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**MARCH 25, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Paul, Weiss Appeased Trump. More Attacks on BigLaw Will Follow.
[link removed]
Fascists respond to capitulation with more aggression. Elon Musk has already started targeting firms himself. BY HENRY BURKE
Bubble Trouble [link removed]
An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us. BY BRYAN McMAHON
The Existential Threat of Ultra-Billionaires [link removed]
A handful of rich guys will burn human society to the ground rather than pay a dime in tax. BY RYAN COOPER
Merchant of Menace: Trump and the Jews [link removed]
The unholy alliance between history's antisemites, Netanyahu, and Trump BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Meyerson on TAP
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**** If Trumpworld's Security Norms Had Been in Place Before
Appoint a nest of birdbrains
to top government posts and see what you get.
Southampton, U.K., Sunday, June 4, 1944, 9:30 p.m. - In a house a few miles from the English Channel, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower meets with top aides to reschedule the impending invasion of Nazi-controlled Europe. The rain pelting down on the house and the Channel has compelled the Allies to postpone the invasion by one day, but weather officers now predict the storm will probably pass by Tuesday, June 6. After tense deliberations, Eisenhower orders the invasion to begin on the 6th.
Aides scurry to alert the officers who will lead the invasion. Two junior aides, Waltz and Hegseth, are supposed to hand-deliver the order to key officials, but rather than risk getting drenched in the downpour, and after a few minutes in which Hegseth peers into a mirror to make sure his jawline looks tough enough, they decide to send the order out to the list by uncoded telegram. And so it goes, to Gen. Bradley, Gen.
Ridgway, and sundry others, including one official identified only as JG.
In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels is surprised but pleased to get the message, and immediately passes it on to the F??hrer and Gen. Rommel.
* * * * *
The American attack on the Houthis, of course, didn't have quite the world-historic weight of D-Day, and
**The Atlantic**'s Jeffrey Goldberg didn't pose a security risk, though he was clearly as gobsmacked as Goebbels would have been in the above historical fiction. Nor would Eisenhower ever have appointed two such patently unqualified and stone-cold stupid individuals as Donald Trump's national security adviser Michael Waltz and defense secretary Pete Hegseth to any post higher than latrine cleaner. Trump's sole criteria for such appointments, we already knew, are lapdog loyalty to him, and a record of looking good on Fox News while attacking Democrats in ways memorably charted by Goebbels's big lies.
Trump's mode of governance, which Jamelle Bouie has
aptly characterized as "anti-constitutional," makes Richard Nixon's illegal surveillance and subversion of his critics look inconsequential by comparison, but the two administrations do share some similarities. A line spoken by the Deep Throat character to Bob Woodward in the film of
**All the President's Men**characterizes not only Nixon's aides, but Trump's as well: "These are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."
One thing that the chat Goldberg revealed [link removed] makes clear is the identity of the most powerful and driven guy within Trump's gang of malignant nincompoops. The chat drones on about the wisdom of attacking the Houthis, with Vice President JD Vance noting that opening the Red Sea to normal ship traffic will help Europe a lot more than it helps the United States, and wondering if Trump would support the attack if that point was made
clear to him. "I just hate bailing Europe out again," Vance says on the chat. The chatters then agree that we should make Europe pay us for bombing the Houthis, making clear that they view Europe, not the Houthis, as our real enemy, for reasons unspecified but perhaps because it's the cradle of a dangerously polyglot Western civilization.
[link removed]
It's only when the chat hears from "S M"-by all accounts, Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for policy-that Vance (merely the vice president) and the other cabinet-level officials are brought to heel. "As I heard it," Miller texts,
the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn't remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain
extracted in return.
With that, all of Miller's nominal superiors fall into line, making clear that Miller, who brings a level of competence and drive not found elsewhere in Trump's circle, powered by a hatred of immigrants and liberals that exceeds that of all other Trumpies, is the one figure whom the rest of Trumpworld fears. Trump's enforcer, as it were.
Two months into Trump's second presidency, it's undeniably obvious that his administration, and for that matter the entire Republican Party, now serves as a monarch's court rather than elected or appointed figures who exercise any judgment of their own. From Speaker Mike Johnson on down, Republican members of Congress have treated this absurd security breach as nothing very serious, despite the fact that many of them, beginning with Trump himself, relentlessly attacked [link removed] Hillary Clinton during the 2016
presidential campaign and thereafter for having classified messages on her personal server (a Blackberry). "We can't have someone in the Oval Office who doesn't understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified," Trump thundered a few days before the 2016 election. This line of attack was shared [link removed] by all Republicans at the time: Marco Rubio, who'd campaigned for president in Republican primaries earlier that year, opined on Facebook that "Hillary Clinton's actions have sent the worst message to the millions of hard-working federal employees who hold security clearances and are expected to go to great lengths to secure sensitive government information and abide by the rules."
Trumpworld, where the shelf life of grudges is measured in centuries, was still harping on this years later. In 2022, Miller tweeted, "One point that doesn't get
made enough about Hillary's unsecured server illegally used to conduct state business ... foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe." In 2023, Waltz, at the time a Republican congressman, urged a belated prosecution of Jake Sullivan, then President Biden's national security adviser, for having sent classified messages to Clinton on her private server more than a decade earlier. It was Waltz, of course, now himself the nation's national security adviser, who initiated the unsecured chat that somehow included Goldberg.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Trump and his lackeys are giving double standards a bad name.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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