Janet E Silver

Media Relations & Strategic Communications Leader

[Janet E Silver @silverjes]

This!

[Maria Shriver @mariashriver]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary outbursts of the President of the United States against female journalists... well, actually against journalists in general and journalism. But it feels like he saves his most childlike behavior and irrational language for female reporters, calling them all kinds of names that kids in kindergarten are given times out for. It’s stunning to me to witness such behavior from any leader, any CEO, any person of influence or importance. I’ve never witnessed someone like this raging, this weekend with @meetthepress host @kwelkernbc, just last week in the Oval Office with @cnn’s @kaitlancollins, calling women stupid or piggy, telling them to “smile”, calling them darling, demeaning their credibility. Every good man should denounce this behavior. Every person should be able to stand up for their colleagues and say “No more.”

Imagine this man screaming like this at your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother... would you stand for it? No, you wouldn’t! And neither should any of us. It’s unacceptable and undignified. Period. End of story.

[Janet E Silver @silverjes]

Unbelievable.

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

That is some wild, unhinged stuff from the President.

Welker is a good person and honest journalist and didn’t deserve that but more importantly we have a president who constantly pushes conspiracy theories with zero evidence and can’t respond when politely challenged on that.

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

It is Albanians, not Americans, who are protesting against American corruption.
The US appears to have accepted the corruption of the Trump family, so we Americans have to rely upon the sound anti-corruption sentiments of others.
Truly embarrassing, but thank you, Albania!

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

It’s important to note that this is not a coincidence or just trolling by Trump and his admin. To such people, the Nazi rise and takeover and transformation of the German government is a success story to be emulated, so why not use their language and tactics?

[Edward Luce @EdwardGLuce]

You're a very stupid man.

[Victor Shi @Victorshi2020]

Wow. Tim Snyder with a chilling new term: “Superpower suicide.”

“I’m trying to emphasize choices that are being made to make us weaker. Deliberately alienating allies, not being able to handle adversaries, breaking down the international order.”

[Washington Week with The Atlantic | PBS @washingtonweek]

"[President Trump's] top generals and war planners came to him and said, 'Sir, one of the first things that will happen is the Strait of Hormuz will be closed,'" said @AnnieLinskey.

"Trump believed that the regime would fall first, and that turned out to be wrong."

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Trump completely passed out, reawakened, then passed out again during today's pressor in the Oval Office. 😂🤣👇

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

"I stand by every single word of this report...I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information."

Sarah Fitzpatrick on Kash Patel:
https://t.co/zYbVTk8Kjc

[Maciej Bąk @MaciejBk1]

Nad Dunajem gwizdy podczas przemówienia Orbana po jego porażce. Tłum krzyczy „Ruscy do domu!”. - Brak mi słów. Nareszcie! Po 16 latach, jestem taki szczęśliwy - słyszę od uradowanych Węgrów. @RadioZET_NEWS

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

Trump's three angry Truth Social posts in the last hour suggest he may not be too happy about Melania's statement on Epstein.

She doesn't bother defending Donald. And her reminder that Epstein didn't act alone is a kind of encouragement to look again into what Donald was up to.

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

“Superpowers rarely inflict such swift and straightforwardly embarrassing injury to themselves.” Susan B. Glasser writes about Trump’s humiliating “little excursion” in Iran. https://t.co/rpB2ResoTY

[Lara reads banned books in Florida📚🇺🇸 @MadeInTheUSANJ]

So…… First lady Melania Trump is claiming she does not know and never met Jeffrey Epstein - meanwhile:

[PBS News @NewsHour]

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that the Defense Department is violating his earlier order to restore access to the Pentagon for reporters, a setback in the administration's efforts to impede the work of journalists. https://t.co/OiYNtsI7lE

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling is not mincing words. The former Commanding General of US Army Europe says these generals were purged because they stood up against Pete Hegseth’s push to turn the US military into a Christian nationalist crusade.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner says dozens of chaplains who don’t share Hegseth’s views are being marginalized and excluded from staff meetings.  The chaplain corps exists to serve all service members regardless of faith. That apparently made Green’s position untenable.

The Pope has now weighed in. Hegseth’s prayer for battlefield violence prompted a response from Rome: God does not listen to those who wage war in his name.
Hertling has seen enough. So have the troops.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

President Trump claimed that “nobody,” not a single expert, expected Iran to retaliate against US allies in the region. In reality, many experts had warned Iran would do this – and Iran had repeatedly said it would.

Trump claimed, as he has for more than a decade, that his 2000 book warned that Osama bin Laden was going to attack the World Trade Center and that the authorities needed to take care of him. In reality, the book contained no warnings or advice about bin Laden at all.

Trump claimed that media outlets coordinated with Iran to spread fake videos of a US aircraft carrier on fire and should be charged with "TREASON." But the White House couldn’t provide a single example of a US outlet that spread the fake videos of the carrier; in reality, multiple US outlets debunked them.

Trump claimed a former president had privately told him he wished he’d attacked Iran like Trump did. Aides to all four living former presidents say they haven’t spoken to Trump since the war began.

Fact check on some of his Sunday and Monday statements: https://t.co/DKgPGXAzej

[Janet E Silver @silverjes]

This is not a joke, appliance parts missing from @BoschHomeIn to vent outside and Bosch Canada does not want to send missing parts for outside transition, so customer care writes that the necessary parts are "cosmetic." That is a new one!

[Janet E Silver @silverjes]

For anyone visiting Porto, Portugal, book fully refundable stays with @Caldeireiros 95 by LovelyStay because if weather or other emergencies prevent travel and stay at this location, they will not provide any compassionate compensation.

[Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins]

President Trump argues the country should move on from the Epstein files and lashes out when asked about the survivors' response to the latest release from the Justice Department.