Krugman on Social Media

Click here for a Substack article by Paul Krugman entitled "America Has Become A Digital Narco-State."

He compares social media, with the potential and actual harm it does, to the narcotics industry. 

Yesterday I wrote about how hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The main driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury at the nations of Europe for being excessively protective of civil liberties and insufficiently racist.

A secondary source of anti-Europe sentiment, however, is the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The Act obliges large platforms to self-police a variety of potential injurious effects ranging from “dissemination of illegal content” to “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.”

Krugman says:

Under the auspices of its Digital Services Act, the European Commission imposed its first fine last week — 120 million euros, basically a tiny slap on the wrist — on Musk’s X. The Commission’s case is straightforward:

· X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them without making any effort to verify that posters are who they say they are.

· X does not provide enough information on advertisements for outsiders to determine whether or not they are scams

· X refuses to make its public data available to researchers

These are clear violations of European law, and the fine, as I said, was little more than a slap on the wrist. Yet Musk went berserk, declaring that the EU should be abolished and threatening personal retribution against the “woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the fine.

And he finishes:

The key point is that if you think of unregulated social media as dangerous drugs, as you should, then we’ve become a nation in which drug lords control much of government policy. Social media billionaires have enough power to prevent us from protecting our own children. They have enough power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.

America has, in practice, become a digital narco-state.

 

 

 

An alarming American proclamation

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's entry in her diary, Letters from an American, for December 5, 2025, where she talks about the quiet release of the United States' 2025 National Security Strategy.

"The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II." 

The NSS is intended to be published annually, though some years have been missed, particularly under Clinton's administration. 

The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia. The authors reject Europe’s current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of “civilizational erasure” and calling for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Allowing continued migration will render Europe “unrecognizable” within twenty years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe’s societies might have a different relationship to NATO than “those who signed the NATO charter.”

In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document’s authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents. Instead, they complain that “European officials…hold unrealistic expectations” for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for “[e]nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

Furthermore:

Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.

National security specialist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”

European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ulrike Franke commented: “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a speech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need Cam on the Fever!

Paul Krugman on Trump's treatment of disaster victims

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack article on December 3, 2025, entitled "Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead."

 The cruelty of Trump and his crew is a feature, not a bug. 

Pete Hegseth, 2016, on war crimes and following unlawful orders

Here’s Pete Hegseth in 2016 saying there should be consequences for people who commit war crimes—that members of the military shouldn’t follow illegal orders from the President: “If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence… pic.twitter.com/znDGDC7MvQ

— Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis) December 2, 2025

Trump corruption

Click here for the Heather Cox Richardson entry in her diary, Letters from an American, for November 30, 2025. It details some of Trump's and his family's corruption -- but it's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more.

Hey, ATCs -- control this!

"The worst of the worst?" I don't think so.

You're a high ranking government official and you shouldn't make things up.

Your 70% number is just a fabrication.

And it's TOTALLY not true that "every single" person you detained is here illegally. For instance, many were allowed in so they could apply for asylum. https://t.co/HpG3QiRRPw pic.twitter.com/zBss7Xd2CJ

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 27, 2025

Trump's Golf Tab

 

Trump Is Racking Up a Colossal Tab Just Playing Golf

A new report reveals the extraordinary sum President Trump has spent playing golf.

Jane Barlow/PA Images/Getty Images

Donald Trump has already spent $70 million of taxpayer money on golfing in less than a year as president. If this pace keeps up, he will spend $300 million playing golf by the time his second term ends. 

HuffPost reports that the president on Wednesday made his sixteenth trip this year to his Mar-a-Lago estate and went golfing. Each trip carries a $3.4 million bill in travel and security costs. If Trump decides to go to Mar-a-Lago twice more before the end of the year, he will have spent a total of $75 million on golf, which, repeated each of the following three years, would result in $300 million spent on the trips.

That’s nearly double the $151.5 million in tax dollars Trump spent golfing in his first term as president. Trump spent a third of 2017, his first year as president, hanging out at his private clubs. This time, Trump has also made nine trips to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, spending $1.1 million on each trip. He also went to Aberdeen, Scotland, in July to promote a new golf course at his resort there, spending close to $10 million on the trip.  

The security costs Trump incurs on his Florida trips can get pretty high, with machine gun–mounted patrol boats manning the nearby Intracoastal Waterway and the Coast Guard patrolling in the vicinity in the Atlantic Ocean. Using Air Force One costs $273,063 per hour to fly to Palm Beach International Airport, meaning that one four-hour round trip to Mar-a-Lago costs the taxpayer $1.1 million. 

In 2016, before Trump was elected, he mocked President Obama’s work ethic, claiming that he was “worse than Carter” for how often he golfed. In the end, Obama only spent $85 million of taxpayer dollars in his eight years as president on golf. 

Meanwhile, Trump has not only eclipsed that in his nearly five years as president, he’s shaped his presidency around golf. He has promoted his golf business on the White House social platform and even decided to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., because he hated seeing homeless people on his way to play golf. 

Last month, Trump took dirt from his White House demolition and sent it to a golf course he’s taking over in Washington. It’s a fitting act for his presidency: taking something from the taxpayer and putting it toward playing an expensive game that he appears to cheat at. 

Donald Trump and Andrew Johnson

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry in "Letters from an American" for November 22, 2025.

 On Tuesday, November 18, six Democratic lawmakers, veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence services, released a video saying service members should refuse to obey unlawful orders. This should not have received any criticism, as the principle is a cornerstone of U.S. military doctrine; events such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, national guard troops killing student demonstrators at Kent State, and the prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war would not have taken place had soldiers refused their orders. The German defense at the Nuremberg trials -- "I was a good soldier; I was only following orders" -- did not stand up, and the defendants were all either hanged or sentenced to long prison terms.

Donald Trump didn't see it that way, and posted on social media that this was "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" Today, November 23, he is continuing to attack the six lawmakers.

Richardson notes that Trump's behavior is not unprecedented; Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat who became president for the remainder of Lincoln's term, from 1865 until 1868, had called for certain Republican opponents to be hanged. For this and other reasons, Johnson was impeached in the House, and escaped conviction in the Senate (and consequent removal from office) by a single vote.

 Richardson's article goes into some detail about Johnson's behavior during his term in office, when he attempted to repress black Americans in the south (he was a strong Southern Democrat) and undo Lincoln's civil rights achievements. Johnson had a tumultuous term in office, and his reactionary policies resulted in a massive defeat in the midterms in 1866, with Republicans winning a two-thirds majority in the House. The House proceeded to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and ensuring equal protection under the law, particularly for former slaves, and prohibiting the denial of life, liberty, or property without due process.

Johnson is widely considered the second-worst president in history, after James Buchanan (1856-1860), who allowed the South to slip into the Civil War. (Trump is generally considered the third-worst, but since he seems to be doing worse every day, he may yet pass Buchanan and Johnson in the worst-president sweepstakes.) 

 

Trump's pro-Russian "peace plan" for Ukraine

This is a good short summary of the situation in Ukraine by Heather Cox Richardson in her November 21 diary entry, "Letters from an American."

Something to keep in mind while you're reading this: In 2016, after Trump had been selected as the Republican presidential candidate, the Republican party drafted a platform, as both Republicans and Democrats had done since time immemorial -- a statement of what the party stood for. (This was the last time the Republicans drafted a platform: After that, rather than draft another platform for 2020 and 2024, they simply declared their platform to be whatever Donald Trump said it was. They did that because it was impossible to state what principles the Republicans stood for, because that could change overnight on a whim if Trump decided something different.)

The Republicans presented their platform to Trump to his approval. To their surprise, Trump accepted the whole thing without asking for any changes -- except for one. Russia had invaded Crimea in 2014, and the Republican party had been staunchly anti-Russian; the platform went into detail promising concrete support for Ukraine including the delivery of specific high-tech weaponry. Trump wanted the platform softened to back off from its pro-Ukraine position, promising only a vague statement of general support for Ukraine. Trump's representatives told Republicans that Trump didn't want to fight World War III over Ukraine, and wanted a general attitude of greater cooperation with Russia.

"Ukraine? That's all he wants? Sure, why not?"

In fact,  Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had for years been a special advisor to Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt Russian stooge who was president of Ukraine. A revolution took place in Ukraine, and Yanukovych fled to Russia after the election of Volodomyr Zelenskyy in 2019.

In 2016, Manafort was trying to arrange a cozy little relationship between Trump, Yanukovych, and Putin, with a corrupt Russia-friendly government in Ukraine.  

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Ukrainian people today. The current moment, he said, is “one of the most difficult” for the country. “Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either 28 complicated points or the hardest winter yet—and the risks that follow,” Zelensky said. 

Zelensky’s use of the word “dignity” recalled Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych and turned the country toward Europe. 

Zelensky was responding to a 28-point “peace” plan President Donald J. Trump is pressuring him to sign before Thanksgiving, November 27. The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, which Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet of The Hill suggest Russia may be pushing now to take advantage of a corruption scandal roiling Ukraine’s government. 

Luke Harding of The Guardian noted that the plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language but are awkward and clunky in English. 

The plan is a Russian wish list. It begins by confirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, a promise Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons but then broke when it invaded Ukraine in 2014. 

The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military. 

It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.” 

It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds. 

The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.  

According to the plan, Russia and “[t]he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”  

The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “[a] dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.” 

Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.  

NATO grew out of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. They agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.  

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, communism backed by the Soviet Union began to push east into Europe. In 1949, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a military and economic alliance, the Western Union, to work together, but nations understood that resisting Soviet aggression, preventing the revival of European militarism, and guaranteeing international cooperation would require a transatlantic security agreement.  

In 1949 the countries of the Western Union joined with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”  

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”  

They did so in the face of Russian aggression.  

Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 after Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, earning economic sanctions and expulsion from what was then the G8. But Crimea wasn’t enough: he wanted Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, the country’s industrial heartland. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the U.S. presidency against Donald Trump in 2016, would never stand for that land grab. But Trump was a different story.  

According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in summer 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort discussed with his business partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan was for Trump to say he wanted peace in Ukraine and for him to appoint Manafort to be a “special representative” to manage the process. With the cooperation of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian officials, Manafort would help create “an autonomous republic” in Ukraine’s industrialized eastern region and would work to have Russian-backed Yanukovych, for whom Manafort had worked previously, “elected to head that republic.”  

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Putin has been determined to control that land ever since. And now it appears Russia is pushing Trump to deliver it. 

This plan, complete with its suggestion that the U.S. is no longer truly a part of NATO but can broker between NATO and Russia, would replace the post–World War II rules-based international order with a new version of an older order. In the world before NATO and the other international institutions that were created after World War II, powerful countries dominated smaller countries, which had to do as their powerful neighbors demanded in order to survive.