March 29, 2025

Saturday, March 29, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Yesterday, the New York Times Op-Ed Section had something serious to say.

Nailing the nature of the Trump Administration.

Trump’s Security Team’s Signal Disaster has shown who he and who they are.

Security Breaches Can Be Fixed. People Without Honor Can’t Be Trusted.

So now it’s clear: The Trump administration has not kept sensitive details of national security secure. Thanks to reporting by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, we have learned that officials at the highest levels, including Vice President JD Vance, discussed military operations via chat on the cellphone app Signal, a medium vulnerable to hostile intelligence services. And they accidentally included Mr. Goldberg in the chat. Which is funny, but also, from an operational security standpoint, not great.

As the Trump administration has responded with a mixture of denials, brush-offs, lies and vitriolic attacks on Mr. Goldberg, I’ve found myself worrying less about the leak and more about the character of the people in charge of our nation’s defense. The breach is serious, but security breaches can be plugged. Men and women who have shown themselves to have no character, though, can never be trusted. Not with national security, not with anything.

Perhaps it seems old-fashioned to talk of character. We’re cynical modern Americans, after all. When idealism feels exhausted and the old order seems insufficient to meet the challenges of the modern world, candid appeals to raw interest, however amoral, can feel like a breath of fresh air. That’s part of Donald Trump’s appeal.

But there remains constant talk of character in the miliary — of integrity and accountability. This is not just for moral reasons but also for practical ones: You cannot ask men and women to go to war in a group bound by nothing stronger than self-interest. How could they trust their comrades and their leaders when their lives are on the line?

This is why a military career starts not with training in lethality but with character formation. When I joined the Marine Corps two decades ago, I entered a decidedly archaic, premodern society for which virtue was of paramount importance. At Quantico, Va. — where Mr. Vance traveled on Wednesday to speak with Marines in training — they shaved my head and put me in a uniform, because my individuality was less important than our shared purpose. Before they taught me how to fire a rifle, they taught me about honor, courage and commitment. We weren’t supposed to be hired guns; we were supposed to be the first to fight for right and freedom.

There’s a reason essentially every warrior society throughout history has had a code like this — and it’s not that every society has been enlightened. Soldiers don’t need to be saints. But to be good soldiers, to complete their missions and protect their comrades, they do need a bedrock of integrity.

In that light, the absurdity of the Signal chat takes on a more sinister cast. You don’t need to be a military expert to know that what the administration did is unconscionable any more than you need to be a meteorologist to know that the sky is blue. It requires only a willingness to speak honestly about serious matters.

That task is evidently beyond the ability of the members of our national security team. Instead, they have lied. They have mocked. The national security adviser, Michael Waltz, has called Mr. Goldberg “scum,” even though Mr. Goldberg took more care with sensitive military information than Mr. Waltz did. The head of the F.B.I. has not promised an investigation. Mr. Trump dismissed the affair as a “witch hunt.” They have treated this as a media event to be spun rather than a grievous error to be rectified.

They have behaved, in short, like people without honor. The lives of our service members are in their hands. (New York Times Op-Ed by Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war.)

Are these people just dumb? Can we add cruel to that?

Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?

It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.

This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.

In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.

Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.

Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.

If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.

I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.

China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested.

Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.)

Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.

I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.

Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today they are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.

All of this is both dumb and dangerous. And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Mr. Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.

If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Mr. Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us. (Op-ed by the former secretary of state, former United States senator and Democratic nominee for president in 2016. New York Times).

The New Yorker has something to say too.

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Tuesday, April 1st is Election Day in Wisconsin.

Musk is up to his old tricks, trying to buy an election.

But for whatever reason, he had to agree to try to buy it the old fashioned way, paying for ads and the like, not voters.

Musk butts up against Wisconsin state law with (now deleted) $1 million check giveaway

Election law experts were skeptical about the billionaire’s move.

Elon Musk will visit Wisconsin on Sunday ahead of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election.

Musk initially announced the plan in a post shortly after midnight on Friday, promising a $1 million giveaway to two attendees who had voted. That post was deleted after legal experts raised concerns it would violate state law. Musk clarified on Friday afternoon that the giveaways would be limited to people who signed his super PAC’s petition — although Wisconsin’s attorney general said Friday his office would seek a court order to stop that from happening.

The visit marks an escalation of Musk’s campaigning in Wisconsin, where the Republican-backed Brad Schimel faces Democratic-backed Susan Crawford in an election that will determine control of the state’s highest court. Musk’s political organization, America PAC, has spent more than $12 million on the race, according to campaign finance disclosures, and he personally gave $3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party.

In a Friday afternoon post, Musk said the event would be held Sunday night and would be reserved for those who had signed a petition circulated by America PAC. He will hand out two $1 million checks at the event, he said.

He had previously posted, and then deleted, about the event and the checks, but the earlier post said the event would be “limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election.”

The illegal bribe that Musk tweeted about, then deleted.

That could still face legal pushback. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, said in a statement Friday that his office intended to seek a court order to stop Musk from carrying out the giveaway.

Legal experts had raised concerns that offering the Sunday giveaway for only those who have already voted could violate Wisconsin’s election bribery law, which makes it a crime to offer “anything of value” to “induce” potential voters to vote or not vote in an election. Early voting is underway in Wisconsin and runs through Sunday.

“I’m actually surprised that Musk is being so explicit about tying eligibility for this million dollar payout to having voted in the election,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of the watchdog organization Documented, about Musk’s earlier post. “His tweet makes it very clear that you can only enter this event, and you can only be eligible for the million dollar payout, if you voted, and it’s hard to read that as anything other than providing a thing of value to induce a person to vote, or to reward them for having voted.”

The giveaway tactic is not new for Musk. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, America PAC made signees of a petition supporting the First Amendment eligible for a $1 million giveaway. The plan faced legal challenges but judges ruled in Musk’s favor.

The group has replicated a similar strategy in Wisconsin, promising voters $100 to sign a petition “In Opposition To Activist Judges,” and it announced on Wednesday it had cut a $1 million check for a Green Bay resident who signed on.

“Elon, thank you,” recipient Scott Ainsworth said in a video posted by America PAC, where he urged MAGA voters to go to the polls and support Schimel.

Musk is quickly becoming an enormous player in Republican politics. He launched America PAC in the spring of 2024, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into the group, primarily to finance canvassing operations supporting President Donald Trump’s election campaign. He promised the group would stay active in the coming years, with the Wisconsin Supreme Court race becoming its first major investment since Trump’s victory.

The Wisconsin election is already the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, surpassing the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where the Democratic-aligned candidate ultimately prevailed. Liberals currently hold the majority on the state’s highest court, which has say over everything from abortion rights to the state’s legislative maps.

Democrats have spent big in Wisconsin’s race, too. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel family gave $1.5 million to back Crawford, and longtime megadonor George Soros pitched in $2 million.

But no single figure has invested as much as Musk. Democrats in Wisconsin have sought to turn the race into a referendum on him and his outsized political influence. A plane flying over Milwaukee on Thursday carried a banner reading “Go Home Elon. Vote Susan.” (Politico)

Morality over Milwaukee.

The Supreme Court race in Wisconsin really is a referendum on Musk, his money and his man in the White House.

Remember to do what you can in these final days.

Vote if you live in Wisconsin.

Get out the Vote! Two ways.

1. Go to Susan Crawford’s website, choose the Volunteer Tab and sign up to Phone Bank. WisDems Virtual Phonebank!
2. Put the image of the banner over Milwaukee above 👆 on your Facebook, X, instagram, and BlueSky, with a reminder, that Election Day is Tuesday.

The Latest poll has Crawford tied.

You can make the difference in who controls the Supreme Court in Wisconsin, and what happens on abortion, voting rights and more.

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See you on Tuesday.

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