Maxine Waters

Dear Commons Community,

In an interview with the CNN correspondent Kyung Lah, California Democrat Representative Maxine Waters described Trump as a “cruel, dishonorable human being” while addressing his decision to deploy the National Guard. Waters spoke to Lah after attempting to visit David Huerta, the President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who was arrested during the protests at the weekend. Waters expressed her surprise at the equipment and weapons the troops had.

Showing images of the Guardsmen in LA, Lah said during the broadcast, “And then I want you to take a look at what these Guardsmen are carrying. You can see these large sticks. We saw them about 15 minutes ago, pull them out and take a more aggressive posture, as if to be prepared to push back the crowd.” 

Lah continued in her broadcast: “But then the weapon that they’re holding are standard issue M4 weapons. They’re military M4 rifles. And take a closer look at that magazine. Those are magazines suggesting that they are indeed loaded with ammunition.” As the camera showed the crowd gathering in the California city, she continued, “And I want you to take a larger look at this crowd that we have.

“This isn’t a sizable crowd, it’s a growing crowd, but this is what they are seeing here in downtown Los Angeles, an incredible militarized force. It actually brought congresswoman Maxine Waters, down here to the Metropolitan Detention Center. She tried to get inside to talk to the president of SEIU, he was detained. She could not get in. The door indeed was slammed in her face. And then here’s what she said about the militarization she’s seeing here in downtown Los Angeles.”

Talking about the weapons seen in the images, Waters said, “I don’t know why we have guns. What are those guns for? Are they to shoot protesters? I mean, there’s no reason to be here with the National Guard.

“The President of the United States is a cruel, dishonorable human being who would just as soon they shoot somebody down. But I don’t want that to happen. I do not want – I want the elected officials to do everything that we can to dissuade them.”

After airing the interview, the CNN correspondent concluded, “Here’s the concern. It’s the cauldron that has been created today by the deployment of the National Guard, by how people are feeling about these ICE arrests that occurred on Friday, what that clash could mean today here on the streets of Los Angeles.”

The Guard was deployed specifically to protect federal buildings, including the downtown detention center where protesters concentrated. Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said officers were “overwhelmed” by the remaining protesters – and said they included regular agitators who show up at demonstrations to cause trouble.

Several dozen people were arrested throughout the weekend of protest. One was detained Sunday for throwing a Molotov cocktail at police, and another for ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers. Trump responded to McDonnell on Truth Social, telling him to arrest protesters in face masks. “Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” he wrote.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom requested Trump remove the guard members in a letter Sunday afternoon, calling their deployment a “serious breach of state sovereignty.” His comments were echoed by Mayor Karen Bass who said in an afternoon press conference, “What we’re seeing in Los Angeles is chaos that is provoked by the administration. This is about another agenda, this isn’t about public safety.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In an escalation of Elon Musk’s fractured relationship with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, the Tesla CEO has floated the idea of starting a new political party to rival the two-party system.

Musk conducted a poll via his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), asking his 220 million followers: “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” The public results show that around 80% of respondents voted yes.

“The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle!” Musk said, reacting to the results of his Thursday, June 5, poll. “And exactly 80% of people agree…This is Fate.”  As reported by Time.

On Friday, Musk shared a potential name: “The America Party.” The moniker echoes that of his super political action committee (PAC), America PAC, which was founded in 2024 to support Trump’s efforts to return to the White House. The super PAC reportedly spent around $200 million to help elect Trump. Musk’s donations made him Trump’s largest, and most prominent, donor in the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, when talking to NBC News on Saturday, Trump said that Musk will “have to pay the consequences” if he opts to fund Democratic candidates in light of their feud. The President declined to say what those consequences would be.

“I’m not going to say, but he’ll have to pay very serious consequences if he does that,” Trump said.

In 2016 and 2020, Musk voted for Trump’s Democratic opponents—Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden, respectively. But during the 2022 midterm elections, Musk said he intended to vote Republican, and that later developed into him becoming Trump’s close ally, which was cemented when the President positioned him as lead of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a role he held until recently.

However, Trump and Musk have now had an explosive fall-out, which has played out in the public arena via social media over the past few days. It started with Musk’s disapproval over Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which he called an “abomination” and told his social media followers to “call your Senator, call your Congressman… kill the bill.”

On Thursday, the back-and-forth between the two influential men escalated, with Musk alleging that Trump is listed in the files related to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “That is the real reason they have not been made public,” Musk said. He did not provide evidence pertaining to this and, as of early Saturday morning, the post has been deleted.

Musk also, in another since-deleted X post, endorsed a message that said: “Trump should be impeached” and that Vance “should replace him.”

Trump has argued on his own social media platform, Truth Social, that “Elon was wearing thin” and that he asked the Tesla CEO to leave the White House.

Starting a new political party is a good idea.  The Republicans have lost their souls under Trump and the Democrats are leaderless.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Since at least the industrial revolution, workers have worried that machines would replace them.

But when technology transformed automaking, meatpacking and even secretarial work, the response typically wasn’t to slash jobs and reduce the number of workers. It was to “degrade” the jobs, breaking them into simpler tasks to be performed over and over at a rapid clip. Small shops of skilled mechanics gave way to hundreds of workers spread across an assembly line. The personal secretary gave way to pools of typists and data-entry clerks.

The workers “complained of speedup, work intensification and work degradation,” as labor historian Jason Resnikoff described it.

Something similar appears to be happening with artificial intelligence in one of the fields where it has been most widely adopted: coding.  As reported by The New York Times and The Seattle Times.

As AI spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it will lead to mass unemployment. Joblessness has ticked up and widespread layoffs might eventually come, but the more immediate downside for software engineers appears to be a change in the quality of their work. Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced.

Companies seem to be convinced that, like assembly lines of old, AI can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an AI coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25%.

At Amazon, which is making big investments in generative AI, the culture of coding is changing rapidly. In his recent letter to shareholders, CEO Andy Jassy wrote that generative AI was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where AI would “change the norms.”

Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said managers had increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. The engineers said the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new AI productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it was last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using AI.

Amazon said it conducts regular reviews to make sure teams are adequately staffed and may increase their size if necessary. “We’ll continue to adapt how we incorporate Gen AI into our processes,” Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, said.

Other tech companies are moving in the same direction. In a memo to employees in April, the CEO of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that “AI usage is now a baseline expectation” and that the company would “add AI usage questions” to performance reviews.

Google recently told employees that it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating AI tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000. A Google spokesperson noted that more than 30% of the company’s code is now suggested by AI and accepted by developers.

The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved “the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years” by using AI to do the thankless work of upgrading old software.Eliminating such tedious work may benefit a subset of accomplished programmers, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University who has tracked research on the subject closely.

But for inexperienced programmers, the result of introducing AI can resemble the shift from artisanal work to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Things look like a speedup for knowledge workers,” Katz said, describing preliminary evidence from ongoing research. “There is a sense that the employer can pile on more stuff.”

Bystanders in Their Own Jobs

The automation of coding has special resonance for Amazon engineers, who have watched their blue-collar counterparts undergo a similar transition.

For years, many workers at Amazon warehouses walked miles each day to track down inventory. But over the past decade, Amazon has increasingly relied on so-called robotics warehouses, where pickers stand in one spot and pull inventory off shelves delivered to them by lawn-mower-like robots, no walking necessary.

The robots generally haven’t displaced humans; Amazon said it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers since their introduction, while creating many new skilled roles. But the robots have increased the number of items each worker can pick from dozens an hour to hundreds. Some workers complain that the robots have also made the job hyper-repetitive and physically taxing. Amazon says it provides regular breaks and cites positive feedback from workers about its cutting-edge robots.The Amazon engineers said this transition was on their minds as the company urged them to rely more on AI. They said that while doing so was technically optional, they had little choice if they wanted to keep up with their output goals, which affect their performance reviews.

The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using AI to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas. (A second engineer said her efficiency gains from using AI were more modest; different teams use the tools more or less intensively.)

The new approach to coding at many companies has, in effect, eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work.

“It used to be that you had a lot of slack because you were doing a complicated project — it would maybe take a month, maybe take two months, and no one could monitor it,” Katz said. “Now, you have the whole thing monitored, and it can be done quickly.”

As at Microsoft, many Amazon engineers use an AI assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out AI tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools “scarily good.” The engineers said that many colleagues have been reluctant to use these new tools because they require a lot of double-checking and because the engineers want more control.

“It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an AI fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”

This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel like bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use AI to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.

They also use AI to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding. One said that automating these functions could deprive junior engineers of the know-how they need to get promoted.

Amazon said that collaboration and experimentation remain critical and that it considers AI a tool for augmenting rather than replacing engineers’ expertise.

It said it makes the requirements for promotions clear to employees.

Harper Reed, another longtime programmer and blogger who was the chief technology officer of former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, agreed that career advancement for engineers could be an issue in an AI world. But he cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works.

“It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work. “It’s not as important as when it was group of 10 people pounding out the metal.”

And just as factories abroad have made it cheap and easy for entrepreneurs to manufacture physical products, the rise of AI is likely to democratize software-making, lowering the cost of building new apps.

“If you’re a prototyper, this is a gift from heaven,” Willison said. “You can knock something out that illustrates the idea.”

The Dreaded Speedup

Amid their frustration, many Amazon engineers have joined a group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which is pressuring the company to reduce its carbon footprint and has become a clearinghouse for workers’ anxieties about other issues, like return-to-office mandates. (Amazon said it is working to reduce carbon emissions from its data centers; the climate justice group is pushing it to provide more information on how.)

The group’s organizers say they are in touch with several hundred Amazon employees on a regular basis and that the workers increasingly discuss the stress of using AI on the job, in addition to the effect that the technology has on the climate.

The complaints have centered around “what their careers are going to look like,” said Eliza Pan, a former Amazon employee who is a representative for the group. “And not just their careers but the quality of the work.”

While there is no rush to form a union for coders at Amazon, such a move would not be unheard-of. When General Motors workers went on strike in 1936 to demand recognition of their union, the United Auto Workers, it was the dreaded speedup that spurred them on.

The typical worker felt “that he was not free, as perhaps he had been on some previous job, to set the pace of his work,” historian Sidney Fine wrote, “and to determine the manner in which it was to be performed.”

Tony

Border Patrol personnel deploy tear gas on June 7, 20205, during a demonstration in Paramount, California. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer)

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump is deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles over the objections of Governot Gavin Newsom after a second day of clashes between hundreds of protesters and federal immigration authorities in riot gear.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Confrontations broke out yesterday near a Home Depot in the heavily Latino city of Paramount, south of Los Angeles, where federal agents were staging at a Department of Homeland Security office nearby. Agents unleashed tear gas, flash-bang explosives and pepper balls, and protesters hurled rocks and cement at Border Patrol vehicles. Smoke wafted from small piles of burning refuse in the streets.

Tensions were high after a series of sweeps by immigration authorities the previous day, including in LA’s fashion district and at a Home Depot, as the weeklong tally of immigrant arrests in the city climbed past 100. A prominent union leader was arrested while protesting and accused of impeding law enforcement.

The White House announced that Trump would deploy the Guard to “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.” It wasn’t clear when the troops would arrive.

Newsom, a Democrat, said in a post on the social platform X that it was “purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.” He later said the federal government wants a spectacle and urged people not to give them one by becoming violent.

In a signal of the administration’s aggressive approach, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to deploy the U.S. military.

“If violence continues, active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert,” Hegseth said on X.

Trump’s order came after clashes in Paramount and neighboring Compton, where a car was set on fire. Protests continued into the evening in Paramount, with several hundred demonstrators gathered near a doughnut shop, and authorities holding up barbed wire to keep the crowd back.

Crowds also gathered again outside federal buildings in downtown Los Angeles, including a detention center, where local police declared an unlawful assembly and began to arrest people.

Standoff in Paramount

Earlier in Paramount, immigration officers faced off with demonstrators at the entrance to a business park, across from the back of a Home Depot. They set off fireworks and pulled shopping carts into the street, broke up cinder blocks and pelted a procession of Border Patrol vans as they departed and careened down a boulevard.

U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said federal agents made more arrests of people with deportation orders on Saturday, but none at the Home Depot. The Department of Homeland Security has a building next door and agents were staging there as they prepared to carry out operations, he said on Fox11 Los Angeles. He didn’t say how many people were arrested Saturday or where.

Paramount Mayor Peggy Lemons told multiple news outlets that community members showed up in response because people are fearful about activity by immigration agents.

“When you handle things the way that this appears to be handled, it’s not a surprise that chaos would follow,” Lemons said.

Some demonstrators jeered at officers while recording the events on smartphones.

“ICE out of Paramount. We see you for what you are,” a woman said through a megaphone. “You are not welcome here.”

More than a dozen people were arrested and accused of impeding immigration agents, Essayli posted on X, including the names and mug shots of some of those arrested. He didn’t say where they were protesting.

Trump calls up the Guard

Trump federalized part of California’s National Guard under what is known as Title 10 authority, which places him, not the governor, atop the chain of command, according to Newsom’s office.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the work the immigration authorities were doing when met with protests is “essential to halting and reversing the invasion of illegal criminals into the United States. In the wake of this violence, California’s feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens.”

The president’s move came shortly after he issued a threat on his social media network saying that if Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did not “do their jobs,” then “the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”

Newsom said in his statement that local authorities “are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment’s notice,” and “there is currently no unmet need.”

The California Highway Patrol said Newsom directed it to deploy additional officers to “maintain public safety.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

June is Gay Pride Month.  The above was sent to me by my colleague, Patsy Moskal, from the University of Central Florida.

Tony

Yurong Luanna Jiang

Dear Commons Community,

A Chinese graduate student drew wide applause with a speech at Harvard’s commencement ceremonies in late May. Online, it was a different story.

In her address, Yurong Luanna Jiang, who studied international development at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke about her program’s diverse student body, recounting how on an internship in Mongolia last year she helped Indian and Thai classmates in Tanzania translate writing on a made-in-China washing machine over the phone.  As reported by The Wall Street Jounral.

Wearing an embroidered and beaded Chinese collar over her graduation robe, Jiang used the anecdote to extol the idea that “humanity rises and falls as one.”

The speech, as Harvard grapples with the federal government’s attempt to stop it from enrolling international students, was delivered in an often trembling voice. Jiang seemed close to tears as she said, “If there’s a woman anywhere in the world who can’t afford a period pad, it makes me poorer.” Faculty and students clapped at the line and at the speech’s conclusion: “We are bound by something deeper than belief: our shared humanity.”

Then came the online attacks, from both Chinese nationalists and Beijing critics. At a time when Harvard’s links to China and Chinese students in the U.S. have come under the Trump administration’s microscope, it illustrated the no-win situation for a group of students often viewed with suspicion over their allegiances both at home and in their host country.

Jiang said the video was subtitled and uploaded by friends who picked up the translation as a familiar expression that is “quite common in everyday language.”

Exiled Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law said in a tweet criticizing Harvard’s choice of Jiang as a speaker that her use of phrases such as “shared future” and “shared humanity” mirrored a “worldview designed to allow Beijing to bypass democratic norms and scrutiny.”

“In some ways, my own experience has become a living illustration of my speech that we are living in a divided world in a hard time,” Jiang said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s surreal to find myself accused simultaneously of being a U.S. spy and a Chinese spy.”

In China, online sleuths unearthed details of Jiang’s background, which led to more condemnation of her alleged privilege and ties to the West, including her education at a U.K. high school and Duke University undergraduate studies. Critics seized on her father’s alleged affiliation with a state-backed environmental organization, suggesting it had helped her get accepted at Harvard.

A few days after her speech, Jiang took to Chinese social media to defend herself. She said she grew up in an unstable family and had been bullied in middle school. She said her father had an unpaid position at the state-backed environment organization and hadn’t pulled strings to get her accepted at Harvard.

Other commentators drew attention to a video from a 2024 speech by Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng at the Harvard Kennedy School that showed Jiang standing behind the stage, watching as a protester was being removed from the audience by another student, an incident widely criticized by Republican lawmakers. Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), chairman of a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called the removal of the student the work of a “pro-CCP agitator” who faced no blowback from the university.

Jiang declined to comment on the event. A person close to her said Jiang wasn’t involved in either the organization of the event or the removal of the student.

Harvard declined to comment, citing student privacy but referred to a website detailing how the university selects graduate ceremony speakers.

For decades, Harvard has trained scholars, entrepreneurs, doctors and executives from humble backgrounds in China. The Ivy League university has also provided training to many Chinese bureaucrats and education to the children of some top Communist Party officials. Harvard’s alleged ties with the Communist Party have emerged as a leading line of attack in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Harvard.

It wasn’t the first time a Chinese student in the U.S. has faced online vitriol.

In 2017, Yang Shuping, a Chinese graduate of the University of Maryland, faced criticism after she called American air quality “fresh and sweet, and oddly luxurious” in a commencement speech and said that in China she wore a face mask against the pollution. Critics said she was pandering to her U.S. audience by implicitly criticizing China.

On her Chinese social-media account, Yang apologized, saying she loved her homeland and was proud of its prosperity and development.

Tony 

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.  I blogged about it when it first was published a month ago (see: New Book – “Original Sin” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Paints a Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle | Tony’s Thoughts).

Tapper and Thompson depict Joe Biden as out of touch and whose family and aides enabled his campaign for a second term as president.  Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times on May 14^th.  According to the review, the book is “a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s “original sin”: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; and an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

My take on Original Sin is that it is a good book for those who want to familiarize themselves with the machinations of Biden, his advisers, and his wife, Jill, during the Democratic nomination period. However, if you were someone who followed cable news before and during the nomination, there is not that much that is new here.  About a third of the book is devoted to the Biden-Trump debate and its aftermath.

In reading Original Sin, I  believe that Tapper and Thompson could have spent more ink on what the major cable news outlets such as CNN were providing.  They have reporters covering the President every day. They must have had suspicions and could have warned their viewers and American public.  They didn’t and the country is suffering for it.

Tony

———————————————————————————————

The New York Times

A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle

By Jennifer Szalai

Published May 13, 2025Updated May 14, 2025

ORIGINAL SIN: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

In Christian theology, original sin begins with Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” chronicles a different fall from grace. The cover image is a black-and-white portrait of Joe Biden with a pair of hands clamped over his eyes. The biblical story is about the danger of innocent curiosity; the story in this new book is about the danger of willful ignorance.

“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” Tapper and Thompson write. On the evening of June 27, 2024, Democratic voters watched the first presidential debate in amazement and horror: A red-faced Donald Trump let loose a barrage of audacious whoppers while Biden, slack-jawed and pale, struggled to string together intelligible rebuttals.

Trump’s debate performance was of a piece with his rallies, a jumble of nonsensical digressions and wild claims. But for many Americans, the extent of Biden’s frailty came as a shock. Most of the president’s appearances had, by then, become tightly controlled affairs. For at least a year and a half, Biden’s aides had been scrambling to accommodate an octogenarian president who was becoming increasingly exhausted and confused. According to “Original Sin,” which makes pointed use of the word “cover-up” in the subtitle, alarmed donors and pols who sought the lowdown on Biden’s cognitive state were kept in the dark. Others had daily evidence of Biden’s decline but didn’t want to believe it.

Tapper is an anchor for CNN (and also served as a moderator for the presidential debate); Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios. In an authors’ note, they explain that they interviewed approximately 200 people, including high-level insiders, “some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages.”

The result is a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

This blistering charge is attributed to “a prominent Democratic strategist” who also “publicly defended Biden.” In “Original Sin,” the reasons given for saying nice things in public about the president are legion. Some Democrats, especially those who didn’t see the president that often, relied on his surrogates for reassurance about his condition (“He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine”); others were wary of giving ammunition to the Trump campaign, warning that he was an existential threat to the country. Tapper and Thompson are scornful of such rationales: “For those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.”

Biden announced that he would be running for re-election in April 2023; he had turned 80 the previous November and was already the oldest president in history. Over his long life, he had been through a lot: the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972; two aneurysm surgeries in 1988; the death of his son Beau in 2015; the seemingly endless trouble kicked up by his son Hunter, a recovering addict whose legal troubles included being under investigation by the Justice Department.

Yet Biden always bounced back. The fact that he defied the naysayers and beat the odds to win the 2020 election was, for him and his close circle of family and advisers, a sign that he was special — and persistently underestimated. They maintained “a near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again,” the authors write. “And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.”

In 2019, when Biden announced a presidential run, he was 76. It was still a time when “Good Biden was far more present than Old Biden.” By 2023, the authors suggest, that ratio had reversed. Some of his decline was hard to distinguish from what they call “the Bidenness,” which included his longtime reputation for gaffes, meandering stories and a habit of forgetting staffers’ names.

But people who didn’t see Biden on a daily basis were increasingly taken aback when they finally laid eyes on him. They would remark on how his once booming voice had become a whisper, how his confident stride had become a shuffle. An aghast congressman recalls being reminded of his father, who had Alzheimer’s; another thought of his father, too, who died of Parkinson’s.

The people closest to Biden landed on some techniques to handle (or disguise) what was happening: restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; instructing his writers to keep his speeches brief so that he didn’t have to spend too much time on his feet; having him use the short stairs to Air Force One. When making videos, his aides sometimes filmed “in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked.” By late 2023, his staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday.

When White House aides weren’t practicing fastidious stage management, they seemed to be sticking their heads in the sand. According to a forthcoming book by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, Biden’s aides decided against his taking a cognitive test in early 2024. Tapper and Thompson quote a physician who served as a consultant to the White House Medical Unit for the last four administrations and expressed his dismay at the idea of withholding such information: “If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose.”

Just how much of this rigmarole was desperate rationalization versus deliberate scheming is never entirely clear. Tapper and Thompson identify two main groups that closed ranks around Biden: his family and a group of close aides known internally as “the Politburo” that included his longtime strategist Mike Donilon and his counselor Steve Ricchetti. The family encouraged Biden’s view of himself as a historic figure. The Politburo was too politically hard-nosed for that. Instead, its members pointed to Biden’s record in office and the competent people around him. The napping, the whispering, the shuffling — all that stuff had merely to do with the “performative” parts of the job.

Tapper and Thompson vehemently disagree. They offer a gracious portrait of Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified materials and in his February 2024 report famously described the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden and his team were incensed and tried “to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack,” but the authors defend his notorious line. They emphasize that it is incumbent upon a special counsel to spell out how the subject of an investigation would probably appear to a jury — and that what Hur wrote about Biden was true.

Of course, in an election like 2024, when the differences between the candidates are so stark and the stakes are so high, nearly every scrap of information gets viewed through the lens of “Will it help my team win?” Even competently administered policy could not compensate for a woeful inability to communicate with the American people. In a democracy, this is a tragedy — especially if you believe, as Biden did, that a second Trump term would put the very existence of that democracy in peril.

Earlier this month, in what looks like an attempt to get ahead of the book’s publication, Biden went on “The View” to say that he accepts some responsibility for Trump’s victory: “I was in charge.” But he was dismissive about reports of any cognitive decline. In “Original Sin,” Tapper and Thompson describe him waking up the morning after the 2024 election thinking that if only he had stayed in the race, he would have won. “That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again,” the authors write. There was just one problem with his reasoning: “His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.”

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk, who led a scorched-earth strategy in recommending the dismantling of federal agencies and laying off tens of thousands of workers, continued burning bridges after leaving his special White House job advising President Donald Trump.  Here are six takeaways in the latest development of their feud courtesy of USA Today.

Trump ‘very disappointed’ with Musk

Musk has called the cost of Trump’s legislative package of tax and spending cuts a “disgusting abomination,” and urged lawmakers to kill it.

Trump responded during an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz by saying he was disappointed with Musk. Trump blamed Musk’s criticism on the legislation aiming to end incentives for electric vehicles, which Musk’s company Tesla manufactures, and for discarding his choice to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which works with Musk’s SpaceX rockets.

“I’m very disappointed with Elon,” Trump said. “I can understand why he’s upset.”

“Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump added later. “I don’t know if we will anymore.”

Musk endorses third impeachment of Trump

When someone else suggested on social media that Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vice President JD Vance, Musk replied, “Yes.”

The House impeached Trump during his first term. Once was for his urging Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. The second time was for inciting the riot Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol.

The Senate acquitted Trump both times after failing to get a two-thirds majority for conviction.

Musk predicts recession from Trump tariffs

Musk upped the ante by predicting Trump’s tariffs – the centerpiece of his economic policy – would cause a recession.

“The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year,” Musk wrote on social media.

Trump has argued the tariffs would bring the government billions in revenue and force manufacturers to bring jobs back to the U.S. He has also used tariffs as leverage to negotiate trade deals with other countries.

Musk alleges Trump connection to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein was a financier charged federally with sex trafficking. He died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019. Conspiracy theorists have speculated that powerful people silenced Epstein rather than have their secrets exposed.

Trump and Epstein were filmed and photographed together at parties. In 2002 Trump praised the wealthy businessman as a “terrific guy” but he has since distanced himself from him.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would declassify the government’s files on Epstein but about 200 pages released Feb. 27 implicated no one else.

“Time to drop the really big bomb,” Musk said in a June 5 post on X. “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

The White House responded that Musk was unhappy with Trump’s legislative package.

“This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill because it does not include the policies he wanted,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “The President is focused on passing this historic piece of legislation and making our country great again.”

Trump threatens to cancel Musk’s government contracts and subsidies

Trump later threatened on social media to cancel Musk’s government contracts and subsidies.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump said. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Tesla’s shares dropped 14%, losing about $150 billion in market share, on June 5.

Trump’s legislative package seeks to end government subsidies for electric vehicles. Musk’s SpaceX also relies on billions in contracts to transport people and supplies to the International Space Station. The government must rely on private rockets or the rockets of other countries for such trips after retiring the space shuttle program.

“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk wrote.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon urges deportation of Musk

One of Trump’s informal advisers, Steve Bannon, told the New York Times he was urging the president to launch several investigations into Musk, including whether he should be deported.

Musk came to the U.S. on a student visa and has since become a naturalized citizen, but critics have raised questions about whether Musk overstayed the terms of his original visa.

“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Bannon said.

These two deserve each other!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

H. Holden Thorp has an editorial this morning’s Science entitled , “America is ceding the lead in creating the future.” He cites Peter Drucker who stated: ”the best way to predict the future is to create it”—a view that applies to science as well. Thorp goes on to lament that current Trump policies regarding research are ceding leadership in science to other countries.  Here is an excerpt.

The renowned American management consultant and author Peter Drucker is often credited as saying that “the best way to to predict the future is to create it” much as to the business world. It implies that gaining insights and ideas that lead to new discoveries and technologies allows victory in the marketplace, ahead of the competition. As the Trump administration continues to drastically defund and dismantle basic science in America, the United States is presenting other countries with opportunities to take the lead in seeing farther ahead, anticipate where scientific and technological prowess is going, and create the future, while the United States stands on the sidelines. This is a matter not only of scientific prestige but also of economic vitality. The country will no longer be at the forefront of commercializing breakthroughs and leveraging them for maximum economic and societal benefit. Moreover, this will trigger a massive transition for the global scientific community and alter the framework that shapes how the world’s economies connect and grow.

Measured by its share of published research, the United States was already falling behind before the latest cuts and attacks. For example, the percentage of papers published in Science with at least one corresponding author with funding from the US federal government has been declining over the past 7 years (2018 to 2024), decreasing from 54 to 44%. By contrast, the number of published papers originating from China has doubled during this time. In Science Advances, the number of papers published from China and the United States in 2024 was roughly the same. If this trend continues, the same will be true in a few years for Science and is likely to happen even sooner as the US government retreats from supporting research and China and other countries continue to increase their investments.

For now, the United States arguably remains the leader in the hot areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, with many of the advances coming from US-based corporate entities such as Google DeepMind and Microsoft. But commercial success in these areas grew out of basic research in computer science and solid-state physics in universities, funded by the federal government. With a bottom line to consider, for-profit businesses likely would not have started these disciplines from scratch. The recent market panic caused by the advances in AI by the Chinese company DeepSeek shows that this leadership is far from guaranteed. Moreover, applying these technologies in medicine and elsewhere will rely on still more basic research— research now threatened by sweeping cutbacks inflicted by the Trump administration.

The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future that will allow it to shape and anticipate commercial and societal advances.

A world where the United States is no longer leading the scientific enterprise will still benefit from science. Human creativity flourishes everywhere, after all, and other countries and cultures will have greater opportunities to shape the future in new ways. The global enterprise will adapt to the lack of American leadership, but the steep loss for the country itself is unambiguous. The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future that will allow it to shape and anticipate commercial and societal advances. This will eventually reduce the market successes and global leadership that the United States has boasted since World War II.

At a US Senate hearing in April on the importance of biomedical research, bipartisan support was expressed for continued investment, although whether senators in the Republican party will defy the president and rectify the cuts remains unknown. In his testimony, Sudip Parikh, the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science), noted that the language of chemistry used to be German and that only in the past 50 years did the German language stop being a requirement for chemistry degrees in the United States. “Twenty years from now,” he said, “what is going to be the language of science? Is it going to be English? I don’t know that for certain.” It is a sobering thought. Scientific knowledge is, fortunately, a public good, and as such, its benefits transcend international boundaries. But relinquishing its prominence in creating the future is nothing short of devastating for the United States.

So True!

Tony

Karine Jean-Pierre

Dear Commons Community,

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has become an independent after serving under two Democratic presidents, according to the publisher of a new book from Jean-Pierre due out this fall.

Jean-Pierre, whose encounters with White House reporters grew tense last year amid questions concerning former President Biden’s age and health, will detail in her new book the weeks that led to his 2024 campaign departure, per a publisher’s description.

The book, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” pledges to take readers through the “betrayal by the Democratic Party” that prompted Biden’s decision.

In it, Jean-Pierre will urge Americans to “embrace life as Independents” in an assessment of what she sees as a broken two-party system.

“In a hard-hitting yet hopeful critique, Jean-Pierre defines what it means to be part of the growing percentage of our fractured electorate that is Independent,” the announcement reads.

Political independents make up a dominant voting bloc, with an average of 43% of U.S. adults identifying as independent in 2023, per Gallup data.

What she’s saying: “I think we need to stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes and not be so partisan,” Jean-Pierre said in a video shared to Instagram.

“If you are willing to stand side by side with me, regardless of … how you identify politically, and as long as you respect the community that I belong to and vulnerable communities that I respect, I will be there with you,” she said.

CNN conservative commentator Scott Jennings on Wednesday congratulated Democrats for “getting rid of” former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre after recently revealing her decision to become an independent.

“I’d like to congratulate Democrats for ridding yourselves of this untalented mediocrity,” Jennings said on CNN’s “The Arena with Kasie Hunt.” “I mean, this is the most self-aggrandizing liar that has ever held this job.”

OOH!

Tony