports seem to be increasing, why would we cut the very people meant to prevent them? Simple. Donald Trump and DOGE are doing it like they’re doing so much else, so they can help their billionaire buddies with another tax break.” This is so insane on its face that it needs no comment from us.
Rep. Robert Garcia, California Democrat, said, in reference to the Department of Government Efficiency that is eating away at the fourth, unelected but controlled by Democrats branch of government that the American people want “us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy, for the future of this country.”
Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas believes American voters are “callous & selfish” and a trifle too satanic for their support of DOGE’s work.
California Democrat Rep. Swalwell claims that “no president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump,” which might be true but there’s no reason to check because Swalwell’s comment is nonsensical. He should be embarrassed. In fact, as CNN just reported, “there was a record low number of airplane accidents nationwide” last month.
Margaret Brennan, a “journalist” at CBS and therefore a Democratic Party operative, apparently believes “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide” by the Nazis. Surely nuttier things have been said on national television by network-paid political hacks, but it would be hard to find a better example of lunacy in the media. And, yes, CBS is the network that edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall to help make her appear lucid and promoted the criminalization of censorship.
The same job description can be applied to Anne Applebaum, who, writing in the Atlantic, said “suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.” That’s right: When federal employees’ work product is being audited and their positions are determined to be unnecessary, they’re living under the boot of an invader. She believes that federal workers have been “under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations” – and that they actually did those things.
The Democrats’ communications department, known by some as the legacy media, has also implied that higher egg prices are Trump’s fault, with blanket coverage of an issue it largely ignored while prices were rising during the Biden years. “No Democrat has offered a coherent explanation of how anything Trump has done in the first month of his administration has had any effect on the price of eggs,” our friend Steven Hayward writes at Power Line. “In short, this is one of the dumbest and most contemptible political attacks of all time.” Which is what we’ve come to expect from a confederacy of the unhinged that has lost its ability to reason.
The Democrats elected a child to be their party’s vice chair. David Hogg might be 24-years-old, but he has the temperament of a toddler who has been told “no.” It’s hard not to picture him wearing one of those little boy suits that have shorts rather than trousers. While he is a successful – and shameless – self-promoter, he brings nothing but deranged, puerile anger. Which is probably why he was elected to that post.
And then there are the incessant chants, caterwauling and braying from the left that seems unable, and probably even unwilling, to stop its descent into madness.

Tom Hanks, Margaret Brennan, and the European Ministers—Reveal It All SNL, Margaret Brennan, and EU elites mock Trump supporters, yet their own cluelessness only fuels the populist rise they fear. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/20/tom-hanks-margaret-brennan-and-the-european-ministers-reveal-it-all/

Three recent but completely unrelated events illustrate the deranged hatred of Donald Trump and his supporters continuing now even into a second decade. And yet the venom only further marginalizes the left.

In its too-long 50th anniversary spectacle, Saturday Night Live offered a skit in which marquee actor Tom Hanks did an impression of what the left thinks is a supposedly neanderthal Trump supporter.

The episode was NBC’s tele-version of the recent Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden vocabulary of cheap MAGA disparagement: clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, and ultra-MAGAs.

Most of those stereotyped props were evident in Hanks’ character.

He was wearing a red MAGA hat (real and not the fake versions of Jussie Smollett’s wild and sinister imagination).

Hanks sounded off as a superstitious evangelical, a slow-speaking Southern twanger, and a poorly dressed slob.

And of course, the SNL writers insisted that he play the gratuitous racist. So, Hanks, as a clueless Black Jeopardy contestant, initially refused to even shake the hand of the African-American, assumed intellectually and morally superior, gameshow host.

We are supposed to believe the Hanks caricature is in contrast with progressives—usually represented in society as the bicoastal enlightened, well-spoken, and snappily dressed.

Perhaps the SNL crowd thought the counterpart to Hanks’ MAGA sluggard was the recent hard-left, Democratic standard-bearer—the eloquent Kamala Harris of mesmerizing word-salad fame?

Aside from the reality that Trump captured a record number of African-American male voters, nearly split the Hispanic vote, and made gains with Asian- and Jewish-Americans, he also won massive defections from Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Democrat Faces Of Failure Pity the poor Democrats – actually, don’t. by Kurt Schlichter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrat-faces-of-failure/

Pity the poor Democrats – actually, don’t pity them because they are terrible people, and their sorry situation is purely of their own making. They got too used to being in charge, too used to ruling from their throne, and now that they have to get off it they have found that their spindly legs have withered and atrophied, so they hobble around, unable to stand fully upright. It’s funny for us, but it’s an existential challenge for them. What are the Democrats to do? Who do the Democrats have to try to do it with? Their bench is worse than the 2024 White Sox, which is a sportsball metaphor indicating that they’ve got nobody good on their team. And they’ve got no prospects for the future.

Now, this is all great for America, but we need to temper our gloating by remembering that we’re Republicans, and Republicans have a unique ability to squander any advantage they happen to have, so let’s not get too uppity just yet. Yet, we do appear to be in a rare interregnum when Republicans are making smart choices and ruthlessly pressing their advantage, so maybe this is when we run up the score. The Democrats are down, and I say kick ‘em in the gut.

The Democrats have the worst issue set ever. They’re still embracing the same nonsense that helped lose them the election. Complicating it is that they have an opponent with a supernatural power to make his opponents assume the least viable political position possible at any given time simply because it’s the opposite of where he says he stands. Trump has maneuvered these people into deciding that the hill they want to die on is USAID funding of bizarre social pathologies overseas and of the regime media here at home. If there are two things the American people dislike, it’s foreign aid and the pinko press, yet that’s where the Democrats decided to position themselves – as unapologetic Japanese soldiers 40 years after the war fighting to the death to take hard-working Americans’ money and give it to grubby, ungrateful foreigners and the reporters who hate them. The other issues they’ve decided to stick with are just as unpopular. DEI? Everybody outside of a faculty lounge and the Beltway hates it. Trans lunatics and perverts who want to hang out in girls’ changing rooms? Again, there are skin rashes that poll better. Where are the Democrats? All over them. And that was just last week.

How Pete Hegseth Can Purge Wokeness From the Military By Will Thibeau

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-pete-hegseth-can-purge-wokeness-from-the-military/

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have a clear mandate to restore the United States Armed Forces as the global standard of military excellence, rolling back four years of decline under the DEI-obsessed Pentagon of the Biden-Harris administration.

They will face resistance to these reform efforts not just from the political Left and the Democratic Party, but from an entrenched class of senior officers whose bureaucratic ethos and commitment to woke ideology have undermined mission readiness, eroded cohesion and morale among the troops, and transformed our military from a merit-based institution singularly focused on national defense into a laboratory for costly and destructive social experimentation.

Hegseth’s success in setting the Pentagon straight will depend on his effectiveness in checking the overreach of these woke officers and restoring civilian control over our Armed Forces. That will require more than simply overturning race– and sex–based quotas, ending the indulgence of transgenderism in the uniform, or any of the other worthy and necessary measures to unmake the woke military at the level of policy. To achieve real and lasting change, Hegseth must enact structural reforms that remove not just the woke policies themselves but the climate and the culture from which they emerged. 

Below are three ambitious but achievable recommendations that Hegseth could adopt to tame the scourge of wokeness in uniform and restore control of our defense establishment to the American people and their elected representatives.

Eliminate woke officers by restoring civilian control of personnel processes.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the upper echelons at the Pentagon have been taken over by left-wing ideology. In one analysis published by the Center for Renewing America, out of almost 600 generals and admirals, over 60 were found to have politicized their service to an objectionable extent — more than one in ten. 

Musk brings the receipts as polling shows Trump and DOGE have public backing despite critics The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk has attracted its fair share of critics, though the agenda of dramatically downsizing government itself appears to have overshadowed the negative press, smear campaigns and public suspicion of Musk. BenWheldon

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/musk-brings-receipts-polling-shows-trump-and-doge-have-public-backing

Elon Musk is bringing receipts to substantiate his claims of large-scale fraud in the American government, undermining claims from detractors as he rides a wave of popular support for President Donald Trump and a government overhaul.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk has attracted its fair share of critics, though the agenda of dramatically downsizing government itself appears to have overshadowed the negative press and public suspicion of Musk.

Over the first month of the Trump presidency, DOGE has torn through federal agencies seeking instances of fraud, waste, abuse and other non-necessary expenditures hoping to dramatically reduce the scope of the federal government. The department has yet to post a comprehensive list of savings, but its website currently promises “receipts coming over the weekend.” So far, however, the department has already shown hard documentation of apparent fraud and waste via its X account.

Thus far, the agency has largely taken aim at executive branch agencies and has yet to post any workforce data on Congress or the Judiciary. But the executive branch agencies make up a substantive part of the federal workforce and payroll, accounting for more than 2.2 million employees and an annual expenditure of just over $211 billion.

Over the weekend, the department published its initial reports outlining the scope of federal agency expenditures and regulations, estimating that 18.5 federal regulations existed for each law Congress approved.

A change in approach

While Trump Blazes, Congress Fumbles And Bumbles

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/20/while-the-white-house-sizzles-congress-bumbles/

In our lifetimes, we’ve never seen anything like what we are witnessing at 1400 Pennsylvania Ave., as the Trump administration sets the town ablaze with rapid-fire executive orders, mass firings, and DOGE investigations. The White House is “flooding the zone” with an unprecedented sense of purpose and urgency.

But a mile-and-a-half east on Pennsylvania Avenue, Republican lawmakers act like it’s just another day at the office at the U.S. Capitol – an attitude that could end up dooming Trump’s presidency.

So far, Congress has passed one bill. And it can’t seem to get its act together on the make-or-break “reconciliation” bill that will determine the future success of Trump’s second term.

This is in stark contrast to 2021, when Democrats handed Joe Biden his $1.9 billion “rescue plan” in record time.

Like Trump, Biden laid out what he wanted in that bill before he took office. The House and Senate got to work and passed a “budget resolution” on Feb. 5 of that year – the first step to getting Biden’s massive “rescue plan” passed through the filibuster-proof “reconciliation” process. The final bill hit Biden’s desk on March 11.

Today? House Republicans still aren’t sure they have the votes to get their budget resolution bill passed against opposition from moderates and fiscal hawks over spending cuts.

And the House can’t agree with Senate Republicans on whether to push for one big reconciliation bill – favored by the House – or two separate bills being pushed in the Senate. Any differences would then have to be ironed out in conference committee.

How USAID Shipped Bags of Hundred Dollar Bills to the Taliban Planeloads of cash. Zero accountability. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21402/usaid-funding-taliban

[T]he ultimate responsibility lay with USAID. The $40 million on the tarmac was part of a much larger scheme under which USAID and the State Department provided over $1.7 billion in funding to the UN which then shipped $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan.

Under the guise of humanitarian needs, $1.7 billion was provided to the UN, which used some of the money to buy dollars to fly into Afghanistan, to trade for Afghan currency, which the U.S. had also arranged to have printed on behalf of the Taliban.

The cash is not provided to the Taliban or DAB by the UN, but by the groups funded by the UN.

During the intermediate step, DAB held ‘auctions’ of the dollars which elements linked to the Taliban, including the Haqqani network allied with Al Qaeda, reportedly ‘win’. The auctions prop up the Afghani currency and keep the Taliban in power.

Putting the money into UN pooled accounts allowed USAID to claim that they “do not provide assistance to or through the Taliban”, they just put money into “pooled UN accounts….”.

The State Department responded to these revelations by falsely claiming that there are no sanctions on Afghanistan, that banks refuse to carry out wire transfers because of “the lack of profitability” and that “to the best of our knowledge, no electronic financial delivery systems are currently scalable to meet the liquidity needs of the UN” requiring it to instead convert billions of dollars into paper notes and ship them by plane. None of this is true or even a plausible lie.

The Taliban money laundering scheme was not an exception, it was how USAID, the State Department and the UN have operated for too long, not only in Afghanistan, but in Syria, Yemen, Gaza and many other terrorist areas around the world, using plausible deniability and chains of organizations to avoid accountability and direct responsibility for aiding terrorists.

Americans have become the financiers of their worst enemies. It’s time for that to stop.

In 2022, the DAB Afghanistan Bank showed off photos of $40 million in stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. The Taliban-controlled central bank described this as one of three shipments of “humanitarian aid” amounting to over $100 million.

DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, was headed by Noor Ahmad Agha, a “specially designated terrorist” who had been named as the “financier of bomb-making”, including the IEDs which had killed over 1,000 American soldiers, and sending money to a sanctioned figure was illegal.

Despite that, someone had sent a massive fortune in U.S. cash to the Taliban’s terror bank.