Did You Hear the One About …

This week’s firehose of news threatens to drown us all. I feel like I’m treading water, but even so, a few of the week’s stories stand out: more revelations of massive corruption in the Trump administration, dangerous escalations of electronic surveillance of all of us, a particularly nasty swatting attack on Pete Buttigieg’s family and four-year-old twins, and Timothy Snyder’s cogent analysis of “an alternative Nazi reality.” 

Corruption: Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sealed a deal with Kazakhstan’s president, getting access to “one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs.” In a corrupt coincidence, the contract and $1.6 billion in federal financing go to Kaz Resources, a company with deep financial ties to Trump and Lutnick’s sons.  

Nothing new there. Trump family financial deals are irrevocably entangled with U.S. government financing and regulation and deals in mining and crypto and drones and real estate around the world. The scale of Trump family profiteering from the presidency dwarfs the Teapot Dome scandal. 

The reflecting pool fiasco, the White House walkway boondoggle, a ballroom that will now feature sniper towers and bunkers—all began with lies about private funding in a bait-and-switch that will cost taxpayers—us—billions. 

Surveillance: A report in The Guardian describes DOGE veterans working in a Trump-established National Design Studio to design or redesign federal websites to track users. The websites include those used for passport applications, voter registration, prescription drug pricing, and children’s savings accounts. 

[The Guardian] “The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002. …

“The studio has also built versions of services legally assigned to other agencies, including a passports website, and a copy of Login.gov, the gateway more than 150 million Americans use to sign in to federal services, the latter reportedly being overseen by a former Doge engineer who moved to the studio.

“The NDS has also apparently built a copy of vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login.”

Swatting Four-Year-Olds: Swatting is the tactic of calling the police to falsely report a crime in progress, a hostage situation, something very dangerous. A heavily armed police SWAT team rushes to the address, and the ensuing chaos endangers everyone. The tactic has been used against numerous political figures, judges, and celebrities in the past few years. A variation on the theme targeted Pete Buttigieg’s family. 

An anonymous caller made ugly accusations that Buttigieg was abusing his four-year-old twins. Child Protective Services and police responded—as they must—and the twins were removed from their family home for 24 hours until the investigation was completed and the false accusation thoroughly discredited. 

[Pete Buttigieg] “The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. …

” After spending a sleepless night wondering what the hell was going on, and spending half a day anxiously picturing what our children were going through without their parents, I waited until the appointment time for my ‘interview’ finally came. …

“Then the officer made clear that he believed this was politically motivated, and said it would not be referred to a prosecutor. Nothing in the forensic interview with the children, which was conducted by trained personnel, had led to concerns.

“After the officer spoke, the CPS worker likewise indicated she had not found anything to substantiate the allegation, though her process would take a bit longer to be formally completed. …

“Everyone knows politics is ugly these days. It’s always been ugly, but now it feels more and more like bloodsport. …

“Even so, this is different.”

Nazis Among Us: Timothy Snyder traces the line that runs from J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Ohio (“eating the dogs, eating the cats”), the repetition of those lies by Trump, and the descent on Springfield, Ohio by the ” white-supremacist blood-obsessed Nazis” of the Blood Tribe.  

“A spurious alternative reality, built from Nazi marches, internet memes, and Vance’s and Trump’s lies was consciously created and spread,” writes Snyder, and that alternative reality has now grown into the Trump administration’s end of Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitians and more than a million other immigrants, with last week’s stamp of approval from the Supreme Court’s six right-wing justices. 

[Snyder, Thinking About] “Hitler gave very specific propaganda guidance in Mein Kampf: a Nazi leader should tell a lie so big that his people cannot accept that they could be deceived on such a scale. And that is one logic, for those predisposed to believe a cat-eating-scale liar like Vance and to accept that the violence was justified. Others, those who do not trust Vance, might still find it hard to believe that their own government, however untrustworthy, is really about to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation just because Nazis march and the vice-president messages. That is, however, the origin story of this policy; and by ignoring it, the Supreme Court takes part in what comes next.”