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Adams Administration in Crisis

The ongoing soap opera in New York City delivered another oh-so-exciting episode yesterday, as four high-ranking members of the city government tendered their resignations.

Stepping down are First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chauncey Parker. That is half the city's deputy mayors, including the most significant among them, as the first deputy mayor is responsible for day-to-day administration of the city. The four resignees, while being appropriately polite and formal, made clear that they are quitting because they want no part of a (possibly illegal) quid pro quo on immigration policy with the Trump administration.

Adams, for his part, offered the usual "thanks for your loyal service" pleasantries, and pledged that his administration will keep on keepin' on. He can, of course, appoint new deputy mayors—and this time around, perhaps choose people who are going to be more... morally pliable, for lack of a better term. And while we do not know the man all that well, since we are not residents of New York City or State, he seems like he is exactly the type to hold on until there's nothing left to hold on to. And even if that were not his natural inclination, his powers as mayor are the only real leverage he has when it comes to persuading Donald Trump to protect Adams from a trial and a very probable prison sentence. (And, by the way, prison inmates just LOVE former cops.)

What it amounts to is that the ball is almost certainly in the court of Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY). Here is a list of some of the varied, and often conflicting, things she undoubtedly has on her mind as she considers whether to exercise her power to remove Adams:

At the moment, given the different directions in which she is being pulled, Hochul is playing things very close to the vest. She hasn't yet thrown Adams under the bus (the subway?), but she also refuses to commit to keeping him in office.

Ultimately, a resolution here is likely going to come down to two things. The first is the decision that will be made by Judge Dale Ho. As long as there is a possibility of Adams being put on trial, then Hochul can punt by saying "we have to let the process play out." If and when it becomes clear there will be no trial, then the pressure on Hochul to step in and make sure some measure of justice is meted out will be intense.

The second consideration is the posture that will be adopted by key Black leaders in New York City. Already, some prominent members of that community have turned against Adams, seeing him as a Trump flunky. However, there are three key Black residents of New York City who have yet to call for Adams' ouster: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Gregory Meeks (both D-NY), and Rev. Al Sharpton. If circumstances leave Hochul in a position where she is under a hundred atmospheres' worth of pressure to cashier Adams, she will speak to that trio and ask them to support her play. If at least two of them agree, Adams' goose is definitely cooked. (Z)

DOGE May Have Penetrated the IRS, SSA

The war that Elon Musk and DOGE are waging against Americans' data privacy has opened two new fronts: the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.

Keep in mind that DOGE operates in secret, and so it is very hard to know exactly how much "progress" Musk & Co. have made in breaching the various systems they want to breach. However, there is general agreement that the IRS' systems have already fallen to Elon and the Muskrats. If so, that would give DOGE a vast amount of information about Americans' assets, tax liabilities, bank accounts, and the like.

Inasmuch as Co-Presidents Musk and Donald Trump do not bother to explain themselves, even when they hold the occasional bizarro Oval Office press conference, it's not entirely clear why the two men want this information. Maybe it's just a case of "the more information we collect, the better." Perhaps they want to use the information to blackmail or punish political enemies. Perhaps they want to alter their own records, so as to reduce their personal tax bills. Or it could be chaos and "breaking things" for the sake of chaos and "breaking things." Any or all of these things are possible.

On the other hand, with the Social Security Administration, things are at least a little bit clearer. Once Musk turned his greedy little eyes on the SSA, interim administrator Michelle King, a nonpolitical appointee with 30 years of public service, resisted as long as she could, and then was compelled to resign. Not unlike the search for a government lawyer who would actually file a dismissal request in the Eric Adams case, it took some time to find someone in the SSA hierarchy willing to be a loyal lackey. The administration finally found that person by searching—wait for it—eX-Twitter, looking for a user who was both an SSA staffer and had written pro-DOGE tweets. The new interim administrator is a fellow named Leland Dudek. In an e-mail announcing his new (if temporary) promotion, Dudek promised "transparency." It is not clear if he's already given Musk the keys to the kingdom, or if that will happen sometime later this week.

Musk's play here is pretty obvious. If he's actually going to cut government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars (say, to allow for tax cuts for billionaires), he has to take a hatchet to either military spending or to spending on social welfare programs. Since cutting the military budget is a non-starter for Republicans, that means social welfare, and the two biggest outlays in that area are Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is currently at work on the latter, and Musk is now working on the former. All of his talk about fraud and inefficiency in Social Security payments (like the ridiculous claim that some people are being paid benefits until their 150th birthday) is clearly meant to give him cover to start hacking away.

Whether Musk is actually able to slash Social Security spending, or Johnson is able to cut spending on Medicare/Medicaid, remain up in the air. There is the possibility of lawsuits, of course, particularly in terms of anything Musk might do with the SSA. Meanwhile, it may eventually occur to someone in a position of power that if the Republicans take an axe to the most popular federal program (Social Security) or the second most popular federal program (Medicare/Medicaid), the GOP will reap the whirlwind. We'll see. (Z)

Today's Crazypants Roundup

There are some machinations by the current administration that are so egregious they merit their own items. But there's also an unbelievable wave of lesser machinations that deserve at least some attention, even if it's not practical to give them the full treatment. We very much look forward to a week when there aren't enough of those under-the-radar stories to justify a roundup like this. But that week is not this week, that is for sure. Here's (some of) the latest:

And there you have it, at least for now. The damnable thing is that we actually had so many stories that might appear in this space that we simply could not include them all. Not only because of time and length constraints, but also because we just can't dump that much stuff on readers all at once. So, look for another crazypants item later this week—maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday. (Z)

Trump May Want to Think Twice Before He Crosses the E.U.

When he is acting in his capacity as a businessman, Donald Trump can bully pretty much everyone he deals with by virtue of being the boss, or else having lots of money and lawyers. When he is acting in his capacity as a politician, at least domestically, he retains the same power because he commands the fanatical loyalty of the base.

Because he meets so little resistance in most areas of his life, Trump might forget there are some circumstances where bullying might not work. We will have an item about the (increasingly shaky) diplomatic relationship between Trump and the leaders of Europe tomorrow. Today, however, it's a briefer item about the risks of slapping tariffs on the European Union.

If Trump does try to hit the E.U. with new duties—which he has certainly promised to do—the impact in the U.S. will be felt very unequally. Here is a list of the 20 U.S. states who rely the most on E.U. products, with: (1) what percentage of the state's total imports come from the E.U.; (2) the total value of the goods the state imports from the E.U.; and (3) whether the state has a Senate race scheduled for 2026:

State Pct. Imports Total Value Senate?
Indiana 46.21% $58,696,886,377 No
North Carolina 45.19% $43,190,299,106 Yes
Rhode Island 38.76% $4,811,129,055 Yes
New Hampshire 34.34% $4,210,174,126 Yes
Maryland 33.38% $16,922,259,371 No
South Carolina 32.49% $22,516,150,106 Yes
Kentucky 31.45% $34,508,188,293 Yes
Pennsylvania 29.92% $48,948,155,420 No
Arkansas 29.26% $2,347,996,891 Yes
New Jersey 26.71% $60,043,736,742 Yes
Wisconsin 26.33% $11,291,219,102 No
Connecticut 25.08% $7,733,489,979 No
Massachusetts 24.53% $14,854,690,324 Yes
Virginia 23.00% $12,617,378,403 Yes
Kansas 22.73% $3,815,663,236 Yes
Florida 22.65% $33,055,394,955 Yes
Georgia 21.87% $38,709,201,060 Yes
Alabama 21.84% $9,572,045,837 Yes
Iowa 21.63% $3,234,515,753 Yes
Ohio 20.46% $20,713,680,097 Yes

Putting a tariff on imports from the E.U. makes their products more expensive for consumers. Economists call it "inflation." As a general rule, consumers (some of whom are also voters), tend not to like this inflation-thingie.

As you can see, there are a lot of red states on that list. There are a lot of purple states. And there are a whole lot of states with Senate elections next year. Meanwhile, the states that do not trade all that much with the E.U. are mostly, as you might guess, the ones that are farthest away from the E.U. In other words, the states that will be least affected by reciprocal tariffs from the Europeans are mostly commie pinko states like California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.

It remains the case that Trump is personally convinced that tariffs are magical, and will fix... stuff? Further, he has promised bigly tariffs, including on the E.U., over and over. However, whenever it comes time for the rubber to hit the road, he wilts, presumably knowing that he'll have to own the consequences. What this means is that we haven't the faintest idea how this will actually play out. (Z)

Resistance Report

A couple of weeks ago, we asked readers if they would like us to add a weekly feature about people fighting the good fight for democracy, at a time when democracy is under attack.

Before we report the results, we will explain that when we ask readers "Should we do [X]?," a baseline result is something like 65% yes, 35% no. Put another way, people who like the idea are considerably more likely to click through and vote, whereas people who dislike the idea are less likely to do so. Consequently, we would only give serious consideration to the idea if support was substantially north of 65%. As it turns out, we need not have concerned ourselves with handicapping the results. Support for the idea was... quite substantial. That is to say, the "ayes" were... 97.6% of the vote. That's really a staggering result. Almost as lopsided as a Russian election.

That means that we need to pick a name for the new feature. We went through the multiple thousands of suggestions, picked the ones that we liked, added some that were clearly popular, and then added a couple ideas of our own. Here are the 25 finalists that this process produced:

If you would care to vote for your favorites, the survey is here.

And as long as we are on the subject, some of the small minority who opposed this idea left messages like this one:

Many, many years ago (during the Obama years), you made at least some attempt to be somewhat down the middle, and fair and balanced. But Trump broke you guys when he was first elected in 2017. It's a damn shame, as I would say you were the first site to use the electoral college maps to show who was winning. Now, everyone does that. I read you less and less, as you have minimal objectivity. I'm sure you don't care that I barely read your site anymore, but there you go.

When Barack Obama and John McCain were facing off against each other in 2008, they were playing by the same rules, and they both adhered to the same basic standards of both propriety and decency. Recall, for example, McCain's famous remarks about how Obama is a decent man, just one who has different ideas. When politics is simply a contest of different ideas and of different strategies, it is very plausible to be "fair and balanced." It is very easy to say, "This candidate has adopted this position, and they are doing so to appeal to this constituency" and "That candidate has made that strategic choice, and that might not work out for this reason."

However, Trumpism is not just about different ideas and different strategies. It's that, too, but it's also about a fundamental lack of respect for half the people in the country (or more), for democracy, and for the rule of law. It's about demagoguery, and corruption, and selfishness. Writing pieces that look askance at those behaviors is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, it's about democracy and decency vs. autocracy and indecency. The rule of law is not partisan. Sometimes people with a (D) are on the wrong side of the law. Eric Adams is a corrupt sleazeball, and the party with which he is registered does not change that. Bob Menendez (D) and Rod Blagojevich (D) are also Democrats we have hounded endlessly in the past for their corruption.

Sometimes people with an (R) are on the right side of the law. Liz Cheney (R) and Adam Kinzinger (R) leap to mind, and we've written about them many times. Or, if you would like a more recent example, Danielle Sassoon. She is not an elected politician, but she is definitely a Republican who called her former boss and idol, Antonin Scalia, "the real deal." We commended her bravery earlier this week—that's not partisan.

When a political faction is quite clearly doing things that are wrong, and lawless, and immoral, then a "neutral" posture isn't actually neutral, it's a posture of passive acquiescence to the wrongdoers. At a certain point, there were not two valid points of view in pre-World War II Germany, or the Civil Rights-era South, or South Africa during apartheid. It is clear to us that we have arrived at that point in 21st century American history, and so we must adjust. Anyone who thinks it's actually possible to give both sides of the story, these days, should take a long look at The Washington Post or The Los Angeles Times. How's that working out for them?

Or, let's put it this way: We would love NOTHING more than to do the site the way we did it back in 2004 or 2008. We do not like writing items like "Today's Crazypants Roundup." Nonetheless, write them we do. And we do so in hope that we can contribute, in some small way, to getting the U.S. political system back on track. If that somehow happens, then we can go back to doing the site we used to do. But at the moment, we are in a political context where that bygone version of Electoral-Vote.com literally cannot exist. At this point in history, Democrats have more respect for the rule of law than Republicans. That's the Trumpers' fault, not ours. But we will do our best, especially in the new feature, to highlight Republicans who when faced with a choice between right and wrong choose right, even if that is not the party line. (V & Z)


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