Bondi in Action! Your $8 Million Politico Subscription? Keeping Gazans Down on the Strip & More

Alexander cut the Gordian Knot in the ancient world. Donald Trump is cutting Gordian Knots right and left in a stunningly new Trumpian edition of Washington, DC. Gordian Knots cut to pieces litter the town. Our friends on the left are not handling this well (here, here).     

From yesterday’s executive order banning men from competing in women’s sports to his proposed buyouts for federal workers to his vision of Gaza as a vacay spot, President Trump is acting fast. The new U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi isn’t a slowpoke either:

Her first actions as our chief law enforcement official did not disappoint: she cut all funding to sanctuary city insanity, ordered investigations into the anti-Trump lawfare, reauthorized the use of the death penalty when appropriate, and worked with the Department of Homeland Security in efforts to neutralize the drug cartels running amok. Any DOJ official who cannot carry out these action items will be subject to internal disciplinary measures, including termination.

One of the first agencies Elon Musk and his youthful DOGE team of government cost cutters set their sights on is USAID, the bleating heart of the DC establishment. As Ben Shapiro notes in a piece headlined “Ending the Taxpayer Funded Blue Pipeline,” this led to a “massive firefight” between the administration and USAID fans such as Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accused Musk of leading “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.” According to Schumer, cuts to AID would undermine “countering terrorist activity” as well as “humanitarian efforts” around the world. “If America retreats from the rest of the world,” Schumer said, “China will fill in the void.”

That may well have been true with decent leadership. But instead, Democrats decided that American interests had to take a backseat to blue interests. That’s why USAID embedded “LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development Policy” in its agenda for foreign countries — despite the obvious incompatibility with such radical ideology with America’s interests abroad. It’s why in 2013, for example, USAID announced that it would funnel $11 million to radical groups to support on gay and lesbian advocacy in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and other developing countries.

This is indicative of a broader Democratic approach to governance: When Democrats are in charge, they use the levers of government not only to enrich their political friends at home and abroad; they embed those streams of funding into the system for times when they aren’t in charge. Democrats have spent a century building permanent funding mechanisms of this sort: The hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year via the Department of Education, for example, are largely directed to blue-affiliated “educational” institutions and groups.

At the risk of belaboring a point—but it really does need to be stressed—I am including a snippet from a New York Post story about a richly remunerated USAID contract awardee ($969,821) and what he did to earn that kind of money:

This, according to an August 2021 USAID blog post, included:

* Efforts resulting in Bangladesh adding a third gender option in its 2021 national census.

* Supporting “gender affirming healthcare” in South Africa, including clinics administering “hormone replacement therapy.”

* “Reducing transgender discrimination and advocating for legal gender recognition in Kosovo.”

* “Increasing LGBTQI+ political participation” in Guatemala.

* Creating a toolkit “to enhance security protections for LGBTQI+ organizations in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Regarding that third gender option on the Bangladeshi census, it probably wasn’t cheap. Social Security has just terminated the extra gender box on its forms, saving the taxpayer $1 million.

It is through USAID that taxpayers have been subsidizing the trendy journalism outlet Politico to the tune of at least $8 million dollars. But don’t say subsidies, say subscriptions, the Washington Post tells us.  Government offices were subscribing in large numbers to a prohibitively expensive Politico lobbying publication. Here is a description of your subscription from a more reliable source, the U.K. Daily Mail:

Left-leaning news outlet Politico was paid a staggering $8.2 million in ‘government subsidies’ uncovered amid Elon Musk’s DOGE dragnet on wasteful spending.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is in the process of cancelling the payments from several government agencies, including the embattled USAID.

Apparently, the subscriptions already have been cancelled. The powers that be at Politico insist that it is just a coincidence that the publication suddenly is having payroll problems.

Too Hot to Handle: Michael Shellenberger has a long and fascinating post on X raising the specter of the possibility of USAID and CIA involvement in the Trump impeachments.

Commentary Editor John Podhoretz is anything but a Trump cheerleader, and so it was interesting to see his New York Post op-ed headlined “Trump Dares World Stuck in Failure with Bold Gazan Plan.” Podhoretz is another Gordian Knot noticer:

You want a way forward for the area that has been decimated as a result of the terrorist war launched against an unsuspecting Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — a war Israel neither sought nor planned for nor expected to have to fight?

You want to cry bitter tears over the uninhabitability of Gaza as a result of the consequences of the war that is entirely the moral, logistical and geopolitical responsibility of the terrorist organization Hamas and its sponsor in Iran?

Dry your tears, says Donald Trump. Here’s the plan.

Gazans will have to go elsewhere for a while. Gaza will be cleared. It’s a “demolition site.” Unexploded ordinance will have to be dealt with. Many existing structures will have to be torn down. It’s an area the size of Chicago, so it’s quite the job.

At that point, the people once resident in Gaza can return . . . if they want to. Otherwise it will become an international city for world people.

Meanwhile, Danielle Pletka writes a great Substack piece headlined “Gaz-a-Lago,” arguing that Trump has a brilliant idea, which may or may not come to fruition. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is headlined “About those Gaza Beachfront Condos” and offers this:

It’s easy to dismiss this as the fantasy of a presidential huckster who imagines Trump condos on a Gaza Gold Coast. But is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?

In the same esteemed publication, Elliot Kaufman writes that the purpose of the Gaza Strip was to keep Palestinians as perpetual refugees waging a forever war with Israel and that the Trump plan would free them from the Gaza Strip.

President Trump is also moving on the conservative dream of abolishing the Carter-era Department of Education. In the meantime, USA TODAY’s Ingrid Jaques takes note of President Trump’s executive order supporting more control by the states and parents:

The bottom line is that the current system of educating America’s kids isn’t working, and Trump is smart to think outside the box and encourage states to break free of the stranglehold that unions have on government-run schools.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and one of the biggest backers of sticking with the status quo, has called Trump’s order an “attack” on public education. She also seems to counterintuitively believe that giving families more school choice will limit their choices.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I think it has a lot more to do with Weingarten fearing her empire of union dues – and the political power that comes with them to elect Democrats – may be at risk.

Even in the Reagan and two Bush administrations, conservatives in the capital were strangers in a strange land. We always were outsiders. I think that is changing for the first time since I have lived here. An Englishman visits the new Washington, including the new conservative hangout Butterworth’s, and finds that young conservatives are taking over the culture:

For the New Right, it’s their America now. Two weeks in, house parties are serving hors d’oeuvres with mini Trump flags. One party I went to last Saturday on Embassy Row had MAGA hats on the fireplace as you entered, in all different colour combinations. A whole range of people were there, from right-wing intellectuals to New York Times journalists to book publishers looking for the next crop of nonfiction hits.