Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.Hannah Knowles, Colby Itkowitz and Liz Goodwin at WP:
But now in his sequel term in the White House, Mr. Trump is advancing ever-more brazen ideas about redrawing the map of the world in the tradition of 19th-century imperialism. First there was buying Greenland, then annexing Canada, reclaiming the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And now he envisions taking over a devastated war zone in the Middle East that no other American president would want.
Never mind that he could name no legal authority that would permit the United States to unilaterally assert control over someone else’s territory or that the forcible removal of an entire population would be a violation of international law. Never mind that resettling two million Palestinians would be a gargantuan logistical and financial challenge, not to mention politically explosive. Never mind that it would surely require many thousands of U.S. troops and possibly trigger more violent conflict.
President Donald Trump’s administration launched one of its most brazen challenges yet to Congress’s authority this week when officials led by billionaire Elon Musk gutted and threatened to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development and suggested that other agencies should brace for overhauls.David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes:
But Republican lawmakers have raised few objections about the push to ax USAID, alarming Democrats who say the GOP is ceding power to the White House.
The Founding Fathers “set up a Congress. They set up debate,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday. “And the American people, mark my words, the American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant in the executive branch.”
Even as Democrats warned of a “constitutional crisis,” it was business as usual on Republican-controlled Capitol Hill on Tuesday, as two controversial Trump nominees, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, cleared Senate committee votes.
The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.
The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.
The agency normally would prefer not to put these names in an unclassified system. Some former officials said they worried that the list could be passed on to a team of newly hired young software experts working with Elon Musk and his government efficiency team. If that happened, the names of the employees might be more easily targeted by China, Russia or other foreign intelligence services.
One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”
