DOGE was a massive failure. It was run by arrogant people who didn’t think they needed to learn and understand the subject matter. DOGE misdiagnosed the problem. Fraud and waste isn’t the driver of the debt, legitimate payments to people for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and military spending, are the drivers. DOGE also broke the law. The executive cannot legally stop spending that has been passed by Congress and signed by a president.
DOGE did enduring harm to research. We lost valuable people who are hard to get back. The standing of the United States and its power to influence people through the State Department, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and foreign aid have been deeply damaged.
Putin doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons. If he did, he risks the destruction of his country. Putin, like the Soviet Union in history, uses nuclear weapons as bluster to threaten countries whose leaders and people believe the likelihood of Russia using nukes is higher than it is. Trump is scared. He’s happy to use or threaten military force against countries without nukes, but Russia invades its neighbor in a war of conquest while committing many atrocities, and Trump is obsessed with peace, even, at times, weakening support to Ukraine to appease Putin. Letting Russia gain things with nuclear threats increases the incentive for other countries to get nukes, and one of those countries may be more willing to actually use them.
On the international stage, the United States is acting like brash huns, its president receiving gifts of gold as countries complement him and shower him in gifts in hopes of corruption as they beseech Trump to lift tariffs. In the short term, the U.S. has higher taxes on goods they import and difficulty selling abroad where foreign countries tariff back and where tariffs on imports into the U.S. make U.S. goods more expensive. In the long term, the U.S. reputation is tarnished and countries may never trust the country again as the country already elected Trump twice, and may always elect another one in the future. A world where the United States can’t be trusted is a worse world for the United States and Americans.
We can’t assume other people in history and in the current world think like us. Not everyone is a reasonable person who can be reached with diplomacy. Some people are ideologically psychopaths and are willing to kill many many people to get what they want. Such people can only be stopped by force.
“Asked by a reporter about Khashoggi’s murder during a press conference in the Oval Office, Trump defended the crown prince — who minutes earlier had pledged to increase his past commitment of $600 billion in investments in the U.S. to $1 trillion.
“He’s done a phenomenal job,” Trump said of Mohammed, adding: “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it.”
And, referencing Khashoggi, the president also seemed to offer an explanation for his murder: “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman,” he said.
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Moments later, he went further and suggested that ABC should lose its broadcasting license over the reporter’s question.
It was not the first time Trump made excuses for Khashoggi’s murder, something he also did in 2018. And it followed the president praising Mohammed for his record on “human rights” and declaring that he and the Saudi crown prince have “always been on the same side of every issue.””