Not elected
Remind me, who elected Elon Musk? When exactly did President Donald Trump say during his campaign that Musk would be given access to the private data of nearly every American citizen? Am I going to get junk mail from Tesla?
The takeover of the U.S. Treasury payment system is explained in a Feb. 1 New York Times article, “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System.”
On Feb. 1, a top Treasury official and career civil servant resigned over this. Through the extra-constitutional Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), private citizen Musk can now “delete” any government appropriation by simply refusing to write a check. Congress seems an unnecessary appendage.
Welcome to possible political meddling in every payment of our entire U.S. government. These include “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” U.S. Senate Finance Committee member Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said.
Peter Cimmino, Virginia Beach
Greenland
Since Greenland is a territory of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of NATO, what are the logistics of a Greenland invasion? NATO is bound to defend any member that is attacked. The U.S. is also a member of NATO and as such must defend Greenland. So the U.S. military will need to be split into two parts, one attacking and the other defending? Maybe the MAGA portion of the military could do the attacking and the non-MAGA portion the defending.
Better would be for the U.S. to withdraw from NATO so that they could all be on the attacking side and would not have to be fighting each other. But then who would defend us when another 9/11-type event or if Russia makes good on one of the many threats that they have recently made against us?
And what about Canada? Does that country also have to withdraw from NATO as the 51st state or does it retain NATO membership? We may end up fighting Canada as well, especially if it opposes becoming our 51st state.
It could all be very complicated. What we should do instead is to invade Chukotka, Kamchatka, Magadan and Sakha (Yakuta), i.e. Siberia, the eastern republics of Russia. Good place for military bases, the land mass would be about the same as Greenland, climate about the same, natural resources more accessible (Greenland is covered in ice), and a hardy citizenry that would surely rather be American than Russian.
Lobby your congressman today!
Charles R. Swager, Chesapeake
Not Republican
There seems to be a widespread feeling that we are in the midst of a brazen attempt to transform the United States into an authoritarian fiefdom. Evidence for this claim, it is said, can be found in the many presidential attacks on revered principles and institutions — at this point solely through the issuance of executive orders. A few of them are actually illegal; some are obviously unconstitutional and could never survive judicial review.
Some of President Donald Trump’s executive orders could have the exact opposite effect of what they purport to achieve. I suspect most will in time backfire. This is plutocracy perversely disguised as populism. And to the degree that congressional Republicans, even reluctantly, become complicit in this plot through actual legislation, then they will surely suffer greatly for it at the next election. I believe most Americans will say, “This is not the U.S.”
As the second Trump administration gets underway, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that it’s a case of mistaken identity to refer to this administration as Republican. Is he a conservative? Certainly not. You cannot call someone a conservative if he is intent not on preserving institutions, but instead on replacing them.
Dave Boraks, Onancock
