"If he failed, their process failed": Inside the NFLPA meltdown
China’s strategy? Let Trump cook.: As President Donald Trump dismantles U.S. soft power and launches trade wars with allies, China is content to sit back and watch. - "'The United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,' Gewirtz told the Wire China. 'It is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. China’s view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.'
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"[Economic historian]Tooze argued that the Americans have 'dropped the ball' here and the consequences will be vast. 'This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history,' he said. 'This is really what the provincialization of the West really looks like.'"
The Wrecking of the FBI The former FBI official Peter Strzok on how President Donald Trump is destroying U.S. counterintelligence from the inside. - "But they thought they had a deal. Bracket Trump, leave Trump out of the story, and Trump in turn would license them to go on a hunting expedition against all the people they really hated. A long list of liberal icons, people like—people whom they dislike for other reasons who were in the Epstein network. If Trump would just—they would stand back from Trump and he would then deliver to them justice against their ideological and other kinds of opponents. They’re mad, these people, because Trump reneged on that deal. In order to protect himself, he ended up protecting a lot of other people, too, or so people in MAGA world who are excited about this issue believe that this has been taken away from them. And for some of the people who are the loudest influencers, losing the Epstein file, having Donald Trump say, There are no records, there’s nothing to see here, everybody stand down, that’s not just a threat to their belief system. For many of them, it’s a threat to their livelihoods. For a lot of influencers, Epstein was central to their engagement strategies, very lucrative engagement strategies, and they now have the choice: If they accept the Donald Trump edict—if they say, Okay, we’ll stand down, as President Trump says—then what do they do for engagement?
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"This is a chronic—I think, going back to the 9/11 analogy, one of the things that happened after 9/11 was the decision was made to harden cockpit doors. What if somebody, a year and a half or two years before 9/11 said, You know, why don’t we harden the cockpit doors? Why don’t we do that? See how that maybe that would be an improvement. And they did it. We would probably now be studying that hardening of cockpit doors as an example of government waste. Right?
"Strzok: Yes.
"Frum: We hardened all the cockpit doors. It cost all this money. No one ever tried it. Nothing ever happened. Why did we ever do that in the first place? What a waste of time and money. Government overregulation hardening cockpit doors. This is the great injustice of government. No one ever knows what’s behind door number two, the thing that didn’t happen, the thing that you prevented."
This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built: The country is witnessing the creation of an all-powerful institution, and one man is responsible. - "Roberts has all but made at-will removal the president's constitutionally guaranteed prerogative, and his rhetoric goes further yet. His opinions taken together create a dangerously authoritarian and largely ahistorical narrative about the constitutional presidency."
What Trump’s Feud With Jerome Powell Is Really About: The president doesn’t think the Federal Reserve chair is bad at his job. He objects to the job itself. - "The Federal Reserve's assignment is to steward the long-term interests of the U.S. economy even at the occasional expense of short-term pain by balancing the twin objectives of suppressing inflation and managing the unemployment rate. Trump, however, believes that the Fed's objective should be to speed up the economy under Republican administrations and slow it down under Democratic ones. To the extent that the central bank balances unemployment and inflation, he would like to see the pain of high unemployment shifted onto Democratic administrations so that Republican ones can benefit from rapid economic growth."
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