Trump Puts The Cartels On Notice
Plus: Vance in Munich, Democrats and USAID, Eric Adams, Elbridge Colby, SNL
Consider it the first tangible example of Donald Trump's Western Hemisphere policy made real. The president's day one executive order calling for the “total elimination” of multiple cartels is now getting its teeth in the form of a list drawn up by the Department of State designating eight different groups based across Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations, according to the New York Times.
The list, which has yet to be formally announced, reportedly includes five major Mexican cartels along with Colombia's Clan del Golfo, which has become key to the migrant crisis given their control of the Darién Gap; Venezuela's Tren de Aragua, a threat which has risen in the minds of Americans over the past year based on a spate of violent activity; and Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13.
Among the Mexican groups, the foreign terrorist organization label is coming at a critical juncture for the Sinaloa cartel. As El Pais describes it in a useful outline of all five Mexico-based designees:
“The Sinaloa Cartel is Mexico’s largest criminal organization,” says analyst David Saucedo, “but it has many heads, it’s a fragmented empire.” The country’s most well-known and powerful criminal group is at a critical moment and has been waging an internal war since last September, centered on the two families that have held the reins of the cartel for decades: the faction loyal to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Los Chapitos, led by the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Zambada accuses Joaquín Guzmán López, his godson and one of El Chapo’s heirs, of kidnapping him and handing him over to the United States. The alleged betrayal is at the heart of the internal battle. Sinaloa, the historic stronghold of the eponymous group, has recorded more than 800 murders since the outbreak of the conflict, as well as hundreds of missing persons, according to official data.
One interesting aspect of this step will be the potential fallout for the Mexican government of a more direct attack on the cartels. Mexico's new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, inherited control in name only of the government from Andrés Manuel López Obrador's MORENA coalition -- furthered by a state-cartel alliance that was barely hidden from view for anyone paying attention. As Joshua Treviño, a senior fellow of the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the America First Policy Institute, wrote recently in The Spectator:
This was more or less common knowledge in Mexico, and the regime did not trouble itself to hide the evidence. AMLO, as he is known, spent nearly his entire presidency defending the Sinaloa Cartel against the Americans, and sometimes against his own security apparatus. He paid more visits to the Sinaloan Cartel headquarters town of Badiraguato across six years than he did to Washington, DC; he took a special trip to pay respects to the elderly mother of jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera; he ordered his own security forces to release one of El Chapo’s captured sons; he intervened to spring the cartel-corrupted Mexican flag officer Salvador Cienfuegos from American detention; he effectively banned US law enforcement from working in Mexico; and he even vowed to use the Mexican armed forces to defend the cartels against American action.
Much of the talk around American confrontation with the cartels over the past decade amounted to just that: talk. There was an omnipresent understanding that the most important criminals in the failed narco-state to our south, who spent their days poisoning American citizens with drugs and profiting from the human misery of millions, were always laughing at us. The second Trump administration is already indicating their willingness to go beyond talk and take real action against a threat that deserved direct confrontation long ago. We'll see how long it is until the laughter stops for good.
In Munich, J.D. Vance Warns Against the Loss of Free Speech
Full text here. An excerpt:
We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the cold war positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.
And thank God they lost the cold war. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the cold war’s winners.
I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’, or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant – and I’m quoting – a ‘free pass’ to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son.
He and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new Buffer Zones Law, which criminalises silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.
Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth. I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaped from leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.
So I come here today not just with an with an observation, but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.
Democrats Love Government Aid Too Much
Over time, Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, including and especially in the last election. A resolute, unconditional defense of government bureaucracies does not appear to be a promising route to getting them back in our current populist era.
But oddly, Democrats seem to have decided that hitching their wagon to government bureaucracies is just the ticket they need to storm back against Trump and GOP. Nothing illustrates this better than how they’ve mounted the barricades to defend USAID and each and every dollar it spends.
As was widely-reported, all USAID programs except for “life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” were paused on January 20th and all agency employees, except for a tiny handful, were put on administrative leave (some have subsequently been reinstated through court order). These actions are follow-ons to Trump’s Executive Order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”
Democrats were outraged as well they might have been. USAID does much useful and important work and most of its employees surely deserve something better than being summarily laid-off during an audit of the programs they administer. Democrats took that outrage to the streets in a signature #Resistance move, where House and Senate Democrats rallied outside the USAID headquarters building and demanded to be let inside (to do….something), at which point bored security guards politely told them to get lost.
Of course, this got a lot of publicity but to what end? The truth is most Americans know very little about USAID and could care less about the USAID as an institution. And if you told them that USAID basically administers foreign aid programs, they would care even less.
Democrats Turn Against Eric Adams
Earlier this week, the Department of Justice ordered the acting U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York to dismiss without prejudice a slew of federal corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams. For now, Adams is spared a protracted legal battle against allegations of bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign donations. Even before his September indictment, his administration had been shrouded in scandal, implicating not only the mayor but also several high-ranking officials. The ongoing legal controversies damaged Adams’s public standing and prospects for reelection. Now, having been rescued by Donald Trump, the mayor has exchanged legal peril for electoral trouble.
Adams’s association with Trump, and his reliance on the president’s good graces, will likely seal his fate with Democratic primary voters. From the start, Adams cast his prosecution as the same sort of meritless politicized “lawfare” unleashed against Trump, alleging that he became a target of federal prosecution only because of his criticism of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Since the November election, the city’s left-of-center voters have watched Adams praise Trump, promise cooperation with his policies, and dart from New York in the wee hours to attend the inauguration.
Democrats’ disgust with Adams is reflected in pointed statements issued by his rivals for the party’s mayoral nomination. None showed the slightest sympathy for the mayor or suggested that his prosecution was unfair. Even Adams’s most stalwart public defender, Al Sharpton, has tempered his support for the city’s second black mayor. “I’m not anti‑Adams, but I’m anti‑Trump, and a lot of people in the Black community share that sentiment,” Sharpton told the New York Times.
It’s hard to see how any candidate in a Democratic primary for mayor of New York could survive after expressing support for the president. A recent Manhattan Institute poll registers a 65 percent disapproval rating for Trump in the city. Adams has not only praised Trump but is now obviously in his debt. His outreach to a man whom many Democrats despise will make the mayor particularly unattractive to the city’s primary electorate, which, in recent years, has been dominated by progressive activists.
On the day after receiving the DOJ directive, Adams continued to simulate a mayoralty. He appeared in City Hall’s Blue Room, where he traditionally holds press conferences, but this time Adams spoke only to a camera. Facing no reporters, the mayor dubiously claimed that he is “no longer facing legal questions” and again presented himself as a falsely accused everyman from Queens. He vowed to “move forward.”
But the mayor may no longer have a vehicle for doing so. The Democratic Party is about to complete its turn against him. Even if he secures the Republican ballot line under the Wilson-Pakula rule, he would face a primary challenge from Curtis Sliwa, one of Adams’s most vocal critics and a popular figure with the city’s Republican voters. Barring more help from Trump, Adams’s chances of success would be slim in a GOP primary. A chameleon can only change colors so many times.
The Most Hilarious SNL Bit This Year is This Reply All Invitation Disaster
On Thursday evening, New Yorker editor Susan Morrison sent out a mass email invitation to an event for her forthcoming biography of Lorne Michaels. She will be chatting with her colleague, the writer Emily Nussbaum, at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location next week. Would they like to reserve just a seat ($5) or a book along with it ($36)?
People began hitting reply all, saying they were sorry to miss the event. Then writer Eric Alterman chimed in, at first wondering whether Morrison had made a mistake in inviting him — “I wonder if I was supposed to get this…” — before expressing his frustration that he’d never received a copy of the book despite asking Random House “for a galley or a pdf (twice)” and wondering whether Morrison was mad at a mutual friend for something they’d written. Writer Paul Goldberger said he couldn’t make it because he was speaking at the Met about Paul Rudolph that night.
At 7:11 PM, Morrison sent another email, subject line “A note about my recent LORNE email,” to say that “a lot of people are inadvertently hitting REPLY ALL to the McNally Jackson email I just sent.” She reminded people to email her personally if they’d like to send a note.
It was to no avail. At 7:19, Renata Adler wrote, “It’s perfect, you, Lorne, a legacy for Lillian,” a cryptic reference possibly to the longtime New Yorker writer Lillian Ross who died in 2017. At 8:03 PM, Win McCormack, the 79-year-old owner of The New Republic, last seen being fleeced for $34 million by his beloved chauffeur, wrote, “I have no idea what this is all about. Why am I included in this correspondence?”
An hour later Graydon Carter said he’d try to make the two parties he’d been invited to for this book, along with Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary celebration on Sunday night. “Honestly, I have my own life. I cannot devote any more time to Lorne…” he wrote, before inadvertently plugging his own forthcoming memoir, When the Going Was Good, a photo of which is currently in his email signature.
“Dear Boomers,” Tina Fey wrote in the thread at 9:38, with a link to an instructional Youtube video for senior citizens on how to read, reply, and forward emails when using a Gmail account.
“Ahahahahahahah!! Thanks Tina. Also thanks Susan!” wrote SNL hanger-on Jon Hamm. “Also thanks Susan! I’ll see you there! BUMP!!”
Colin Jost joined the thread at 10:04 PM. “Guys, the video Tina sent is malware. Make sure to keep hitting Reply All or the virus can infect your computers.”
Jon Hamm jumped in again. “Oh my goodness. Thank you young man.”
Then came Aaron Sorkin, economical, for once, with his words: “How did I get involved in this?”
The thread is still going as of this writing, with most people making jokes. Roseanne Cash: “I only have so much time left on the planet and I had to choose between reading this email chain and Heather Cox Richardson.” Jesse Eisenberg: “Can I play win mccormack when we read this at symphony space?” Kurt Andersen: “Signing up for the Random House platinum premium content level was worth it after all.” Shouts & Murmurs’ Cora Frazier said she’d take a book and a ticket and offered a presumably fake debit card number, expiration date, and PIN. To which composer and frequent Coen brothers collaborator Carter Burwell wrote, “I’ll take one seat and one ticket, on Cora’s Visa card.”
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
National Interest: Putin Wants a Second Yalta
Spectator: Trump's Call with Putin Sparks Utterly Idiotic Reaction
WSJ: Vance Threatens Sanctions to Push Putin into Ukraine Deal
Telegraph: Hegseth and a US Strategy Shift in Ukraine
Politico: Roger Wicker calls Tucker Carlson a “fool” on War in Ukraine
NY Post: Douglas Murray on Trump Negotiating to End Ukraine War
WSJ: Russian Drone Sets Fire to Chernobyl’s Containment Shield
Telegraph: Can Europe Defend Itself from Russia?
Semafor: Russia and Sudan Cut a Red Sea Naval Base Deal
Spectator: Trump’s Gaza Plan and Middle East Impact
Brussels Signal: Conrad Black on Trump's Gaza Plan
Free Beacon: How Bloomberg Philanthropies Is Boosting China’s Belt and Road.
Semafor: Narendra Modi Meets Trump and Musk
Domestic
Semafor: Trump Announces Plan for Fair and Reciprocal Tariffs
Spectator: After 52-48 vote, RFK Jr. Becomes HHS Secretary
Spectator: What Elon Musk and Doge can Learn from Javier Milei
WSJ: Trump Layoffs Hit Federal Workers
WSJ: Department of Defense Plans for DOGE Budget Cuts
WSJ: GOP's Right Flank Secures Deeper Spending Cuts
Newsweek: Josh Hammer on the Coming Judicial Resistance Smackdown
Washington Examiner: Border Transforms Under Trump
Semafor: Trump’s Accessibility Creates Opportunities, Challenges for GOP
MPR News: Tina Smith Will Not Run for Reelection, Opening Minnesota Seat
NYMag: DOJ Officials Fall on Sword Instead of Dropping Adams Case
Politico: Cuomo Fundraising Warchest Grows for NYC Mayoral Race
Politico: Ric Grenell Teases Run Against Kamala Harris in California
National Review: Study Shows Pro-Life Laws Save Lives
Media
Mediaite: Jon Stewart Objects to Jen Psaki Comments on Joe Rogan, Theo Von
NY Post: Trump Roasts Kaitlan Collins During Press Conference
Tech
National Interest: JD Vance Unveils America's AI Doctrine
Health
City Journal: Yes, National Institutes of Health Should Cut University Grants
Ephemera
Telegraph: Jamie Dimon Rants on Gen Z and Office Jobs
NY Post: Meghan Markle Upset After Backlash to Brand
THR: Netflix Breaks Silence on ‘Emilia Pérez’ Scandal: “This Is Such a Bummer”.
Spectator: The Great Valentine's Day Con
Quote
“All things are the same — familiar in enterprise, momentary in endurance, coarse in substance. All things now are as they were in the day of those whom we have buried.”
— Marcus Aurelius