Politico reports that FBI Director Kash Patel is planning to visit Russia later this year—“an unusual and sensitive trip for an FBI chief to one of America’s top adversaries.”
For many Trump officials, we might fret that such a visit presages some capitulation on Ukraine or some further attempt at bad-faith muckraking over the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. But given it’s Kash: Maybe it’s just another fun little trip? Happy Tuesday.
Join Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger for Morning Shots Live on Substack and YouTube at 10:00 a.m. EDT today.
How Elon Ruined Salad
by Andrew Egger
When you write a daily newsletter, two weeks turns out to be a ludicrously long time to be out of the news. I’m basically a caveman who’s just been thawed out to weigh in on current events. My timing is all off; I’m probably the last guy in America who still has something to say about Graham Platner. (I’ll resist the impulse.)
Still, a break can be helpful for a few reasons. For one, it helps you recalibrate what sort of things the non-junkies are paying attention to. Where I was, in northern Michigan, that turned out in recent days to be two big issues: Wildfire smoke and cyclosporiasis.
Martyn Wendell Jones has a good take on the wildfire squabble between the United States and Canada down below. But I want to talk briefly about the unpleasant parasite that has sickened thousands of Americans—because I think it’s a good example of the sort of mini-controversy1 that I think is likely to keep dogging this White House until Trump leaves office for good.
An outbreak of foodborne illness is something that can happen under any president. It’s one of the marvels of modernity that man has learned to protect himself against such things at all, and the work is far from easy. Tracking an outbreak of cyclosporiasis means subjecting a bunch of woebegone diarrhea sufferers to a battery of unpleasant tests, then trying to get them to remember everything they’ve eaten for weeks to narrow the possibilities down to a possible common source. Under ordinary circumstances, the relevant scientists and laboratories get to work, they do what they can to identify the source and limit the damage, and the outbreak passes without ever becoming a political story at all.
Except that here—as with the ongoing return of parasitic cattle-munching screwworm—there turns out to be a political angle after all. Because in this case the “relevant scientists and laboratories” turn out to be the ragtag bunch of parasite fighters who were left alive in the wreckage after the DOGE rolled through last year.
Yesterday, CNN reported on how a bevy of cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and USAID slowed the government’s response to the cyclosporiasis outbreak. They spoke with Dr. Joel Barratt, the former head of domestic surveillance at the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, who resigned last September after seeing his team reduced from eleven to three. “The response,” Barratt said, “is being hampered by the loss of specialized staff and the loss of hands-on-deck needed to identify the source of the outbreaks.”
“The government’s reaction to the cyclospora outbreak has been undermined by massive budget and staffing cuts under President Donald Trump,” CNN went on to report, “including nearly $30 million in funding that disappeared from Barratt’s CDC division when Trump axed the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
Meanwhile, some Democrats have zeroed in on another, separate cyclosporiasis-surveillance program that was DOGE’d out last year. Last week, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking why he had terminated surveillance of the cyclospora parasite in the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. “Your foolish and self-indulgent demolition of critical public health programs,” Ossoff wrote, “puts Americans at risk.”
It’s impossible to say, of course, how different the current outbreak might have looked if DOGE had never started tinkering at HHS at all. Maybe critiques like Ossoff’s are fair; maybe they’re not.
My point here is only to say that DOGE made such critiques possible. In their rampage through the federal government last year, Elon Musk’s merry band of smoothbrained hacker lads did so much indiscriminate cutting and yanking of funds, particularly on anything touching government science, that anything that goes wrong anywhere in America now has a decent chance of turning into a story of DOGEian hubris.
I still remember how it felt, watching the DOGE bros do their arsonist blitzkrieg through the government last year. These kids were just slashing and burning anything they felt like, based on the slightest whim or the smallest AI-generated suggestion, then moving on to the next operation. Nothing stopped them, and nobody cared: There was such a bizarre, surreal sense of suspended political gravity.
As it turns out, though, gravity was still around. It was just put off for a while—like a cartoon character going over a cliff. When you break everything, people don’t necessarily find out all at once. Cyclosporiasis isn’t the first outbreak that Democrats have been able to hang around the neck of Trump and DOGE. And it won’t be the last.
Stand Up for Canada
by Martyn Wendell Jones
As he announced he would do in a Truth Social post several days ago, Trump is retaliating against Canada for the wildfires that covered swaths of North America in yellow smog for several days last week. His tool: new 50-percent tariffs on U.S.-bound Canadian goods, to go into effect in thirty days. While the rate is steep, the new duties are being relatively narrowly applied: An initial estimate from Jennifer Robson, a Canadian professor of public policy, has the new duties touching roughly 5 percent of Canadian exports to the United States, resulting in roughly $10 billion of new costs likely being passed along to American consumers. According to the annexes linked in the several executive orders that frame up the tariffs, affected products are oddly diverse; they include Canadian mezcal, fishing rods, honey, whey protein concentrates, and hockey sticks.
The authorizing power Trump has invoked for the new duties is Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. It has not really been used before, and it confers on the president a fairly unaccountable authority to impose up to 50 percent tariffs in response to other countries’ discriminatory trade practices, as identified by the president. The ostensible intent of the new tariffs is to resolve this problem when it comes to cars, dairy, and alcohol. Never mind that Trump left a clear public record saying he was imposing the tariffs because of the wildfire smoke.
The tariff announcement, along with Sen. Bernie Moreno’s deranged bill proposing sanctions on Canada in response to the fires, plus Trump’s recent re-upping of a meme image showing him in the Oval Office with a map showing Canada was part of the United States (to say nothing of the economic challenges already being undergone in Canada as a result of the Trump administration’s previous tariff bonanzas), is a significant new injury to an already-mauled international relationship. Canadians are, completely justifiably and reasonably, alarmed by these belligerent acts and threats against their sovereignty and economy.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put the issue plainly yesterday: Americans need to stop treating as unserious Trump’s insane threats towards our northern neighbor—a faithful ally for a century, whose loyalty the president has decided is worth less than nothing—and Democratic lawmakers need to loudly condemn Trump’s actions. “If Canadian leaders and ordinary Canadians decide that they’re just never gonna trust the United States again,” Bouie says, “I wouldn’t blame them.” Frankly, who would?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Undoing Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption… He’s made the presidency into a profitable grift. Here’s how some of his ill-gotten gains might be clawed back, writes AMANDA CARPENTER.
Can We Get Rich by Watching Hundreds of Trump Speeches? On Bulwark Takes, BRENDAN HARTNETT and WILL SALETAN put their encyclopedic knowledge of Donald Trump to the test by predicting which words he would use in a major speech.
We’re Governed by Broken Men… On the flagship podcast, BILL KRISTOL joins guest host SARAH LONGWELL to discuss why the leaders in this country are men with no center and no core.
QAnon Conspiracy Theorists Have Taken Over a Prison… And they’re vowing to fill it with trafficked children? What? WILL SOMMER explains in the latest False Flag.
Quick Hits
CASUALTY LIST: We’ve just been reminded, if a reminder was necessary, that much like their counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, senior officials at Trump’s Department of Defense conceal and obfuscate.
Yesterday the Pentagon admitted that nearly 100 U.S. troops have been injured in the war with Iran over the last two weeks. This came, the Washington Post noted, “after the Trump administration for days declined to detail how many U.S. service members have been injured recently.” On Monday night, an online Pentagon database “that had been stagnant for days if not weeks” was “briefly updated to reflect that 18 service members have died and 447 have been injured since the beginning of the war on Feb. 28.” But then, “with no explanation from the Pentagon, the database later reverted Monday night to the earlier numbers.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that during the past week, Iran carried out three strikes against U.S. forces in Jordan, which “injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters . . . The Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.”
The Times adds that “In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.”
But not to worry: Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell assures us that the Department of Defense under Pete Hegseth is the most transparent in history.
Hegseth testifies this afternoon before the Senate Appropriations Committee. He’s demanding tens of billions of additional dollars to spend with the ineffectiveness, irresponsibility, and lack of transparency we’ve come to expect. Just say No.
—William Kristol
INTO HOSTILE TERRITORY: Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to New York next month, and Zohran Mamdani keeps talking about getting a posse together. In a podcast interview last week, the New York mayor said he was in “active conversation” with his legal department about whether he could arrest the Israeli prime minister, who has an outstanding warrant before the International Criminal Court due to Israel’s conduct in Gaza, when the latter arrives to address the U.N. General Assembly.
Yesterday, Trump weighed in: Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” he posted on Truth Social. “He is fighting against the Islamic Republic of Iran. . . . The only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented SPIRAL OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, something that should have been dealt with years ago, by previous Presidents!”
Interestingly, though, Trump’s post steered clear of any actual criticism of Mamdani. The weirdest bromance of U.S. politics is still seemingly doing fine.
DARLINE STICKS AROUND: Lindsey Graham’s yearslong pursuit of a close relationship with Donald Trump paid off handsomely for him during the president’s unexpectedly hawkish second term. Now it seems likely to keep shaping South Carolina politics long after his death.
Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, had never served in elected office before she was appointed to serve out her late brother’s term. But yesterday, she told Fox News she intends to run for re-election—an announcement likely to be received enthusiastically by the president, who publicly urged her last week to run. “There would be nobody better to honor the legacy of her beloved brother, Lindsey,” Trump wrote. “Darline, who comes from an absolutely incredible family, has been a WINNER all of her life, and, should she accept, has my Complete and Total Endorsement.”
That’s the kind of pre-endorsement that tends to clear a GOP primary field—and thus Graham’s path to a six-year term in ruby-red South Carolina. Democracy in action!
Cheap Shots
Unless you’ve had it, in which case there’s nothing mini about it.
Let's just go back to the good old days, before Sinclair's The Jungle, when food producers were left to regulate themselves. I think that's what Americans want, while they are blasting off of their toilets, because they keep voting for cuts to the government, to taxes, and for deregulation. It shows how well we've had it, that we just assume we can decimate the infrastructure that makes our lives work and everything will still proceed just fine.
I feel so badly for Canada. They have been a great neighbor. They have supported us and fought by our side. They cause us no trouble whatsoever. We've been good friends. Now we have Trump as president, and the US has become a total psychopath slapping outrageous tariffs on them based on totally unsupportable justifications and threatening to annex them as the 51st state. Canada is just good people, and we're behaving like monsters to them, totally unprovoked, because Canadians are not the sort of people who would provoke such behavior. We should be helping them with these fires to whatever extent we can, not antagonizing them. I hate it so much.
"like a cartoon character going over a cliff."
The Acme Pool Sealing Company didn't do so great with their no-bid contract at the reflecting pool. Not expecting the Acme Parasite Control to do much better.