What might a second Trump White House be like? In his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump (for one year), characterizes Oval Office meetings as "exercises in competitive sycophancy" where advisers would greet him with lines like "your instincts are always right" or "no one has ever been treated so badly by the press."
Trump, meanwhile, would come up with crazy concepts, and float them: "Why don't we just bomb the drugs?" (Also: "Why don't we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?")
This is one man's account, of course. McMaster's word should not be taken as gospel, and some of his frustration might stem from his dismissal, or his foreign-policy prescriptions being at times ignored by his boss. But it's a somewhat revealing look behind the curtain at policy-setting in a White House helmed by an especially mercurial commander in chief, who "enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration."
It also shows how quickly Trump fantasies have percolated through the Republican Party, namely the "let's just bomb Mexico to get rid of the cartels" line, which Trump has been toying with since roughly 2019 (or possibly more like 2017, after he chatted with Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, who had promised to kill 100,000 drug traffickers during his first six months as president). A few years prior, in 2015, he had suggested that Mexico was sending rapist and drug-traffickers across the southern border, and that we'd need to build a wall between the two countries, but it wasn't until nine American citizens were killed in Mexico that Trump trotted out the idea of declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations and using military might to eradicate them.
Trump's line from 2019 has now become standard fare, notes The Economist: The Republican primary debates included lots of tough talk on Mexico, specifically on the bombing front, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claiming he'd send special forces down there on Day One. Right-wing think tanks have embraced the messaging, with articles headlined "It's Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels." Taking cues from other members of her party, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why "we're fighting a war in Ukraine, and we're not bombing the Mexican cartels." Whether it's economic protectionism (10 percent across-the-board tariffs, with 60 percent tariffs imposed on Chinese imports) or Mexico-bombing, Trump has near-magical abilities to get other members of his party to accept something previously regarded as absurd.
Telegram founder taken into custody: French authorities arrested Russian entrepreneur and Telegram messaging app founder Pavel Durov on Saturday. The charges are currently somewhat unclear; there's a wide probe into the types of activities enabled by the app, including purported failures of content moderation and "complicity" in drug trafficking and distribution of child pornography.
But it sure looks like the authorities might be going after Durov for the fact that the app he created, which now has 900 million users, is a freedom tool for much of the world, especially those living under authoritarianism. "The messaging app allows users to message each other through both unencrypted and encrypted chats, and to create 'channels' that other users can subscribe to," writes Reason's Matthew Petti. "There's no feed with an algorithm to manipulate, and founder Pavel Durov has committed to never sharing user information with authorities." This delightful anti-government mulishness has made Durov—who is a dual citizen of France and the United Arab Emirates—more than a few enemies: the governments of China, Iran, Myanmar, and Durov's native Russia, for example (where it is used to counter the force of mainstream propaganda about Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine). Now, apparently, France.
"POV: It's 2030 in Europe and you're being executed for liking a meme," tweeted X doyen Elon Musk in response to the news about Durov. Venture capitalist David Sacks tweeted a list of four companies with targets on their backs (TikTok, Telegram, X, and Rumble), and asked "Are you getting sick of me saying 'I told you so'?" (Sacks was a prominent opponent of the U.S. government's ban/forced sale of TikTok to American owners.)
Scenes from New York: Wild statistic of the day.
Children under the age of 17 are 10% of the population of Manhattan south of 59th St. (The national average is 21%.)
— Ryan Radia (@RyanRadia) August 25, 2024
QUICK HITS
- In Japan, per 2010 data, an estimated 884 people were older than 150. Only one issue: That wasn't true, their names were merely being used by others to collect pension checks in a massive, messy, wide-reaching fraud. (Relatedly, are "blue zones" fake? "Sardinia is not really a blue zone, it's a fraud hotspot," writes a Substacker named Cremieux.)
- "As South Korea scrambles to halt the sharp decline in its birth rate, policymakers are having a hard time convincing many in their 20s and 30s that parenthood is a better investment than stylish clothes or fancy restaurants," reports Reuters. ("Not even South Korea's aggressive interest rate hikes over the past three years have been able to rein in youthful spending," is possibly the most Reuters-y line in this whole piece.)
- NASA has grown increasingly reliant on help from SpaceX; now, it's been called on by the government to bring two stranded astronauts home. Thanks, Elon!
- "A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked on Monday a Biden administration program that could offer a path to citizenship for up to half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens, ruling in favor of 16 Republican-led states that sued the administration," reports The New York Times. Judge J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas wrote that the complaint before him raised warranted questions about the executive bypassing Congress to set immigration policy.
- Grow a spine, Zuckerberg:
In which Mark Zuckerberg says the feds "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire … I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it." https://t.co/nDFdwDUXL0
— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) August 27, 2024
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