The Friday Brief

February 14th, 2025

Inside: The Death of American Power. Eric Adams and our newly corrupt and weaponized DOJ. It’s Trump’s Inflation Now. Yale Law Needs To Come Get Their Boy J.D. Vane. The Lonely Island of Mitch McConnell. Golden Age, My Ass. The Next Pandemic. So Much Finding Out.

The Big Picture

The Death of American Power

This week amounts to nothing less than the outright murder of American power, courtesy of Donald Trump’s inevitable act of political fellatio toward Vladimir Putin.

Compared to Trump, Neville Chamberlain starts looking like Genghis Khan. In this latest sequel to the world’s longest-running cringe show, Trump has decided there’s no line he won’t cross to appease Daddy Vladdy—who’s been sitting on his superweapon (The Donald) like a Bond villain petting a cat, waiting to drop the big one on Ukraine. And here we are, letting Trump gush with pleasure at the shallow compliments paid to him by to a homicidal tyrant.

Over in the war Putin started, the body count on both sides climbs higher by the day—he routinely uses ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and glide bombs to target and kill civilians. His own conscripts are thrown into the grinder as cannon fodder.

It is Putin’s doing. His plan. His fault. His war has been a military, diplomatic, economic, and political disaster for Putin.

Does that stop Trump from bounding around with the energy of a toddler who just discovered ice cream and crayons? Nope. Fresh off Elon Musk treating him like I’d