A Metaphor For Something
I asked ChatGPT for an image of the best visual metaphor I could come up with for the Trump administration. It refused.
Good Evening:
I asked ChatGPT to create me today’s Good Evening image, thinking a dinosaur eating its own stomach would be a good metaphor for the Trump administration. Apparently this ran afoul of rules against self-harm images.
That’s a metaphor for something.
Today on #DogShirtTV, I mused on the barriers to a US occupation of Gaza—not that I think Trump taking over Gaza, displacing two million people, and building hotels is not a fine idea, mind you, but there are some challenges we would need to work through first. The estimable Eve Gaumond and I discussed the obstacles, and the estimable Shane Harris showed up to tell us about what’s going on in the CIA right now:
I received the following image the other day from the estimable Fred Jacobs in response to my query on the show about dog images for #DogShirtTV merch. He writes:
- This image was created in part using DeepSeek, the Chinese AI, because I wanted to turn the CCP's digital weapon against them.
- What is a dog shirt? Is it a garment worn by a human which portrays a dog? Or is it a garment worn by a dog which portrays a human? That's a healthy debate which I want to stimulate.
- This is a surreal image with lots of "crazy eyes" (chihuahua; Ben; cactus). I think that meets the moment
The Situation: A Memo for the New Attorney General
In my column today, I offer six pieces of advice to recently confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi, counseling that she rebuild relationships with Department of Justice employees and prevent the department from becoming a conduit for right-wing violence:
As Donald Rumsfeld might say, you defend the rule of law with the attorney general you have, not the attorney general you wished you had. The president nominated you, and you accepted the nomination. The Senate has now confirmed your nomination, and you have been sworn in. So you are the only attorney general we’ve got.
Today On Lawfare
Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman discuss the parallels between Elon Musk’s efforts to acquire control of federal government systems that govern payment, infrastructure and personnel and the United States’s takeover of technical world economic systems in the 2000s. Farrell and Newman warn of the disastrous consequences of Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) actions, but note that at present, they lack a sophisticated understanding of how to wield this power:
The U.S. identified key choke points that allowed it to weaponize the world’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure to achieve its ends. Musk’s DOGE is weaponizing the U.S. government’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure in highly similar ways, carrying out an end run around the political structures that are supposed to restrain unilateral executive action. Just as when the U.S. weaponized the world economy over two decades ago, it is hard for those at the receiving end to understand exactly what is happening to them.
Trump’s Petty Purge of 15 Young Jan. 6 Prosecutors
Roger Parloff reports on the firing of 15 federal prosecutors—most of whom were less than two years into their careers and whom the administration says can be fired “at will”— for their work on Jan. 6 prosecutions:
In a Jan. 31 memorandum demanding their terminations, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove took the position that these individuals were “probationary” employees, having worked for the federal government for less than two years, and that that they could, therefore, be fired “at will”—in other words, without cause. He said that they had been hired “to support casework” on the Jan. 6 criminal prosecutions and that President Trump had “appropriately characterized that work as having involved ‘a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated on the American people over the last four years.’” (At least four federal judges who handled those cases have rebuked that assertion, with one terming it a “revisionist myth.”)
Are Domestic Drone Shoot-Downs Lawful?
Ashley Deeks and Madison Rinder detail the gaps and limitations in U.S. federal, state, and local officials’ authorities to immobilize drones—including coordination challenges, surveillance concerns, and the risk of endangering civilians. Deeks and Rinder discuss the Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act and other proposed legislation that would seek to resolve these issues:
There are also intergovernmental challenges to intercepting drone threats. There is a lack of clarity among state and local officials about their authority to engage drones in the national airspace, or whether that power lies exclusively with federal authorities. Confusion during a real threat from unmanned aircraft could lead to duplicative efforts, confusion, or interference between the various operations. Alternatively, cumbersome coordination among federal, state, and local officials may be too slow and fail to mount a response in time. State and local authorities may lack the necessary information to respond or may be paralyzed from doing so out of concern that they would be violating federal law, which could inhibit any response at all if federal authorities are not themselves positioned to respond. Some of the legislation discussed below seems aimed at clarifying state and local entities’ authorities in these situations.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Quinta Jurecic sits down with Nick Bednar to walk through the many legal issues raised by the “deferred resignation program” that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has offered to over two million federal employees:
On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Molly Reynolds, and I discuss the major national security news of the past week, including the Trump’s administration’s consolidation of power in the executive branch, push to end birthright citizenship, and impending purge of FBI personnel:
Documents
Anna Hickey shares a lawsuit filed by six federal employee unions against the Department of Labor, the Acting Secretary of Labor Vince Micone, the U.S. Digital (DOGE) Service, and the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization. The plaintiffs allege that DOGE will seek to gain access to sensitive data and processes and request that the court block DOGE-related personnel from gaining unlawful access to the Department of Labor.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the marbled crayfish, which earns the honor for being super weird. The marbled crayfish is a new species, descended from a single organism alive around 1988. This single crayfish somehow figured out how to reproduce by means of parthenogenesis—that is to say, without mating—something no other decapod can do. All marbled crayfish are thus clones of this one individual. Because they can clone themselves, they reproduce extremely fast and have become invasive populations in a number of areas. Also, they’re blue. I cannot emphasize enough just how weird these things are.
You can learn more about today’s Beast in this paper from 2017, which provides the formal description of the marbled crayfish as a new species.
Tomorrow, we expect the regular Thursday publication of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Under normal, sane circumstances, this would not need to be stated. Publishing a weekly report on medical issues of concern is one of those things that the CDC is supposed to do without anyone outside the medical and public health fields really noticing. It’s one of those important functions of government that we don’t really think about—and honestly, we shouldn’t have to. The CDC should publish its report, as it has every week in some form since 1930, and we shouldn’t hear about it. If the MMWR is in the news, that almost certainly means something has gone wrong.
On Thursday, January 9 of this year, nothing went wrong.
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