RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/supreme-court-trump-firings-executive-branch-power

Article II of the Constitution begins with a simple declarative sentence: “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” Those 15 words are at the heart of a key battle in the early days of the second Trump administration—and will likely be the basis for consolidating power in one individual over what has become the most important branch of government.

In his first month in office, President Trump has removed many officials, both high-ranking and middle-managerial, hoping to streamline government and wrest control of the permanent bureaucracy. Many of the dispatched employees have contested their removal in court. The dispute is partially about civil-service rules and, more consequentially, about the president’s ability to remove principal officers of so-called independent agencies, which themselves are a contradiction in constitutional terms.

These employees argue that their firings were unconstitutional because of a 90-year-old Supreme Court decision that protects heads of independent agencies (but not cabinet departments) from without-cause removal. That 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, held that agencies wielding “quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative” power can only get fired for incompetence or malfeasance, not mere presidential agenda-setting. In 1988, the justices extended Humphrey’s Executive to nearly all federal officials in Morrison v. Olson, over a fierce solo dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia, who argued that the presidential removal power was essential to checking government abuses and ensuring political accountability. Those decisions fueled the rise of the modern administrative state.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/04/memo-to-trump-get-focused-on-the-economy-before-its-too-late/

Conservatives have been positively giddy with the whirlwind of activity out of the White House over the past five weeks. But if President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress don’t start focusing on the economy, the excitement will be short-lived.

Not only are there worrisome signs of an economic slowdown, but the public is growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as a lack of attention to pocketbook issues on Trump’s part. Republican lawmakers are making matters worse by dawdling on extending Trump’s tax cuts, which is causing businesses to hold off on big investments. This is a lethal combination.

The latest sign the economy continues to struggle comes from the GDPNow, produced by the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, which projects GDP growth for each quarter based on currently available data, and changes as those data roll in. Data released on Monday caused a sharp downgrade in GDPNow forecast to -2.8% for the quarter, from -1.5% last Friday.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Confidence Index dropped sharply in February and “pessimism about the future returned,” according to the Conference Board.

The latest I&I/TIPP poll finds that 76% of those surveyed are concerned about an economic slowdown, with 45% saying they are “very concerned.” And 82% are troubled about inflation.

(We will have a complete report Wednesday on the poll’s findings.)

In other words, we are not out of the woods yet.

Here’s the worrisome part.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

                                                                                                                               Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

                                                                                                                                Australian author & art critic

 “Our doubts are traitors and cause us to miss the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.”

         Measure for Measure William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

As the two epigraphs infer, doubt is personal. In her Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, the American poet wrote “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” On the other hand, in The Selected Letters of Tennessee Wiliams, the playwright is quoted: “I don’t believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work…”

Doubt, including self-doubt, and skepticism are not synonymous but are related. Doubt can be defined as uncertainty regarding one’s abilities (as Lucio infers). It also serves as questioning one’s judgement (as Robert Hughes suggests). It is intuitive, reflecting a lack of knowledge, as Thomas wanted proof of Jesus’ resurrection. On the other hand, a skeptic is one with an open mind who questions the truth of something stated or alleged, or at least who defers judgement until more facts are available.

This is not to argue that belief in one’s self is uncommon. When a youth, I was not skeptical about much and had few self-doubts. Many of us were raised on the American folktale, The Little Engine that Could. Theodore Roosevelt, allegedly, expressed a similar sentiment: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” All good advice, so long as it does not morph into cockiness, arrogance, or conceit. As I grew older, I read and thought more, I became more skeptical. I recall, when a teenager, the president of a brokerage firm who told me that the longer he worked in the business the less he felt he knew about finance.

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/5169877-musk-loyalty-attacks-mccarthyism/amp/

This month, 75 years ago, Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.) gave his infamous speech denouncing disloyal Americans working at the highest levels of our government. It was the defining moment for what became known as McCarthyism, which attacked citizens as dangerous and disloyal influences in government.

Some of us have criticized the rising “rage rhetoric” for years, including that of President Trump and Democratic leaders, denouncing opponents as traitors and enemies of the state.

In the 2024 election, the traditional red state-blue state firewalls again collapsed, as they had in 2016. The response among Democrats has been to unleash a type of new Red Scare, questioning the loyalty of those who are supporting or working with the Trump administration in carrying out his promised reforms.

Elon Musk is the designated disloyal American for many on the left. That rage has reached virtual hysteria on ABC’s “The View.” This is the same show before the election on which hosts warned that, if Trump were elected, journalists and homosexuals would be rounded up and “disappeared.”

After the election, democracy seemed to stubbornly hang on, so the hosts had to resort to attacking as disloyal anyone joining the government or supporting Trump’s policies. 

This week, co-host Joy Behar followed many others in questioning Musk’s loyalty and attacking him over being a naturalized American citizen: “The guy was not born in this country, who was born under apartheid in South Africa. So, [he] has that mentality going on. He was pro-Apartheid, as I understand it.”

Behar was then forced, perhaps by panicked ABC lawyers, to walk back the comment — such retractions having become a regular feature on “The View“. What came out was the type of jumbled confusion that results when you interrupt a lunatic on the metro in mid-rave.

Behar stated: “I’m getting some flack because I said that Musk was pro-apartheid. I don’t really know for sure if he was … He was around at that time, but maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t—he might have been a young guy, too. So, don’t be suing me, okay Elon?”

This anti-immigrant attack on Musk, however, has worked its way into many Democrats’ talking points, even though their party had previously claimed to defend immigrants against racist Republicans seeking to close the Southern border and deport criminal illegal immigrants.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/03/who-really-politicized-the-pentagon/

Is the era of rounding up government or academic “experts” to declare their support or opposition to ongoing controversies over?

Public declarations by Anthony Fauci and his associates to follow their “expertise” or “science” did not work out well and persuaded few.

Recall the 1,200 partisan healthcare “professionals” of June 2020 who flipped to assure us that it was mysteriously now medically OK to break quarantines—but only if to publicly protest during the post-George Floyd unrest.

Do we remember the “70 arms control and nuclear experts?” In 2015, they were collected by Obama subordinates to convince America to embrace the flawed administration’s so-called Iran Deal.

In 2021, “Seventeen recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences” assured there would follow no inflation from the Biden administration’s massive borrowing and spending.

Hyperinflation followed.

Most recently, five former Secretaries of Defense—William Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, and Lloyd Austin—co-authored a public letter to Congress. They blasted the Trump administration’s dismissals from command of several generals—including the current chairman of the joint chiefs, General C. Q. Brown Jr.

They argued that such firings were political and thus would weaken the military and depress recruitment. As a result, they demanded congressional investigations.

Oversight of anything in government is always welcomed. But there are a number of inconsistencies in the letter that unfortunately diminish the force of its argument.

First, firing generals is hardly new. Many presidents have relieved commanding officers—even wartime combat theater commanders—without much, if any, explanation.

Consider just one recent pre-Trump presidency—the tenure of Barack Obama. He fired Gen. David McKiernan as commander of all American troops in Afghanistan. And he did so without much explanation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/10-bad-takeaways-from-the-zelenskyy-blow-up/

1. Zelenskyy does not grasp—or deliberately ignores—the bitter truth: those with whom he feels most affinity (Western globalists, the American Left, the Europeans) have little power in 2025 to help him. And those with whom he obviously does not like or seeks to embarrass (cf. his Scranton, Penn. campaign-like visit in September 2024) alone have the power to save him. For his own sake, I hope he is not being “briefed” by the Obama-Clinton-Biden gang to confront Trump, given their interests are not really Ukraine’s as they feign.

2. Zelenskyy acts as if his agendas and ours are identical. So, he keeps insisting that he is fighting for us despite our two-ocean-distance that he mocks. We do have many shared interests with Ukraine, but not all by any means: Trump wants to “reset” with Russia and triangulate it against China. He seeks to avoid a 1962 DEFCON 2-like crisis over a proxy showdown in proximity to a nuclear rival. And he sincerely wants to end the deadlocked Stalingrad slaughterhouse for everyone’s sake.

3. The Europeans (and Canada) are now talking loudly of a new muscular antithesis, independent of the U.S. Promises, promises—given that would require Europeans to prune back their social welfare state, frack, use nuclear, stop the green obsessions, and spend 3-5 percent of their GDP on defense. The U.S. does not just pay 16 percent of NATO’s budget but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop patrolling sea-lanes and deterring terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes.

4. Zelenskyy must know that all of the once deal-stopping issues to peace have been de facto settled: Ukraine is now better armed than most NATO nations, but will not be in NATO; and no president has or will ever supply Ukraine with the armed wherewithal to take back the Donbass and Crimea. So, the only two issues are a) how far will Putin be willing to withdraw to his 2022 borders and b) how will he be deterred? The first is answered by a commercial sector/tripwire, joint Ukrainian-US-Europe resource development corridor in Eastern Ukraine, coupled with a Korea-like DMZ; the second by the fact that Putin unlike his 2008 and 2014 invasions has now lost a million dead and wounded to a Ukraine that will remain thusly armed.

5. What are Zelenskyy’s alternatives without much U.S. help—wait for a return of the Democrats to the White House in four years? Hope for a rearmed Europe? Pray for a Democratic House and a 3rd Vindman-like engineered Trump impeachment? Or swallow his pride, return to the White House, sign the rare-earth minerals deal, invite in the Euros (are they seriously willing to patrol a DMZ?), and hope Trump can warn Putin, as he did successfully between 2017-21, not to dare try it again?

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/02/dressing-for-the-role-zelensky-polonius-and-the-theater-of-politics/

I believe that most students, when first reading Hamlet, are inclined to regard Polonius as a sententious fool, present mostly for comic relief.

Sententious he may be. But it strikes me that most of his advice is wise and to the point.

Consider, to take one example, his famous speech to his son Laertes as the young man prepares to sail for France.

Is there a single item among Polonius’s “few precepts” that rings false?

I think that the speech, though pitched a bit high rhetorically, is full of good advice, from the bits at the beginning about holding one’s tongue to the concluding “to thine own self be true” admonition at the end.

Thinking about Volodymyr Zelensky’s performance in the Oval Office on Friday, it occurred to me that the Ukrainian president might profit by emulating certain of Polonius’s strictures. I am not thinking of Dane’s advice that one should “Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.” Nor am I thinking of Polonius’s sage advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Both, to be sure, are sound prescriptions that the President of Ukraine might practice to his advantage.

But no: what impressed me as I digested the theater of the Zelensky Oval Office outing was something apparently more trivial. It revolved around what Polonius said about clothes, especially his observation that “the apparel oft proclaims the man.” Before the fireworks really started, at about minute 40 of the 50-minute Oval Office press conference when Zelensky and J.D. Vance got into it, someone asked why the President of Ukraine was not wearing a suit.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/trump-2-good-bad-ugly/

The 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is a man with a plan. His predecessor, the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was not. Trump 45 portrayed himself throughout his first campaign as the embodiment of the electorate’s rage. That was effective in getting him elected and may have had the virtue of being true—but the role of rage-embodier provided little guidance when it came to the day-to-day task of being president. How were you to embody rage while at the same time repealing Obamacare, for example?

Trump 45 had no road map and no agenda. He had a vibe, and his first administration was an improvisation. Now, anyone who’s done (or watched) improv knows that moments of inspired brilliance can arise from a few disparate observations mashed together in an entirely new and unexpected way. But those unfortunate performers and audiences also know those indelible moments are usually outnumbered by the ones that go on too long, or are embarrassingly off-key, or just don’t work. The greatest improv of Trump 45 was the Abraham Accords, and a remarkable accomplishment they were. But then there was the bad improv, most notably the inconstant policy pronouncements and nightly briefings on the pandemic in 2020, which were so uncertain and discomfiting that they brought Trump 45 to its end.

Trump 47 ran for president for two years after the 2022 midterms, and the improviser was no more. His was a tight campaign and it had an overarching through line. The first, and most obvious, was that his successor had done a bad job and was so cognitively impaired, he wasn’t even really the president. That was the classic “binary choice” approach that every candidate running against a sitting president has to deploy: Do you want more of him or do you want to try me instead?

But it was more than that, and what we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump campaign is evidence. What Trump did, in every speech and every rally, was vow to take on and destroy two forces imperiling America’s present and condemning it to a dark future. The first was wokeness. The second was the weaponization of the law and the culture as a means of imposing wokeness on America. From the minute Trump took the oath of office on January 20, his determination to fulfill this vow—which unites even those parts of the right that remain skeptical or worse of Trump himself—has released a kind of primal political energy that has hit Washington with the force of one of those 2,000-pound bombs Joe Biden refused to send to Israel.

As I write, Trump has been president for three weeks. He has promulgated executive orders banning biological males from girls’ sports and recognizing two and only two genders. Other executive orders ended the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in government and extended the ban to institutions that receive federal funding. He has set loose the world’s richest man and most brilliant executive to root out waste in government, with no regard for prior political niceties—or niceties at all. He has targeted foreign aid, which collectively constitute the least popular doings of the federal government. He has sent illegal migrants who have committed criminal acts to Guantanamo. He has suspended government grants. He has moved American troops to the Southern border. He has threatened tariffs, then temporarily suspended them.

These are just the things he’s done that have popped into my head as I have been writing these sentences.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/02/28/well-zelenskyys-interview-with-bret-baier-was-interesting-n4937441

Just hours after being unceremoniously booted from the White House by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to salvage what was left of his diplomatic credibility in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier. And boy, was it a doozy.

Zelenskyy kicked things off with the expected platitudes, thanking President Trump and the American people for their support throughout Ukraine’s three-year war with Russia. “I was always very thankful from all our people. You helped us a lot from the very beginning… you helped us to survive. We are strategic partners, even in such tough dialogue,” Zelenskyy said—sounding like someone ready to capitulate to Trump to get this deal done.

But the winds changed when Baier pressed him on whether he owed Trump an apology for the Oval Office debacle. Instead of showing an ounce of contrition, Zelenskyy doubled down: “I respect president and I respect American people, and… I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I’m not sure that we did something bad.”

Not sure you did something bad? Is getting thrown out of the White House after a shouting match with the leader of the free world not a big enough clue? Ironically, Zelenskyy also expressed that some of the issues ought to have been discussed privately—which is exactly what JD Vance said. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-and-the-new-new-world-order/

This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.