Mudline February 28, 2025
February 28, 2025
........OMB director Russell Vought on federal employees, before his confirmation: "When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma."....Mehdi Hasan: "Every time I think the appointees can't get worse, Trump says 'Hold my beer.' I am stunned that Dan Bongino, a man even Fox got rid of, is now the new deputy director of the FBI. We are so effed."....The Nation's Elie Mystal: "We are a nation of grifters, run by grifters, and regulatory agencies only get in the way of the next pyramid scheme."....Rep. AOC: "This is now a billionaire feeding frenzy."....Sen. Amy Klobuchar: "What is the difference between Greenland and Donald Trump? Greenland is not for sale."....Canadian MP Charlie Angus: "We will never kiss the ring of that gangster from Mar-a-Lago, Trump."....former Trump Russia adviser Fiona Hill: "There's no Team America for Trump. Not once did I see him do anything to put America first. Not once. Not for a single second."....Timothy Garton Ash: "[Trump's] appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlin look like a principled, courageous realist."....former Russian president Dimitry Medvedev on Trump calling Zelensky a "dictator without elections": "If you'd told me just three months ago that these were the words of the U.S. president, I would have laughed out loud."....Russia state TV on JD Vance's Munich address: "It was very nice to hear Vance's very strong speech. It was a public caning. I can't call it anything else."....Elon Musk: "DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it."....Steve Bannon on Musk: "A parasitic illegal immigrant...It's pretty evident the president's using him as an armor-piercing shell that's delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state."....Timothy Snyder: "People who have submitted to Trump see him as a strongman. But what they are experiencing is in fact their own weakness."....UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher on Trump Gaza plan: "Statecraft seems to have been replaced by real estate craft."....Thomas L. Friedman on Gaza plan: "Proves only one thing: how short a distance it is between out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-your-mind thinking."....Mona Charon on Trump: "The world's most credulous narcissist."....Mary L. Trump on her uncle: "Donald has never met an opportunity he didn't squander."....Andrew Sullivan: "There is no decent cause that Trump cannot make indecent."....
