MAGA opens national forests to mass destruction; Blog note Re: Sharing Pxy

The NYT reports (not paywalled) that djt is opening vast amounts of US forest land to environmental rape for profit:

Trump Administration to End Protections for 58 Million Acres of National Forests

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the Clinton-era rule barring road construction and logging was outdated and “absurd”

The Trump administration said on Monday that it would open up 58 million acres of back country in national forests to road construction and development, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the 2001 “roadless rule” that had preserved the wild nature of nearly a third of the land in national forests in the United States. Ms. Rollins said the regulation was outdated.

“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Ms. Rollins said in a statement. She said the repeal “opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”

If one is concerned about protecting the environment and lands the US owns, what is “absurd”, actually outrageous, is corrupt MAGA thugs telling us that opening protected forests to rape and pillage for profit constitutes a new era of “consistency and sustainability.” What a pack of insulting, kleptocratic MAGA lies. 

In fact, this is just another transfer of wealth and power from the public and the public interest, to special interests. Who pays for building the roads for private tree harvesting companies to use to get to our trees? Taxpayers. How much do private tree harvesting companies pay for the trees they take and make profit from? Not enough to pay for the roads us idiot taxpayers paid to build the access roads. Annual loss is ~$1 billion/year to the US Forest Service.[1] 

Not only is the public and public interest being lied to and ripped off by MAGA kleptocrats and criminals, they are forcing us to pay them to screw us. What benefit do we get? I asked Pxy: 

Q2: Given (1) how MAGA and Trump operate rhetorically (mendacious and demagogic) and politically, (2) how much dark money in politics there was in the 2024 elections, and (3) how corrupt MAGA elites and Trump are operating in our pay-to-play political system, make a rough estimate of costs and benefits to the special interests who will benefit and the public, e.g., ~90% of benefits and ~10% of costs flow to the special interests who will harvest trees and ~90% of costs and ~10% of benefits will flow to the public and public interest. It is understood that this will be an estimate, but a reasonable, fact-based estimate is the only possibility given that MAGA, Trump and special interests seeking favors and advantages operate in as much secrecy, deceit and lies as they can possibly get away with. Fact check your data sources and provide links. Minimize all biases as much as possible.

A2: Executive Summary: Based on available financial data and the documented patterns of corruption and dark money influence in the Trump administration, the distribution of costs and benefits from forest deprotection policies appears heavily skewed toward private timber interests at public expense. The evidence suggests approximately 85% of benefits flow to special interests while they bear only 5% of costs, with the public bearing 95% of costs while receiving just 15% of benefits 1 2 3.

Both Qs&As in their entireties are at this link, which is open to anyone.

Footnote:

1. One source comments on the cost to us taxpayers: Recreation has replaced logging as the golden egg of the national forest system. While the extensive logging practices lose $1 billion a year, recreation based in national forests provides $111 billion per year to the country’s gross domestic product. And that’s according to the U.S. Forest Service’s own study, which also declares only 3% of jobs in rural communities are linked to logging on public land, while 75% of jobs in rural communities come from recreation based on public lands. Recreation contributes 30 times more income to the nation’s economy and creates 38 times more jobs than logging. Yet current Forest Service policy** still favors logging over recreation.

** Forest Service policy is now MAGA kleptocracy policy -- it's the new normal!!

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Blog note: I can make all of my Pxy Qs&As available to the public by, amazingly, clicking on a button that says "Share"! Who would have thunk it? I figured out this advanced technology just a day or two ago.

Share button is at upper right 

corner of Pxy responses

The personalist presidency

CONTEXT

Political scientists, sociologists, investigative journalists and others have been trying to figure out what is going on with djt and his MAGA wealth and power movement. To some people, e.g., me, the main goals have been clear since 2016, accumulation of wealth and power for himself and some other elites. That was to be done by attacking democracy, the rule law and civil liberties, especially their restraints on unlimited political power. But that does not explain in detail how djt's and elite MAGA's attacks on power restraints are being accomplished. 

Lots of analysts focus on comparisons between djt and MAGA elites with dictators of the past, including Hitler, and how djt and MAGA elites are establishing Americans authoritarianism as dominant over democracy and the rule of law. There are parallels and similarities between djt and past despots, but is that alone be enough to overthrow the American democracy and rule of law? Nearly all people who see little to no threat to democracy keep pointing out how strong American democracy and the institutions that support it are. The bottom line for most of those people is simple: Dictatorship can't happen here.  

The personalist presidency

One line of research that seems to be fairly new is a recognition of what researchers call the personalist presidency (PP) that djt and MAGA elites are well on their way to establishing. The PP is a form of dictatorship centered on the dictator who relies on loyalty to himself and key tactics to gain and keep power. Political scientist Don Moynihan describes the PP concept in a substack post (this peer-reviewed paper). He writes in his substack post:

Right now, so many things are happening so quickly that it is hard to keep up. This is part of a deliberate strategy to “flood the zone” with so many changes that it is impossible to make sense of them all. I’ve been trying to step back and identify bigger patterns that help us to frame and understand these events, rather than just respond to them.

For a considerable period, from about the 1970s until relatively recently, politicization of the U.S. federal government describes a President using two basic strategies: centralizing policy expertise within the White House, and using political appointees to strategically manage agencies, especially agencies that do not ideologically align with the President. Both political parties applied such strategies, to varying degrees, within a certain equilibrium. The President was assumed to value a balance between loyalty to his policies, and administrative competence in delivering those policies. The civil service system was assumed to be a stable source of institutional capacity, with basic workforce protections for employees. Within that equilibrium, the number of political appointees has gradually increased, from about 3,000 in 1990 to about 4,000 today, even as the number of career federal employees they supervised remained relatively stable since the 1960s.

That equilibrium no longer exists. Direct forms of political control are more extreme, and the types of politicization are more varied than the centralization of policymaking power and strategic use of appointees. The core components of the new politicization are

1) The personalist presidency - centered on loyalty to Trump with a legal infrastructure built to serve and protect him

2) Governing by fear via conspiratorial messaging towards the public sector and threatening individual public servants

3) Purging of career officials, expansion of appointee class by weakening of civil service systems, and dismantling civil service protections. 

The emergence of Trump has compelled scholars focused on US domestic politics and policy to look to comparative research for useful explanatory concepts, such as populism and personalism. While populism centers on a grievance-driven us-vs.-them ideology, personalism centers on the idea of a political movement built around loyalty to an individual leader. Personalism is more likely to prevail in settings featuring weak political, democratic and governance institutions, and so the emergence of personalism in the Grand Old Party and the United States challenges prior assumptions. While loyalty to Trump may falter in his last years in office, he has been able to silence or drive from power dissenters within the Republican Party and seeks to do so within government.

Trump has created the conditions for a personalist presidency, reorienting processes and powers to reward the value of loyalty. Personalist systems are more likely to feature family members, or those who have passed extraordinary loyalty tests, such as joining in false claims the leader makes or defending damaging behavior, such as the denial of an election loss. 

His second term Cabinet nominations were largely not the type of generic Republican that characterized his first term, often holding few credentials for the position beyond their loyalty to Trump. A willingness to stand with Trump during his lowest period, after the 2021 January 6th assault on Congress by his supporters, became a key criterion. Donald Trump Jr described the appointee screening process: “Loyalty has got to be number one,” emphasizing that the Presidential Personnel Office “will diligently go through and understand not just where were they in 2015 and 2016, but where were they on January 7th”. Candidates for appointments were screened with questions like whether they believed Trump’s false claim he won the 2020 election and how they evaluated the 2021 January 6th insurrection.

To maintain Trump’s personalist Presidency requires defanging standard modes of presidential accountability. In his first term, Trump fired Inspectors General at an unprecedented rate, removed the head of the FBI, and complained about Department of Justice investigations. A key lesson he drew from his first term was to build an even stronger legal infrastructure to further shield him from risk and increase his power. Trump and supporters eliminated the long-standing norm that the Department of Justice maintain a measure of independence from the President, enabling him to directly intervene in cases involving investigation of himself, or his political opponents.

Purge competent bureaucrats and replace with 

loyalists, regardless of competence or honesty

Moynihan's post continues at length like this. But the key point he makes is that djt puts loyalty to himself far above the Constitution, the law, democratic norms and our civil liberties and legal protections. Competence is a minor to trivial concern. Loyalty matters first and foremost. Right now, the balance of power is solidly with djt acting as dictator. Musk losing his recent fight with djt is solid evidence of that.

Any deference Trump has left for democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties remain because djt sees enough personal value to leave them in place to (1) protect his power or (2) enrich himself when he sells off the remaining vestiges to special interests. The buyers can then profit or establish their own fiefdoms. What fiefdoms? These for example, (A) carbon energy corporations and their pollution of our environment and physical bodies, (B) unregulated billionaires preying on their deprotected, naked workers and consumers, (C) some Christian Zionists getting Iran bombed to initiate the rapture that saves Christians from an imminent global war that will lead to the deaths of most or all non-believers, and (D) Christian nationalists and their bigoted, hate-driven theocracy. Those are really big fiefdoms. Economically worth trillions. Socially probably worth at least as much in social capital.

Everyone will have to pay djt personally to get a slice of the pie taken from us and given to special interests. But whatever they have pay to djt, it will be well worth it. Almost every time they will win and we will lose.

Bottom line: Dictatorship can and is happening here, right now. 

Q1: Do you think that the PP concept adds much or anything new in understanding djt and MAGA elites, their tactics and their thinking? Or is all of this more or less obvious? 

Q2: Any predictions on what happens after Trump dies, e.g., Christian nationalist theocracy, continuing "secular" (pragmatic?) dictatorship, populist nationalism with at least semi-functioning congress, or modest restoration of the old normal? Is the old normal ever going to come back?

Acknowledgement: PD brought the concept of the PP and research on it to my attention

Okay, help me out here…

As we all know, this last weekend Trump decided to come to the aid of Israel and deployed seven stealth bombers to bomb Iran’s three known nuclear-developing sites.  The Trump administration announced it was a great success (but who really knows?) and that “we are not at war with Iran; we are at war with Iran's future nuclear capabilities.”

Word has it that Iran is a “state sponsor of terrorism” and they live for the day when they can “wipe Israel off the face of the map.”

We hear both sides of the story: Iran is close to producing a nuclear weapon; Iran is years away from producing a nuclear weapon.

Now, no love is lost on Trump around here (this blog).  Same with Israel, considering the brutality they are unleashing in the Gaza area.  Brutality seems to be a way of life in that little corner of the world.  And you will find relgion(s) are the taproot of that burning bush.

While violence is never (rarely?) looked upon as a “good” thing…

Question: Do you think it was a good thing that Trump bombed those Iranian facilities, or a bad thing?  Make your case.

(by PrimalSoup) 

Self-Proclaimed “Peacemaker” Drags U.S. Into Another War

Heeding the request of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump dispatched U.S. warplanes to bomb Iran.

American warplanes bombed three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday night, bringing the U.S. military directly into Israel’s war with Iran. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE,” President Donald Trump incongruously wrote in a social media post announcing the attacks.

Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars during his 2024 presidential run and has cast himself as a “peacemaker.” In his second inaugural address, he pledged to “measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Trump also regularly claims to have opposed the Iraq War from its outset. (He actually supported it.)

“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “All planes are now outside of Iran airspace. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow.”

The aim of the attacks, American and Israeli officials have said, is to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. The U.S. intelligence community says that threat is not, however, real.

“We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so,” reads the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment published in March. The assessment serves as the intelligence community’s official evaluation of threats to “the Homeland,” U.S. citizens, and the country’s interests. Trump dismissed those and more recent assessments to the same effect.

Defense experts who spoke with The Intercept warned the United States might be entering into a new round of the forever wars.

“Between enabling Israel in Gaza and all of its operations across the Middle East, and now these strikes in Iran, we are setting the foundation for the next generation’s ‘War on Terror,’” said Wes Bryant, who served until earlier this year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

He questioned the Trump administration’s abrupt shift from negotiating with Iran about its nuclear program to bombing it.

The idea of an “imminent Iran nuclear threat” wasn’t serious a few days ago, Bryant said. “The fact that suddenly Trump was pulled into this reactive major strike against Iran under the auspices of nuclear deterrence is, I think, among the most disturbing red flags of this administration thus far.”

“Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear targets is a short-sighted one that will not achieve his stated objectives, brings significant risks to the United States, and could derail his foreign policy priorities,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for measured U.S. foreign policy. “To strike Iran while diplomacy was ongoing undermines his push for peace elsewhere including with Putin. Why would Russia or any other country negotiate with Trump going forward?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his military’s objective was to “strike all” of Iran’s nuclear facilities. He had been pressing Trump to augment Israel’s attacks with weaponry his country does not possess — namely the 30,000-pound GBU-57s, known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators or “bunker buster” bombs, that Israel says can destroy Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facility in Fordow.

Former defense officials speculated that these weapons — which are so heavy they can only be carried by U.S. B-2 bombers — were used on Israel’s behalf during the Saturday attacks.

If Iranian leaders respond to the U.S. strikes with a major counterattack, such as striking American military bases across the Middle East, it could set off an escalatory spiral and even more aggressive U.S. involvement.

“Trump is trying to signal that he wants to get back to diplomacy but the risk of a wider war is still very real and high. Iran’s retaliation will determine whether the United States can extract itself so easily,” said Kavanagh, a former senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation who served as the director of its Army Strategy program.

“There is also very little chance Iran will negotiate now because Trump has no way to provide them credible assurances that if they come to the table, they will be spared future attacks,” Kavanagh said. “Trump has sacrificed significant diplomatic leverage for narrow military gains of uncertain duration, and in doing so, has put the United States at risk of another costly Middle East war that will further diminish U.S. global influence and American prosperity.”

More than 40,000 U.S. active-duty military personnel and civilians working for the Pentagon are deployed across the Middle East. U.S. troops in the region have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since October 2023 in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza. Predominantly led by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian-allied Houthi government in Yemen, the strikes include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region.

Trump struck a ceasefire deal with the Houthis in May. Prior to the U.S. attacks on Iran, the Houthis threatened to again target U.S. ships in the Red Sea if Washington joined Israel’s attacks on Iran.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has expressed his desires for regime change in Iran and not ruled out targeting the country’s supreme leader, saying “no one in Iran should have immunity.” Israel’s defense minister said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cannot “continue to exist.” Trump joined in on the threats, pointing out that the U.S. knows Khamenei’s location and dangled the possibility of assassinating him in the future.

“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week, before Saturday’s strikes.

“Military force, by itself, is seldom effective in orchestrating regime change,” Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, told The Intercept before the U.S. began its attacks on Saturday.

“There will be ramifications against the U.S. and this should be discussed and addressed in detail,” Votel warned. “There is no clean course we can take in this situation.”

by Nick Turse

The Intercept 6/21/25