Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 16

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done - The Atlantic
Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing.

This article is a brutal takedown of Trump's terrible leadership, ruination of of relationships with allies, and unfitness for office. And it has no hyperbole or exaggeration.

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.

This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.

Judge Orders Prosecutors to Testify

This headline does not adequately convey the absolute thrashing this judge gave the US Attorney's office. For proceeding with a plea agreement for a CSAM case without charging for additional material found, for having a random other attorney from the office try to speak without the proper paperwork, for the office itself being ran "at its own risk" under the stay of an order finding the current leadership invalid. And so he subpoenas the 3 current leaders of the office to be questioned individually about who is actually running things and making decisions there.

The transcript is very interesting.