My bet is that Musk will walk out if Stewart asks him tough questions and pushes him too hard.

FYI:

Tom Nichols
@radiofreetom.bsky.social

By the way, the word in Russian and Ukrainian for a "suit" is "kostyum", in case you were wondering why Zelensky used that word. He likely meant "suit" in answering Glenn.

Here is Zelensky thanking Trump in the Oval office today before JD accused him of not doing so:

Hoodlum
@nothoodlum.bsky.social
But Zelensky never even said 'thank you'-except he did, and then the ambush followed.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." Too bad so many Americans didn't follow Angelou's advice when it came to DonOLD:

Trump And Vance Ambush Zelensky In Prelude To Betrayal

JD Vance egged on the president, setting the stage for the US to abandon a key American ally in televised Oval Office meeting.

President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance moved to betray a key U.S. ally that has lost hundreds of thousands of people in fending off a Russian invasion on Friday, taunting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at an Oval Office meeting after spending weeks trying to undermine the bilateral relationship.

The Oval Office blowup, in which Trump and Vance berated Zelensky as ungrateful while dismissing the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin might renege on a potential ceasefire agreement, is a culmination in a weeks-long campaign to choreograph an end to U.S. support for Ukraine.

"Media suppression"

Check:

Taniel
@taniel.bsky.social
A Trump adviser said a Voice of America reporter was "treasonous." Now the reporter has been put on leave, pending an investigation.

And articles have been watered down to remove criticism of the president.

Spot on:

Ron Filipkowski
@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social

Zelensky found out what it was like to be a US governor in a blue state asking Trump for medical supplies during the pandemic. Or disaster relief after a wildfire or storm. It's not his money, but he fully expects you to beg and plead for it and tell him how wonderful he is.

FTA:

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster that every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy will have to endure. With the White House's betrayal of Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with confidence and think: one of us.

I look at it this way: they have all our information, why shouldn't we have theirs?

Rick Wilson reacts to the disgraceful Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Today's Oval Office spectacle wasn't about showing strength, it was about surrendering to Putin. Trump and JD Vance have sold out America.

Trump: "This is going to be great TV, I will say that."

I think Trump thinks it made him and Vance and the US look strong and powerful, but really it made them look like a bunch of bullies who needed to gang up on one guy in order to dominate him and make him shut up.

FTA:

Today's meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration's policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. Vance complained that Zelensky had traveled to Pennsylvania to thank U.S. ammunition workers, because, Vance charged, the appearance amounted to campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. "Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me," Trump angrily explained. "He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia."

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America's allies"and who deeply sympathize with the world's most aggressive dictator.

Trump admitted they did it for the cameras:

Jim Wright on FB:

Elect a contemptable second rate Realty TV star, get contemptable second rate Realty TV government.

And that's exactly what this was, the standard issue rotten disgusting Reality TV ambush.

This isn't statesmanship. This isn't diplomacy. This isn't how a president should behave. This isn't how we should treat our allies.

This is goddamn disgraceful. It's embarrassing. It's bullying. It's punching down. It's second rate Reality TV, manufactured drama and conflict, trolling for clicks, likes, and ------ comments from the worst people on the internet.

That's all it is.

America should be ashamed.

The real truth:

Ron Filipkowski
@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social

Trump and Vance needed to create an incident to provide a justification for their pre-planned abandonment of Ukraine now, then separation from NATO in the near future. That's what that was all about, and that was always the way a second Trump term was going to go.

God forbid if there is another 9/11, we can forget the rest of the world coming to our support and defense.

Steven Beschloss
@stevenbeschloss.bsky.social

If this ambush of President Zelensky was planned, it makes the behavior of Trump and Vance even more disgraceful. What democratic ally can ever trust a single word uttered by these despicable men who spit in the face of every American who fought and died to save our democratic nation?

FTA:

All of these things exist in some form already, and all have been used to suppress dissent before. What distinguishes this point in history is, I think, the severity with which we are going to see all three of these things unleashed. All of these things have, in the past, been used somewhat covertly, because politicians understood that they were perceived as shameful. That shame is going away now. These methods are coming out to play in the sunshine.

Grifter gangster gonna grift and gangster:

Historian calls out Trump's Ukraine 'protection racket': 'Not a lot of diplomatic thought here'

President Donald Trump is slated to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he called a "dictator." They are expected to finalize an agreement giving the U.S. rights to rare minerals in Ukraine. Historian Jon Meacham told MSNBC on Friday that Trump's approach was reminiscent of the Sopranos.

"So one of the things that I think is really important here is to remember that we are now living " to shift from a historical metaphor to a cultural one--we're now living in the Sopranos, right? This is a protection racket. Basically, President Zelenskyy is being asked to come to Washington to pay for our protection," he continued.

"He can come back when he is ready for Peace." ...

What Trump really means is when he's ready to grovel.

Trump in 2007: 'I'm Excited' for Housing Market Crash

Donald Trump counseled Trump University students to take advantage of the housing bubble as an investment opportunity.

Donald Trump counseled Trump University students to take advantage of the housing bubble as an investment opportunity and said, just a year before it burst, that he was "excited" for it to end because of the money he'd make.

"People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I'm excited if it is,' he told the Globe and Mail in March of 2007. "I've always made more money in bad markets than in good markets."

I also worry they are trying to cause people to panic and to crash the economy, so that the oligrachs can swoop in and pick up the shattered pieces.

So being promoted gets you fired? That's heavy logic in action.
#4 | Posted by REDIAL

Yes, that's the way I understand it is working in all the agencies under attack. You could have been there for 20 years, but if you got promoted in the last 6 months, you get the axe.

I think the hope is that people will become so disgruntled with social security because they can't talk to anyone in person, can't get their questions answered over the phone if there is some sort of mix up or delay in payment and will turn against the program and then beg for it to be scrapped and/or privatized. The bottom line that unifies all of these cuts and firings is to undercut people's faith in the federal govt, so that it can be dramatically downsized and whatever essential services remain can be privatized and brought under presidential control.

FTA:

Nothing could have prepared Americans for what the first 50-ish days of the second Trump administration have been like. Even some Cabinet members and Republican members of Congress seem caught off guard. But if you took time to look closely at Project 2025, the effort from the conservative Heritage Foundation to prepare for a new Republican administration, you're probably a little less shocked than other people.

I'm not the first to point out that many of the actions the White House and other departments have taken since the inauguration are pulled directly from Project 2025. Even though Donald Trump vociferously denied any connection to the work during the campaign, that was always transparent bunk. For example, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, led the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump White House, was the policy director for the Republican National Committee's 2024 platform, and is now leading OMB again.

The authors of Project 2025 believe that far too much of the executive branch is not functionally under the control of the president. "What we're trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them," Vought told The New York Times in 2023.

Are these cuts necessary? Considering the way it's being done and communicated, I'd say no.
Meaning the cuts won't be strategic....just cutting to cut.
And that will lead to more problems....and a media devoted to hammering it step by step.
#40 | Posted by eberly

Yes, they are just cutting to cut. This has never been about cost cutting and saving money. That's how it's being marketed, but the truth is this has always been about P2025 & the GOP's desire to drastically reduce the size of the federal govt and to corral what is left of the federal work force under auspices of "the unitary executive" i.e. the president:

Mapping the DOGE Game Plan: New Details on Which Contracts Get Axed

Let's start with my story from last night about the abrupt and reckless cancelation of upwards of a thousand VA contracts totaling roughly $2 billion and covering a huge variety of work VA does, everything from funeral care to doctor recruitment. As I reported last night, VA contract officers were sent an Excel spreadsheet of almost a thousand contracts in the early morning of February 21st, told that all of these contracts should be canceled and that if anyone wanted to make a case to spare individual contracts they had until the end of business that day (February 21st) to make their case. My sources noted that the contract code on all of these contracts was NAICS " 541611, which is "Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services." It's very clear the DOGE people pulled up everything under that label and slated it to be cut. My sources' impressions are that the DOGErs making these decisions read that label as basically, McKinsey/MBA consulting type --------, easy stuff to cut. At VA, most of it wasn't that at all. But they didn't seem to make any attempt to look under the hood at what those contracts were.