Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on the Power of Public Opinion)

“Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.” — American journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The View From the Ground (1988)

Quote of the Day (Robert Rubin, on ‘Outsiders Arriving in Washington’)

“I…recommend that outsiders arriving in Washington recognize how much they don't know about government and how different it can be from business. The best way to make a successful transition to the public sector is to do so with humility. The alternative, in many cases, is to have humility thrust upon you."—Former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs co-senior partner Robert Rubin, “The Limits of ‘Running Government Like a Business,'” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18-19, 2025

You can put down at least one person from the private sector who failed to heed Rubin’s warning at the start of the second Trump administration: Elon Musk. 

The Tesla tycoon, having rode roughshod through the executive branch in his unelected, unconfirmed role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a “department” never authorized by Congress, by the way—now finds himself sidelined by the President he backed with all of his financial and social-media power, according to this post on the “Square” blog of the Binance Website.

Worse still, he is telling worried Tesla investors that he’s scaling back his involvement in DOGE to a day or two a week starting sometime in May. And not a moment too soon: his indiscriminate cost-cutting in service to Trump has caused such a backlash that the company’s revenue fell 9%, with auto revenue down 20%, and adjusted income plummeted 39%--increases steeper than forecast, according to Chris Isidore’s report for CNN. And profits have dropped a whopping 71% over the first three months of the year.

With any luck, the damage to Musk’s financial position will be permanent. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely after all this time that Musk, any more than the President he supported so recklessly, has learned the “humility” that Rubin urged.

More tragically, Musk’s barbaric assault on institutions built over a century will result, in one way or another, damage to Americans in virtually every corner of their lives, from Social Security to veterans’ affair.

(The accompanying image of Robert Rubin was taken May 11, 2014, by Ralph Alswang.)

Quote of the Day (Molly Ivins, on the Problem With Political Reporting)

"There was a time when explaining how what the government does affects ‘ordinary people’ was considered political reporting. But reporters somehow became more fixated on the polls, the consultants, the horse race, and the partisan bickering; ordinary people pretty much fell off the screen. . . . The difference between one underassistant secretary and another assistant undersecretary is still turning people's lives upside down; indeed, it can be the difference between life and death." — Columnist Molly Ivins (1944-2007), Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush's America (2005)

Quote of the Day (Michael Gerson, on Politics as a Battlefield)

“Those who see politics only as a method to defeat enemies and advance favored aims have lost sight of something important. We should honor democratic values, such as civility, not only because they make our system function, but because they make our system noble. We should treat our fellow citizens with respect because we share a role in, and responsibility for, an experiment in self-government that remains the last, best hope of Earth.”—Columnist and former Presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson, “The Power of Civility,” The Washington Post, June 7, 2019

(The image accompanying this post was taken when Michael Gerson was part of the George W. Bush administration.)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on ‘The Government of My Country’)

"The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two." — Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)

Quote of the Day (G.M.Trevelyan, on Government ‘In the Hands of Fools and Adventurers’)

 “Government remained in the hands of fools and adventurers, foreigners and fanatics, who between them went near to wrecking the work of the Tudor monarchy.”—George Macaulay Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England (1942)

Leave out “foreigners” (they would!) and change “the Tudor monarchy” to “American democracy,” and you would have a pretty good shorthand description of the current House of Representatives—one that will change forever (for the worse) the associations with “Tea Party” in American history.