Roundup
(1) Here’s the spending bill that was passed in the House.
(2) Trump wants NATO countries to pay more:
Now he’s prompting the rest of NATO to bump their defense spending to five percent of GDP.
Probably won’t happen, though.
(3) Democrats try to troll Trump by referring to “President Musk” during the CR negotiations.
Trolls only work if they hit home, and this is pretty absurd IMHO, for two reasons. The first is that Trump is obviously in charge – and has taken charge of so many things very very quickly, even though he’s not president yet – and has put Musk in charge of cutting government waste. The second is that the same people attempting this trolling of Trump were remarkably silent and incurious about who was really in charge when President Biden was snoozing at the wheel.
(4) A closer look at Biden’s most outrageous pardons:
Will Trump open the doors to the WH for everyone to walk in?
Comparing Trump to Jackson…another interesting comparison comes from Tom Haigh, a historian focused on the computer industry, who compares Trump with Tom Watson Sr of IBM. (this is from 2018)
I think it’s an interesting piece, though I don’t agree with many aspects of Haigh’s opinion of Trump and may write a post in response.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3163909
Seems Trump is in an early negotiating stage…on lots of stuff right now, IMHO.
FT article I read on it said he’s looking for over three percent of GDP, which is what the US has been paying for the past few years. Throw out “five percent” to wake them up, then am guessing that he negotiates that down to 3-3.5%.