Last week the Trump administration reminded us of the Frank Zappa quote: “Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex,” — not so entertaining as the reality was an ominous leak of “imminent war plans,” as described by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic who was an inadvertent recipient of the shocking security breach, being added by Michael Walz, who implied “conspiracy“ during one interview. Included in a group chat on Signal comprised of US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and seventeen other top officials who discussed upcoming strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, Goldberg disclosed that he had hours of advance notice of the action, not sure that it was authentic initially, only to see the Trump announcement about a “very effective” operation later on March 15. When questioned about the leak by the press, Trump claimed not to “know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.” though National Security Council spokesman Hughes was already on the case reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the Signal chain. If Goldberg had publicized the details in advance, it could have been deadly to our armed forces in the region, but he chose not to do so until the administration started defending its slip-up, and the Fox News talking heads began making excuses for their old colleague, Hegseth, with charges of “fake news,” a “hoax,” and other improbable spins about conspiracies. Democratic lawmakers were outraged by the security breach, with Senator Coons posting on X that “every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime.”  Republican Mike Lawler, a New York representative, said: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels — and certainly not to those without security clearances, including reporters. Period. Safeguards should be put in place to ensure this never happens again.”

In the chat, Trump’s cabinet complained about “bailing out Europe” by attempting to keep international shipping lanes safe from Houthi missiles for passage through the Red Sea, with JD Vance expressing his doubts that his boss is aware of the inconsistency in regard to his messaging to Europe that they have to go their own way, essentially “loathing of European free-loading.” Vance wrote that only 3% of US shipping runs through the Suez Canal, with 40% of European trade doing so, with Hegseth’s complete agreement. Interesting that he fled shortly to Greenland with his wife — things a bit too heated in the Oval Office? Jeffrey Goldberg’s surprise at being included in the chat message led him to believe that he could be “part of a disinformation campaign,” since he had met National Security Advisor Mike Walz only briefly in the past, and with the “administration’s contentious relationship with journalists,” and him personally, it was clear that this was out of whack. “I also could not believe that the National Security Advisor to the President would be so reckless as to include the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior US officials, up to and including the vice president,” said Goldberg. These revelations are surely going to trigger major questions about security within the Trump cabinet and the handling of highly sensitive government information, echoing the scandal brought upon Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign when she was accused of using insecure servers for emails, a major factor in dooming her run for office.

Another shocker is that his team allowed the president to take to the podium before the assembled press, without briefing him on the security breach, raising questions about the care and qualifications of his inner circle, dumbfounding former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the entire episode. Panetta said there was “no question” that the chat was legitimate, referring to the incident as a “serious blunder,” and that a proper conversation should have been held in-person in the White House. “It has to be investigated, and somebody, frankly, needs to get fired. Somebody put that name on a list, and whoever that was deserves to be fired,” he told CNN. Regarding the leak, X users displayed a wide range of emotions and opinions, from disbelief to anger, with search terms encompassing ‘War Plans’ to ‘Hegseth.’ ABC’s late-nighter, Jimmy Kimmel commented on the ineptitude, saying, “Our national security is being guarded by a bunch of dudes he wouldn’t trust to throw your cousin a surprise party. The administration accidentally texted me its war plans. No one on the chain thought to ask, who is JG, what are these initials for? They could have been  leaking secrets to Jeff Goldblum for all they know. And not only did this happen, after it happened, no one thought to tell Trump.”

Typically, Fox News host Jesse Watters was indifferent to the accidental disclosure, likening it to an incident where a family member is inadvertently added to a group chat about “raunchy” bachelor party plans. “Well, that kind of happened today with the Trump administration. He (Goldberg) heard some things today he probably shouldn’t have. Could’ve been a wee bit of a security breach.” Goldberg disputes this, saying he removed himself from the group after realizing it was authentic and contained sensitive national security information, hitting back at the White House’s insistence that “no war plans were discussed” and “no classified material was sent to the thread.” Watters attempted to discredit Goldberg, calling him “not a good reporter” and “one of the biggest hoax artists around.” After Goldberg provided screenshots of the Signal group chat in a report to back up his story, Watters contended, “I’m sure it won’t happen again.” Fox’s Jessica Tarlov was absolutely taken aback by Watter’s nonchalance, standing her ground in calling the debacle a sign of “incompetence and recklessness on a scale unimaginable,” compounding Trump’s drop in ratings on his handling of the economy, inflation, and cost of living. “So they’re not doing this on a SCIF (a sensitive compartmented information facility), they’re doing it on an app that you and I, we all have on our phones, and it’s obviously incredibly reckless. National security risks — I don’t ever wanna hear ‘but her emails’ again,'” she added, referring to Hillary’s email server brouhaha. She called this incident a perfect example of what James Carville was asking of Democrats, to “run out the clock” and see what happens in Trump’s second term, where “folks have jobs that didn’t deserve them.”

Watters wasn’t done with Tarlov, trying to call it an accident, unlike “purposeful leaks from the Democrats” in the past. He began, “Yeah, they accidentally leaked something to the media instead of to the Democrats — ,” which brought Tarlov’s interruption to tell him, “They didn’t leak it; they invited him in.” “At least they didn’t home-brew a server and acid-wash it — ‘but her emails!’ I just did it,” Watters jabbed back. Hillary Clinton for her part, posted on X in response to the whole fiasco, “You have got to be kidding me,” alongside a side-eyed emoji. Secretary of Defense Hegseth, initially denying anything at all was amiss, jumped into the attack on Goldberg after he made his revelations, calling him a discredited journalist who makes a profession of peddling hoaxes, naming ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ or ‘fine people on both sides’ hoax, and the ‘sucker and losers’ hoax as examples of his “peddling garbage.” Donald Trump kept up his criticism by posting on Truth Social a link to the conservative satirical website, The Babylon Bee, and its article “4D Chess: Genius Trump Leaks War Plans to ‘The Atlantic’ Where No One Will Ever See Them.” Elon Musk stepped in to help by posting the link to the article, also writing, “Best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of The Atlantic magazine, because no one ever goes there.”

Pete Hegseth’s post claiming that “nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” brought a pushback from Fox’s Brit Hume who said, “Oh, for God’s sake, the administration has already confirmed the authenticity of the message.” Fox News anchor, John Roberts, praised Goldberg following his devastating exposé, saying, “I would think that there are worse people that you could text your secret plans to, but it appears Goldberg has acted responsibly here in writing this article.” Posts on X, call the operation “sloppy — the only thing worse would have been if they had used Facebook to communicate. We are the laughing stock of the world. Allies sharing intelligence is no more,” and “God, dude, this place is worse than China. They are not allowed to take responsibility for anything. Nothing they do is bad, ever. The media has to adore them, or it’s fake or illegal. This party belongs in prison before it’s too late.” The administration’s whitewashing started from the President on down to White House Press Secretary Leavitt, who said Trump “continues to have the utmost confidence in his national security team, including National Security Advisor Mike Walz,” followed by Speaker Mike Johnson rejecting the possibility that Walz or Hegseth might face disciplinary action. Both Leavitt and Johnson praised those involved saying, “top- level officials were doing their job, doing it well and executing on a plan with precision.” However, Politico is reporting that internal discussions among White House officials are considering ejecting Walz, supposedly with Trump to make a decision within a few days. Still holding your breath?

Satirist Andy Borowitz offered his take on the Signal breach in The Borowitz Report: “Defending his decision to use an insecure messaging app to discuss classified war plans, National Security Advisor Mike Walz said on Wednesday that he chose Signal because it offered more emojis. ‘Those sleaze bags at The Atlantic are acting like using Signal is some kind of scandal,’ Walz said. ‘You want to know a real scandal? The government spent billions of dollars on a secure communications system that has zero emojis.’ Walz said that he refused to use the government’s system when it became clear to him that it lacked even rudimentary emojis like fist, fire, and smiley face. ‘I stand by my decision to use Signal,’ he said. ‘When you’re planning to bomb another country, an emoji is worth a thousand OMGs or LOLs.'”

Back during the nomination process for Trump’s cabinet members, red flags were raised about Hegseth’s ability to handle the job he was offered, with many stories about his alleged abusive behavior, public drunkenness, financial mishandling, and bigotry — all ignored as the Senate Republicans approved him with flying colors. “Soooo, we thinking old Pete was drunk on the job or what?” Texas Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett asked. “It would be funny, if it wasn’t so scary! Maybe we need some DEI (Definitely Earned It) hires to get this together because incompetence is OVERWHELMINGLY problematic.” Spotted: A demonstrator’s sign with a photo of Pete Hegseth sipping whiskey from a bottle, captioned “WHISKEY LEAKS…LIKE WATERGATE BUT WITH MORONS.” Journalist Aaron Rupar writes that history repeats itself, but at increasingly high levels of stupidity: “It’s like Watergate, only in this version Nixon directly mails the tapes to Woodward and Bernstein.” And The Onion headline: ‘Teen Warned Not To Accept Group Chat Invites From National Security Advisors She Doesn’t Know.’ Interestingly enough, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who was included in the Signal chat group was physically in a Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin — US military strategy leaking in real time to someone in Russia. Just imagine that — a face-to-face so Putin doesn’t have to bother with reading a text, unless Witkoff handed the Russian leader his cellphone on which the Signal thread was stored.

A US Department of Defense official explained to CNN’s Natasha Bertrand that “information providing indication or advance warning that the US or its allies are preparing an attack” — which Hegseth shared — is classified Top Secret. “It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court martialed for this. We don’t provide that level of information on unclassified systems, in order to protect the lives and safety of the service members carrying out these strikes. If we did, it would be wholly irresponsible. My most junior analysts know not to do this,” he continued. Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida is sending letters to all the identifiable officials in the ‘Hegseth Disaster Signal Chat’ demanding they retain all messages for any pending litigation and Congressional investigations, saying, “Any deletion of the chat is a willful destruction of evidence.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Hegseth “the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history” and demanded his immediate dismissal. Jeffries wrote, “The so-called Secretary of Defense recklessly and casually disclosed highly sensitive war plans — including the timing of a pending attack, possible strike targets, and the weapons to be used — during an unclassified national security group chat that inexplicably included a reporter. His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives, and likely violated the law.” Jen Rubin wrote on The Contrarian, “Proud of your votes for Hegseth? This is on you as much as Hegseth. You knew he was not remotely qualified,” as she called out Senators Ernst and Tillis. Fun fact: Former US Air National Guardsman Jack Douglas Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison four months ago for doing the same thing Pete Hegseth and his band of idiots did when they leaked war plans to a reporter.

So, discipline, dismissal or firing? Jimmy Kimmel says the excuses don’t stop, with Trump dragging out one of his old favorites — “witchhunt.” “First, he blamed the reporter, and when that didn’t work, he blamed the Signal app, saying, ‘it could be a defective platform, and we’re gonna have to find that out.’ Right, maybe one of the wires came loose and the gasket got cracked,” Kimmel quipped, adding, “Blaming Signal for this is like blaming Tinder for when you get caught cheating on your wife.” He wasn’t through as he tore into the talking heads at Fox and Newsmax as they continued with downplaying the scandal, calling it “the perfect storm of incompetence, inexperience, dishonesty, and hypocrisy from the same people who spent the last 12 years screaming about Hillary’s emails and Hunter’s laptop, while calling Signalgate a ‘non-story.'” Why cover it if it’s a non-story? Taking a final swing by mentioning Trump’s DEI initiatives, Kimmel said, “Thank God they got rid of DEI. Now you can rest assured that the idiots in charge are not chosen for their race or gender. They were chosen purely based on being idiots. I believe that Pete Hegseth wasn’t drunk. I believe he was perfectly sober when he made this idiotic mistake.” His belief that President Trump might not be very happy with his national security and defense picks may lead him to calling them Eric and Don Jr.

Satirist Andy Borowitz provides another followup view of Hegseth: “Millions of Americans have been rattled this week by the bombshell that a former Fox News host might be a liar, reports on Thursday indicate. According to industry insiders, the revelation that a former employee might have knowingly disseminated falsehoods threatens to tarnish the image of the nation’s most trusted news organization. Harland Dorrinson, a crisis management specialist, said Fox News needs to ‘change the narrative’ by reminding Americans of its peerless and longstanding reputation for honesty. ‘Fox needs to remind people that they are the network of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson,’ he said. ‘One bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch.'”

Steve Schmidt on his The Warning blog focuses on a story by Peter Nicholas, Carol E Lee and Megan Shannon concerning the reappearance of former president Joe Biden, offering to people close to him to raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground from the rollbacks of Democratic Party-designed programs by President Trump. In a meeting with new Democratic National Committee chairman, Ken Martin, Biden offered his help to raise the popularity of the party from the 27% favorability of voters to which it has fallen of late, a ranking that is likely to keep falling in its struggle to regain its viability. A report says Donald Trump responded to a possible Biden re-entry into politics by declaring, “I hope so.” Schmidt says Trump is happy. DNC Vice Chair Jan Kleeb responded with, “The Kool Aid tastes delicious. If you were to call any state party chair and ask if they wanted Joe to be a keynote speaker for their annual dinner, the answer would be ‘Yes.’ He is beloved by the party and beloved by voters.” It is said the Bidens are sequestered with their team of gaslighters, all plotting how to make money on the books that are coming as they consult with former administration officials, and a snarky question arises: Biden is signed with CAA in Hollywood, so it is fair to ask who will play him in the dramatic pardon scene at the end of his tenure? Schmidt says Biden’s selfishness is his legacy, and wife Jill’s lust for power, combined with the insatiability of his advisers for more of it, has led America into an abyss — which leads into another tragic legacy: Trump. This is a legacy of catastrophe, and the reality is that Joe Biden will serve the sentence that he imposed on all of us in solitary. Schmidt concludes that the lies and delusions should be put down at last, with a realization that more Biden and Schumer is not the right path — the party is already in the ditch.

Schmidt slams Senator Schumer by mocking his ‘strategy‘: By not going after every single issue, picking only the most important fights, then lying down on the train tracks. He describes Schumer as “the career politician from Brooklyn, a cloistered man from a cloistered club, presiding over our national suicide — sublime, indifferent and capitulant. The view is good from the tracks for Chuck Schumer and his team of fools, who can watch the Trump locomotive run over them again and again and again.” Illinois governor JB Pritzker rejected Schumer’s appeasement, saying, “Trump is not somebody that you can appease. We’ve got to stand up and fight. And by the way, at the state level, I think many of us are. But I think that we’ve got to make sure that in the Senate and the House, that the people who have a platform are standing up.” Schmidt charges the Democratic Senate members with failing the country in an urgent moment, being ill-led, and corrupted by the touches of a thousand lobbyists, who know the lure of self-interest as a primary enticement which is more important than fighting for constituents. “The Senate Democrats are a team that can’t fight because at their head they have a man who can’t stand up. Chuck Schumer is a lay-flat type of man. This moment calls for stand up people with guts, integrity and a plan. JB Pritzker should appreciate two things: Chuck Schumer isn’t changing, and neither is Donald Trump. Let me close by saying something as clearly and directly as I can. Is there anything more grotesque than what Donald Trump is doing? Is there anything more grotesque than Elon Musk stomping about the US government like it is SpaceX? What about the purges, the lawlessness? The answer is yes, there is. It is the surrender to it all. It is the laying down on the tracks when the train is coming. Why can’t Chuck see it? Why can’t Chuck hear it? He is a most preposterous figure. He is a hollow man from a fallen age — the archetype of the 21st century politician so perfectly suited for our fallen moment. The age of silliness has ended, and along with it, any pretenses that menace isn’t real and malice hasn’t seized power in America. It has. The question now is, can we get it back?”

The bugaboo for ‘Real Time’ host Bill Maher is ‘deregulation,’ a repudiation of which he believes is dragging the Democratic Party downwards, suggesting the party is facing the same fate as the Whig Party which collapsed in the 1850s, and a notion they should embrace. He cited the American Redistricting Project’s outlook that Democrats will lose congressional seats in California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Oregon by 2030, with Republicans gaining seats in Texas, Florida, Idaho and Utah. “I mean, it looks like ‘game over.’ And the reason why people are voting with their feet is a lot what your book is about: taxes and regulation,” he told New York Times columnist and ‘Abundance‘ co-author Ezra Klein. “I’ve been screaming about it forever. We’re taxed (in California) more than any other state. People are leaving these kind of states for places where they don’t feel the heavy breath of government on them. It’s not that hard for Democrats to understand this, but they don’t. They seem to be incapable of doing anything about it,” he continued. Klein’s response cited polls revealing the reason people are ditching Blue States is ‘cost of living,’ stressing that if 2030 projections hold, the Red States will ultimately allow Republicans to win presidential elections without the Blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. “They are driving people out, working-class families, out of the states they govern because the cost of living is too high,” Klein says, linking it to regulations and taxes, adding, “But the big problem is they just don’t have enough energy, not a government capable of delivering, and they’ve been treating that as not a real problem.” He went on to praise Texas and cities like Houston and Austin which are booming because of their friendly environment for home and energy development, while noting the irony of the Texas GOP’s opposition to clean energy, yet able to thrive because of deregulation. “We need an Elon Musk who would do to California what he’s doing to the government — in a sane way. I mean, if you have 400,000 regulations and you cannot build a high-speed rail that started in 2008, you need somebody to come in here. Who is this person on the left?” Responding to his question, panelist and Substack writer, Andrew Sullivan said, “The left doesn’t want to deregulate. They just don’t have that instinct to deregulate. They’re gonna have to get over it, or they’re gonna be the Whigs.”

With the Democrats approval rating at 27%, Donald Trump’s star rose to a 44% rating, his highest-ever, prompting him to crow about it on Truth Social — still underwater, however, with 51% of those polled in disapproval. Americans who believe the country is on the right track also hit the 44% mark, with 54% saying we’re on the wrong track, but the Trump border security and immigration issues got a 55% approval. The economy polling has another topsy-turvy result with 54% disapproving of Trump policies, and a 44% approval rating in the NBC poll. Intra-party rifts and frustration consumed the Democrats in Congress as lawmakers approached a possible government shutdown a couple of weeks ago, as Senate Democrats had to decide between a House approved, GOP plan to keep the government afloat — a choice between backing Trump legislation giving him more power, or a shutdown forcing hundreds of thousands of workers to be idled. In the end, ten Senate Democrats sided with the MAGA side of the aisle avoiding a shutdown. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is asking for less animosity, calling for Dems to end the “intramural quarreling” in this “fight for democracy,” as “we fight in the dugout, being absent on the field and the other team scoring runs.” Senator Chris Murphy, a ‘no’ voter, said he gets it why some of his colleagues voted to avoid a shutdown, but this risk aversion led to the party sinking to a historic low in polling. “I understand that had we gone into a shutdown, even for a handful of days, it would have been difficult, but it would have sent a message that the Democratic Party is not going to be bullied by Donald Trump.” In a CNN poll, 57% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents feel that party leaders should focus on stopping the GOP agenda, with 42% wanting cooperation with Republicans.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” though completely shuttering the 45 year-old agency will require an act of Congress. The workforce had already been cut in half, and dozens of grants and contracts canceled, all of which have drawn legal challenges. Former wrestling executive McMahon’s actions will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year department created by President Carter, as surely as Trump’s gutting of funding for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and effective closure of USAID. Not to be overlooked are his and RFK Jr’s attacks on vaccine science, Trump’s attacks on freedom of speech of university students and professors, and state attacks on teaching truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide. Then we have attacks on libraries with an executive order mandating cuts in funding, which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators. The same executive order cut funding for museums, and on the arts, as Trump appointed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center in DC. Robert Reich sees all this as an attack on the American mind, as “tyrants throughout history have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned books. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.” Reich sees Trump as “the frontman in this attack which is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: From JD Vance; and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked Vance’s senatorial campaign and helped convince Trump to select Vance as VP; and from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Reich responded with, “Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power. Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the US is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment equality and justice is eroding America’s social order. In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major ‘shareholders’ select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. Be warned,” advises Reich. Former Obama adviser, Steven Rattner, wrote on X, “The Department of Education provides crucial funding for low-income public schools — eliminating it would result in the loss of 6% of teachers’ jobs nationwide.” He presented a chart based on data from the Center of American Progress on states’ K-12 education funding under Title I, the Ed Department’s main federal program to help low-income students, showing Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Nevada, and Arizona — Trump states — as most reliant on that funding, and the most likely to lose hundreds of teachers, with many other Red States close behind. Rattner says this will likely lead to a devastating domino effect of educational instability in states that need it most.

Conservatives argue that other education department functions, such as administering loans, should be handled instead by the US Department of Treasury, and that civil rights infractions are the Department of Justice’s domain. Trump’s allies also want to expand school choice, which would allow students and families to use public money to select private or religious alternatives to public schools. But who can forget Trump’s primary victory speech in Nevada, when he said, “We won with the young. We won with the old. We won with the highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” This post on Quora captures that moment: “A person who misspells three-letter words, talks in code, cannot finish a single thought in a sentence, acts like a toddler, and only thinks of himself with a strong desire to be worshipped and loved by his followers, will almost literally roll over and have his belly scratched for money by actual billionaires and corporate goons. Although graduating from Penn State, claiming he went to Wharton School of Business, his professors said he was the dumbest person they ever taught — and who could prove otherwise since he forbids his school records to be divulged. Military school instructors called him the dumbest person on the planet. I peg his IQ at about a 75, slightly above my dog’s IQ, which is borderline Special Needs. The scary part is how many MAGA supporters think he is a very smart man — revealing volumes about their own IQs.”

“Trump, his chief of ghouls Stephen Miller, and his czar of white ethnonationalism, Tom Homan, have been making the rounds of calling out ‘rogue’ federal judges who dare to try to apply the law to Trump and his administration,” wrote Elie Mystal in The Nation. The chief executive has called out for the impeachment of US District Judge James E Boasberg, who ordered Trump to halt the deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador — which Trump ignored. “That SEEMED to trigger Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, prompting him to pull out the weapon most preferred by institutionalists to fight the fascist takeover of the government: the sternly worded letter,” reports Mystal. Roberts issued a statement which read, in full: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” Mystal says people who don’t know any better are calling this a rare “rebuke” of the sitting president from the Chief Justice. “I urge people to not fall for the ‘Okiedoke,’ and to understand Robert’s statement for what it is: meaningless drivel from a man trying to protect his own stature instead of trying to protect the country from a tyrant.” Robert’s letter telling Trump that impeachment is not an ‘appropriate response’ to a judicial disagreement is like me telling Trump that he can’t jump off his roof and fly. It’s not a ‘rebuke’ to tell somebody they shouldn’t do what they physically can’t do anyway. Impeachment of federal judges follows the same rules as the impeachment of a president, a process familiar to Trump, where the House brings impeachment charges, and the Senate presides over a trial which requires a two-thirds vote for conviction. Mystal gets a dig in, when he says, “Trump controls the House, but he doesn’t control two-thirds of the Senate. Judge Boasberg is not Palestinian, so I don’t think Chuck Schumer will give Trump the extra votes he needs.”

“Justice Roberts knows all that. His statement is meaningless because it tells Trump not to do something he already can’t do. Roberts is sprinting to the head of the parade already in motion, just to look like he’s leading it,” says Mystal. Looking at what Roberts didn’t say, Mystal points out that Trump is in direct violation of Boasberg’s order, but Roberts avoided that, and instead of an admonishment, Roberts only invoked the ‘normal appellate review process,’ NOT saying Trump should litigate disagreements with the judge, but saying Trump should feel free to ignore lower-court orders until the Supreme Court has a chance to weigh in — essentially telling Trump what he wants to hear. Roberts is trying to maintain the appearance of power in the face of a president who has shown no inclination to respect it, with the Chief Justice desperately trying sound as if he’s in control, to avoid a judicial confrontation with Trump. Mystal calls it a delicate game, looking back in history to Chief Justice John Marshall’s attempt to maintain an appearance of judicial supremacy against President Thomas Jefferson — the Marbury v. Madison case in 1803. The case dealt with the seating of commissioners appointed by President Adams, seats Jefferson didn’t wish to fill, so a lawsuit was initiated by William Marbury. Marshall knew Jefferson was never going to fill those positions, and all the court orders in the world wouldn’t have mattered a whit to Jefferson, so Marshall deferred to the president, saying it was wrong not to seat the commissioners, but it didn’t matter anyway because the entire congressional law itself was unconstitutional. Mystal concludes, “He was bending the knee.” Turn down the echo machine!

A phone call between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war in Ukraine has comedian Jimmy Fallon casting a jaundiced eye, saying, “Both sides said the call went well, which makes sense because they’re both on the same side. Russia actually described the call as historic and epic, and nothing makes me feel safe like a happy Russia.” Despite the hype, the New York Times reported that the call accomplished nearly nothing, with Fallon joking, “The White House said Putin agreed to a partial ceasefire — at least they think he did. It was tough to hear on the phone with Elon’s kids playing tag in the background.”

Speaking of happy — the US has dropped to its lowest-ever ranking on the World Happiness Report conducted by Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Falling down one spot from last year, to 24th, and from the nation’s highest ranking of 11th place in 2012, rankings are determined from answers people give when asked to rate their own lives. Finland has held the top spot for eight years, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands in the top five; Costa Rica and Mexico entered the top ten for the first time, ranking sixth and tenth place, respectively. Brent Hartinger and Michael Jensen-Brent in the Washington Post say that people don’t want to go to parties anymore — along with other signs the world is coming to an end. They say Americans‘ current obsession with social media and “therapy culture” isn’t going to end well, as people who do show up at social gatherings are sitting to one side staring at their phones assuring that things rarely take off. The Wall Street Journal adds that it’s now socially acceptable — even something brag about — to cancel your plans with other people at the last second. Both publications blame these new social mores on America’s political polarization — who wants to socialize with people on ‘the other side’ anyway? They say it’s the lingering after-effects of COVID — but please, that’s not it at all; why are both newspapers pretending not to see what’s really going on? Smartphones and social media! Why bother interacting with actual human beings when you can have all your social needs met by living online? Teachers will tell us that kids are literally addicted to their phones, accustomed to the dopamine hits from social media that bring on actual symptoms of withdrawal when separated from their phones. The greater problem is that social media isn’t really real; it’s the illusion of intimacy. It gives people what we want, to keep us forever engaged and looking at ads — but not what we need. It’s also important to sometimes be bored. And remember, as great as cat videos are, actual cats are always better.

Stephen Colbert who recently mocked Democrats and their hand-held protest signs displayed at Trump’s State-of-the-Trump speech at the joint session of Congress, has gained a bit traction with his own paddle-sign that read “Try Doing Something.” Protests against the administration’s policies are becoming more common, larger in number and in participants, with representatives holding town halls in their districts being forced to flee because of voter anger — advisers are saying, “just skip this tradition!” One person who has been persistent in punching at Trump with Tweets for years, but magnifying her activity since last October, is Natasha Rothwell, who starred as Belinda in the TV series, ‘The White Lotus.’ Every single day she posts a message reminding the president in some form saying, “Donald Trump, you are trash!” Natasha may include retweets, quotes, likes, and different views, one variant reading, “You have no value or use and you spend your days lying around doing nothing…cuz u trash.” Not content to pick on just Donny, her header on X has ‘TRASH‘ above headshots of the six conservative Supreme Court Justices, with arrows pointing appropriately to insure that they feel the burn.

Feeling the burn from last week’s vote on the continuing resolution to fund the government until September, is Senator Chuck Schumer who succumbed to the demands of blackmail as John Stoehr of Editorial Board posted on the blog. Schumer took to the floor and said that he would vote with MAGA to pass the resolution, with Stoehr asking, “What is Schumer getting in return?” He isn’t implying that corruption is an issue, only that this is politics and the Senator must be trading for something, right? The resolution allows Trump and Musk to continue dismantling the government, with Everett B Kelly of the American Federation of Government Employees saying, “A widespread government shutdown has been underway since January 20 and will continue to spread whether Senators vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on HR 1968.” Kelly, leader of the country’s largest public employee union, says HR 1968 sets in stone the administration’s crime spree, decimating agencies without due process, cutting off funding that has already been appropriated and signed into law, and with it the administration “will dramatically expand its termination of federal workers and double down on its campaign to make federal agencies fail, because there will be nothing left” to stop them. He believes it robs the constitutional authority of Congress, with the White House having said that even if the bill passes, it will ‘impound‘ that money — which is to say, ‘steal it’ — if it pays for things that Trump does not like. What it boils down to for Democrats who voted for it, is that Trump will become a criminal president, or if they voted against it, Trump will become a criminal president. Heads…I win, tails…you lose. Not a choice, blackmail, as Stoehr said.

Senator Schumer explained to Chris Hayes in an interview, that he made his choice to vote for the resolution, because the alternative was much worse by allowing a government shutdown. Trump would have favored a shutdown, allowing him to redefine what counts as ‘essential services,’ then cutting the government even closer to the bone. Stoehr saw Schumer’s premise, yet he didn’t explain why the House MAGAs voted to keep the money flowing if co-presidents Musk and Trump preferred a shutdown — and why did Schumer deceive us earlier into thinking he might lead a resistance demanding a one-month extension? Stoehr asks agains, “What are Democrats getting in return?” He answers his own question — “nothing.” Chris Hayes posted that “the institutional Democratic Party is guided by an almost pathological level of conflict-avoidance in almost every direction. ‘What can we do to make the least number of people mad?’ is just a bankrupt way to operate.” Stoehr concludes the Dems pathology is deeper than ‘conflict-avoidance’ — only the fear of being held accountable by someone somewhere “who requires the Democrats to take responsibility for the bad choices made by Republicans. Its’ a deep-seated sense of obligation that the Democrats are the only adults in the room, and if they don’t act like adults, things will get much worse than they are. Schumer believes in his bones that the Democrats must save the Republicans from themselves, and thus save the country from the Republicans, as reflected in his comments about a possible shutdown.”

Schumer is quoted as saying, “There’s no exit ramp. Anyone who wants the shutdown, I have asked: ‘Well, how do we get out of it?’ Guess who it’s up to — Trump, Musk, DOGE, all bad choices. I respect people who don’t want to vote for the CR. It’s awful. But with the alternative being a government shutdown, that’s even worse.” To this, Stoehr replies, “Well, yes! It is up to Trump! And if he does to the government after a shutdown what he’s already doing to it before a shutdown, then whatever happens is on him and him alone. Lots of good people are going to suffer, because the administration is evil. But the Senate Democrats cannot save them, nor should they try, because they cannot hold accountable the man responsible for their suffering if they themselves are complicit in it.” Stoehr feels that institutional Democrat Schumer is taking cues from the mainstream media, not “plucky indie newsletters,” and also the party’s donors who are concentrated in the northeast. “They want the Dems to bargain with the Republicans, not necessarily fight them, as serious combat would probably jeopardize their interests,” he discerns. “In times of crisis the mainstream media understands subconsciously that the Republicans are hopeless but that Democrats are not. They assume that Democrats will be the adults in the room, and because institutional Democrats interpret this assumption as something mainstream voters want, they deliver. Even if it means getting nothing in return.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi, in a statement regarding handling of the funding vote, took a shot at an unnamed Schumer, saying, “Democratic senators should listen to the women. Appropriations leaders Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray have eloquently presented the case that we must have a better choice: a four-week funding extension to keep government open and negotiate a bipartisan agreement. America has experienced a Trump shutdown before — but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For the People.” She goes on to praise House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his leadership in rejecting a false choice, and her colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus for their “overwhelming vote against this bill.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “There is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal. And not just about progressive Democrats — this is across the board — the entire party. I cannot underscore enough how incorrect that is. There are members of Congress who have won Trump-held districts in some of the most difficult territory in the United States, who walked the plank and took immeasurable risks in order to defend the American people, in order to defend Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.” Representative Greg Casar, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus chimed in, saying, “The GOP bill is specifically designed to allow Trump and Musk to continue plundering the taxpayers to enrich themselves.”

In the end, Senators and Representatives voted to “sell our country out to Donald Trump and Elon Musk for mass firings, cuts to vital services, and tax breaks for the rich,” according to the Common Cause website. Elected leaders are sticking to the same passive, by-the-book strategies that empowered people like Trump and Musk in the first place, while abandoning our public services and our values at the altar of political convenience. Stirring up a hornet’s nest of dissatisfied constituents, Senator Schumer was met with a barrage of demands for his resignation, calls which have only escalated. Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said, “Schumer has lost the confidence of a critical mass of well-meaning people around the country. He must step down from his leadership role in the Senate now, so a sufficiently determined resistance to the disastrous Trump-Musk agenda can be allowed to rise up and act before it’s too late.” Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid said in a blog post, that Schumer must resign, and adding with perspicuity, “Let’s be clear: MAGAs control the House, the Senate, and the White House. The Democratic Party is not in its strongest position, and every single day Trump and Musk are working to gut democracy, attack working families, and consolidate power. And yet, when given the opportunity to use the one piece of leverage Democrats have — forcing Republicans to own the government shutdown — Schumer is folding like a cardboard box in a rainstorm. This isn’t just betrayal. It’s utter incompetence. We don’t need more politicians holding tiny signs and coordinating outfits while Trump consolidates power and enables fascism. We need leadership with the courage to fight injustice and hold the line when it matters.”

Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Sunrise Movement, a youth-led, climate-focused organization, declared that, “Today was a spectacular display of cowardice from Senator Schumer. This morning, Schumer had arrested, 11 young protestors in his office rather than look them in the eye. This afternoon, he gave Elon Musk the keys to the government. Trump’s and Musk are hurtling our country toward disaster. They are gutting the educational system, enabling oil billionaires to burn the planet, and destroying vital government programs that millions rely on. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer sits on the sidelines. The budget is one of the only pieces of leverage Democrats have, and Schumer just gave it away. That’s incredibly reckless. Chuck Schumer needs to step aside. Our democracy and our climate and our families can’t afford even another month of this b.s.” Democratic strategist, Waleed Shahid, commented, “This wasn’t about whether Democrats were willing to impose a cost on their opponents for governing through blackmail. Instead, Schumer made the kind of move that tells Republicans they can keep pushing.” Justice Democrats, a progressive group that helped Ocasio-Cortez upset a top House Democrat in a 2018 primary, said, “Corporate Democratic leadership is all talk and no fight. Gutless, spineless, and utterly unqualified to lead.” Schumer stepping down from his leadership isn’t enough for many, with many critics encouraging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Dan Goldman to challenge the Senator in the 2028 primary.

Domestic beer brewers should take a page from Canada’s oldest brewery, which has announced a ‘Presidential Pack’ of Moosehead beer — 1,461 cans of its Canadian lager, intended to last the course of President Trump’s entire second term, one beer for every day of that term. The pack retails for $3,490 CAD and is sold in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario provinces. Leaning into the ongoing trade war with the USA, Karen Grigg, director of marketing said in a press release, “If the start of 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that it will take determination to weather four years of political uncertainty — and what better way to make it through each day than with a truly Canadian beer.” Trevor Grant, VP of Sales and Marketing said the idea was talked about for a few weeks as the challenges with tariffs and the Trump administration dragged on, and, “Obviously, it’s a bit of a difficult situation, so we’re trying to maybe have a little bit of fun with it, as Canadian shoppers look for locally made products now more than ever.” Many of the big US companies that sell in Canada, like Anheuser-Busch, manufacture American brands within Canada, such as Bud Light, and thus aren’t affected by tariffs — or good taste.

Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has remained relatively low-key as the measles outbreak worsens, with cases popping up in even more states across the country. Several weeks ago, Kennedy couldn’t get excited about the first death in Texas, saying, “It is not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year,” ignoring the fact that outbreaks are considered rare, with measles considered eliminated in the US in 2020. Kennedy has been slammed for writing previously that measles are not deadly and that outbreaks had been “fabricated” to push people toward “unnecessary and risky” vaccines. His prominence in the anti-vax community has been credited with leading to an increase in the number of parents who won’t follow the science, now refusing to vaccinate their children. What our children have now learned from Kennedy and President Trump is that, ‘science is stupid.’ Fran Lebowitz, in her short essay entitled ‘Science,’ writes, “Legend has it that the atom was split when a bunch of scientists working late decided to order in a pizza. Indeed a terrifying story and one made all the more chilling when one learns that a number of their colleagues smarting from the snub of being excluded from this impromptu meal spitefully repaired to an all-night diner and invented polyester.” Be aware that Trump and Kennedy may designate measles as ‘Freedom Freckles.’

In defense of his bosom buddy and co-president, Elon, Donald Trump came to the Tesla mogul’s aid after an announced boycott against the firm’s vehicles, in addition to protester’s vandalizing dealership showrooms or individually owned cars and trucks, not to mention plunging stock prices. The orange co-president posted, “To Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans, Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for. I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???” Musk responded with, “Thank you, President @realDonaldTrump!” So be careful out there — those of us who decide against buying a Tesla because we dislike Musk are doing so illegally, and perhaps Donny should know, being a convicted felon himself as many pointed out. Let’s not forget that Trump once called for a boycott of Goodyear tires because of their dress code prohibiting political attire, i.e., MAGA baseball caps. Trump’s promotion of a specific brand and whining about ‘illegal‘ is silly and inappropriate for a president’s concern. Of course, while this is going on, the two co-perpetrators are ruining American’s lives, by tanking the economy, threatening long-time allies around the world, and compelling them to boycott all American products. No worries, though — Trump, a once fierce critic of electric vehicles (drill, drill, drill!) is buying a Tesla from the world’s wealthiest man. Oh! And, so is Sean Hannity! Lunatics all — to include those who voted for this.

Tesla sales boycotts are only part of the picture, as some Tesla owners are selling, or considering selling, their vehicles as the backlash against Musk and DOGE grows, even though they may take a serious financial hit as prices plummet according to dealership website CarGurus. Singer Cheryl Crow announced she is selling her Tesla, then donating the proceeds to NPR as a protest against Elon. Investor Joanne Wilson told Business Insider she was ditching her Model S, floating the idea of letting members of the public smash it with hammers. Real estate developer, Scott Oran decided to sell his Tesla out of “embarrassment,” and a concern over vandalism, and to beat the rush of other sellers to the marketplace with the brand which is most common for EVs. Oran feels that Musk has irrevocably damaged the Tesla brand, with the maker’s stock drop on a recent Monday of 15% — a $29 billion reduction to Musk’s worth in just one day. Not to fret over Musk’s loss — after Trump’s announced Tesla acquisition, reports emerged that Elon was considering a $100 million donation to a super PAC associated with, and controlled by, the president.

That donation probably went a long way into converting the White House south lawn into a Tesla showroom for Trump’s big auto purchase, with five vehicles displayed for his perusal before his decision to spring for a deep red Tesla Model S, valued at almost $80,000, for use by his staff since he doesn’t drive any more. It’s unclear whether or not Pennsylvania Avenue was lined with plastic tube men, or air dancers, to attract the locals to the big sale. Trump praised Tesla’s quality and Musk’s dedication during the White House auto sale, and a photographer got a shot of the script and Tesla price list given the president by Musk to make a sales pitch to the masses. It must have been a convincing sales pitch, because Trump also committed to gifting a Tesla Cybertruck to his granddaughter, Kai — what’s another $80 grand? According to the price list, “Teslas can be purchased as low as $299/month or $35K.” And who knows? Trump may qualify for tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act for purchasers of electric vehicles. That’s dependent upon whether or not the Internal Revenue Service is still operating by next year’s tax filing — no comment from Musk, as he told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow that he’s been running his businesses “with great difficulty” since spending his time with DOGE. Time for that chainsaw to be shelved, Elon? If Trump is drawing his $400K standard presidential salary, he won’t qualify for the tax incentive, but if he’s only drawing his one-dollar annual salary as in his first assault on the presidency — he’s not saying…what do you think? — he might qualify for the EV credit.

So far, Trump has not commented on his 2023 post that electric car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote that the car promo was, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly below the office of the presidency,” and we might add, so is most of the other junky crapola Trump and his grifting Crime Family push constantly. If any other government official in the executive branch had done a similar promotion, they would have been in clear violation of the regulation prohibiting such endorsements; but Trump and his hillbilly VP are exempt, where norms are usually respected as the primary lever for holding the line. The Don has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his Tesla push is not out of the ordinary for him, and in reality, it delights him that he has such impunity, says Lora Kelly in her The Atlantic Daily commentary.

On his show, Jimmy Kimmel expressed dismay at the changing reputation of Tesla recently, recounting how owners are attempting “to disguise their vehicles to avoid confrontations and vandalism.” He showed clips of Teslas minus the logos, which now sport Mazda, Audi, or Subaru identification. “People are even trying to disguise their Cybertrucks. That’s like trying to pass off Chewbacca for a chihuahua. It doesn’t seem right,” he said. “Maybe this is all a ruse. Elon somehow tricked MAGA into driving electric cars. Maybe he really is a genius,” he speculated. The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert shared that recently someone stole the wheels off of every single Tesla in a Texas parking lot. “Whoever did it, I do not condone this. But I do appreciate your tireless efforts,” he said as he accepted a fake Nobel Prize for Puns. “Thank you so much!” He continued, “I want to be clear. I do not condone violence or vandalism of any kind. That is a deeply held belief of mine that comes from the bottom of my CBS legal department.” He pointed to a trend where Cybertrucks are being covered in garbage, theorizing, “To be fair, that might not be vandalism. That might just be a simple mistake because they do look a lot like a dumpster.”

PLAYING POSSUM, FULL OF IT, RUBY, COOKOUT POTATO SALAD

James Carville seems to have adopted the Napoleon Bonaparte quote: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” The influential Democratic Party strategist who came to prominence in the Bill Clinton years recently predicted that the Trump White House will “collapse” in less than a month as his approval ratings continue to decline with his multitude of unpopular executive orders, and slashing of governmental agencies by firing thousands — risking an economic nosedive. His advice to his party is to simply sit back and watch it all come down: “Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing,” he predicted in an interview with Dan Abrams of Mediaite. “We’re in the midst of a collapse. This is the lowest approval — not even close — that any president has ever had at a comparable time. It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks. Just lay back.” Later, he told Sean Hannity on Fox News that he sees Democrats up by 13 points in the congressional generic, with Trump at the lowest approval of any president, so early in the game, in American history. He challenged Hannity by his query, “So, your viewers are getting one view. And I’m reading another view. One of us is right and one of us is wrong. It’s that simple. Have they got fact checkers at Fox?” Trump came to his defense on Truth Social with the claim that he has “the best polling numbers” in his history. “The Democrats, run by broken down losers like James Carville, who’s weak of mind and body, are going crazy, and just don’t know what to do. They have lost their confidence and spirit — they have lost their minds!” he fired back. Carville maintains that the House Democrats know exactly what they are doing because they see what is going to happen, in spite of the concern in the party that its defenses are lacking. Trump’s first moves in office instigated from constituents, 1,600 phone calls a minute to the Senate, complaining that more needed to be done. Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts told Axios that the record number of calls were from “people disgusted with what’s going on, and they want us to fight back.”

Carville suggested to Democratic politicians that they should not get in the way of protesters around the country who are speaking out against co-presidents Trump and Musk, or as rural America says, “‘Don’t just stand there. Do nothing.’ Let this germinate. In the immortal words of Dalton in ‘Road House,’ ‘be nice until it’s time not to be nice.’ And that time is coming shortly.” Carville disagrees with moderates who say people are overreacting to Trump, warning, “No one is overreacting. We’re living in real time in a catastrophe.” One prominent date he sees is the November 5 election in Virginia, where Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, a leading Trump supporter, will be dealing with a large and angry electorate made up of thousands of fired federal employees. Carvile asks, “Do you think they’re gonna vote? I think they’re gonna vote. I think I know which way they’re gonna vote, and they’re gonna vote heavily.”

Robert Reich says people are asking him, “Where’s the Democratic Party?” He says that at a time when America needs a strong, bold, courageous opposition, the party’s silence is deafening, but goes on to say, “But with due respect to my old friend James Carville who is telling Democrats to ‘roll over and play dead,’ he’s full of it. Trump is killing our country, reducing the US government to rubble, and destroying our relationships with our allies. Putin may love it, but it’s a catastrophe four us and much of the rest of the world. Democrats have been rolling over and playing dead too long. That’s one reason the nation is in the trouble we’re in. My simple advice to congressional Democrats: Wake the hell up!” He goes on to say that if the party had only “had the guts years ago to condemn big money in politics, fight corporate welfare, and unrig a market that’s been rigged in favor of big corporations and the rich, Trump’s absurd bogeymen (the deep state, immigrants, socialists, trans people, diversity-equity-inclusion) wouldn’t have stood a chance.” His comments preceded the joint congressional session State-of-Trump speech, where he correctly predicted the “Republican lawmakers who have turned over their brains and intestines” would applaud his stream of lies. His wish that the Democrats would boycott the whole event en masse did not come to pass and his suggestion that they would perhaps just sit on their hands and applaud a few insipid Trump utterances was close to what we saw. There were many empty seats, with some making an exit at various times during the ninety-nine minute ordeal. Representative Al Green had to be escorted from the gathering when he heckled Trump as he pointed his cane toward the president for spewing lies, and many of those remaining had brought signs which they held up in response to his insults and rambling lies.

The small, hand-held signs only brought derision and chuckles from the Republican faction, and a political cartoon printed in some newspapers emphasized the futility of the protest in showing a chainsaw wielding Elon Musk laying waste to government buildings as the Democratic donkey mascot sat nearby in a chair holding up a sign that read, “Tsk, tsk.” Andy Borowitz satirized the event with his own account: “Donald J Trump watched Elon Musk’s historic address to Congress Tuesday night from the last row of the House chamber. Striking a menacing tone, Musk threatened to mount lavishly funded primary campaigns against congressional Republicans unless they gave him a standing ovation after every line of his speech. Trump’s view of the speech was partially obstructed by Robert F Kennedy, Jr, who sat in the second-to-last row and brought a dismembered whale’s head as his plus-one guest.” With a bit more accuracy, Borowitz said, “In what is being called a historic performance, on Tuesday night Donald J Trump set a new world record for delivering the longest speech that did not include a single fact. Congressional Republicans were awestruck by their leader’s ability, at the age of 78, to give such a sustained fact-free oration. House Speaker Mike Johnson said, ‘He’s still got it.’ Republicans contrasted Trump’s address favorably with the Democratic response of Senator Elissa Slotkin, who spoke only briefly but whose remarks were riddled with facts.” It must be noted that Elon was actually present, all spruced up in a fitted suit and tie, after ditching the blazer/t-shirt/baseball cap/dark sunglasses attire which is his Oval Office outfit — much the same as Zelensky’s. Stephen Colbert offered his thoughts on the Oval Office’s strict dress code of decorum, saying, “You must either look like a businessman or a guy trying to hand you a flyer outside of a strip club.”

In his speech, Trump again spoke about trying to regain ownership of the Panama Canal, sure to cause diplomatic shockwaves, as he singled out Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the one “to blame if anything goes wrong,” — resulting in a wide-eyed and shocked reaction from Rubio, and a classic forever meme for denizens of social media sites. Poor ‘Little Marco’ was probably still in a state of shock from being present at the Trump-Vance-Zelensky brawl in the Oval Office a few days before. Rubio — who according to Saturday Night Live, will now be known as ‘Marc Ruby’ since Trump signed his English-only language executive order — posted on X that the president’s speech was “inspiring” and “momentous,” with Trump’s “clear mandate from the American people to renew the American Dream.” Ruby won his Senate confirmation 99 to 0, and many hoped that his maturity and government experience would serve him well in holding some sway over Bully Trump, but that is obviously not to be. Ominously, the American asset management company, BlackRock has volunteered to buy two ports at either end of the Panama Canal from their current Hong Kong-based ownership in order to lessen Chinese influence over the crucial international waterway. BlackRock and other investors will spend $22.8 billion to buy the ports of Balboa and Cristobal — a deal which is now only an ‘agreement in principal.’

Response by Senator Bernie Sanders to the joint session speech charges Trump with creating a parallel universe with “a set of ideas that either have no basis in reality, or are nowhere near the most important concerns of the American people” — a pivotal moment in our country’s history. He says Trump’s tactic is the BIG LIE, many of which were heard during the Tuesday night blathering, and these grossly false lies are repeated over and over again, with complicity of right-wing social media sites blasting them out until people accept it as truth. Sanders points to the purpose of these lies, not only to push a right-wing agenda, but to deflect attention away from those important issues facing the country — issues Trump and his billionaire friends don’t wish to address, otherwise there is no financial benefit to them. He emphasized the issues Trump ignored in his record-setting speech: About how will working people support families in these tough times, made tougher by the administration; the reality of the 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck; the broken, dysfunctional, expensive health care system, and the non-affordabilty of prescription drugs; the major housing crisis and homelessness;  the massive income and wealth inequality with three 3 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom half of our society; the corrupt campaign finance system that allows billionaires to buy elections; the life expectancy of the poor compared to the wealthy; and the planetary crisis of climate change. Trump urged Congress to pass his “big beautiful budget,” leaving out ugliness of the $880 billion that would come from Medicaid, leaving 36 million Americans in peril. But what the hey — spaceship ownership is such an important factor nowadays, as well! An occasional fireworks display over the Caribbean is a sight to behold!

On his nightly show, Stephen Colbert mocked Trump’s remarks, but he was most critical of the Democrats, saying, “But don’t you worry. The Democrats came ready to fight back with their little paddles. That is how you save democracy. By quietly dissenting…or bidding on an antique tea set, it was hard to tell what was going on. In fact, I made my own sign.” Impassively, he held up a sign reading: “Try doing something.” Before Trump’s address, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had demanded that Democrats sit meekly and do nothing during the MAGASpeech, a demand that was not respected by several individuals. Consequently, a dozen or so disruptors were called into a ‘come to Jesus meeting’ on Thursday following the address, to be helped to “understand why their strategy is a bad idea,” which brought forth the comment that “if Jeffries has any good ideas, we’d love to hear them,” accompanied by the snarky, “But he’s been busy on a tour to sell his children’s book, “The ABCs of Democracy.” It seems incredibly misguided to scold Congressional Democrats for taking a stand against an autocrat who the party has characterized as a fascist authoritarian — a puny stand though it may be. Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation: “I asked Democrats to boycott Trump’s speech to Congress. They did not. Instead, they brought little placards emblazoned with political messages, as if they were in a silent auction for fascism. We live in hell.” Senator John Fetterman on X, characterized the protests as a “sad cavalcade of self-owns and unhinged petulance. It only makes Trump look more presidential and restrained.”

Elie Mystal, besides being disgusted with Democrats for showing up at the joint session, was further enraged that Representative Al Green was censured by Congress for disrupting Trump’s speech “to a joint session of sycophants and co-conspirators”; and, though many Democrats protested and voted against the procedure punishing Green, Mystal posted a list of the ten Democrats who voted with the MAGAts who he hopes will never be able to raise a dollar from other Democrats, ever again: Ami Bera (D-CA), Ed Case (D-HI), Jim Costa (D-CA), Laura Gillen (D-NY), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Jim Himes (D-CT), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), and Tom Suozzi (D-NY). He also decried Elissa Slotkin’s “tepid Democratic response to Trump’s multi-hour Netflix series address to Congress, during which she managed to praise notable Democratic hero, Ronald Reagan.” Mystal recounts her follow-up interview with Tim Alberta of The Atlantic, “where she outlined her priorities. Her answers were the usual thin gruel that passes for Democratic Party talking points, but one line really stood out to me. She said, ‘It doesn’t win elections to speak to just the base of the party…if it did, Kamala Harris would be president.’ First of all, I’m really gonna need Becky with the 80% White Congressional district to keep Kamala Harris’s name out of her mouth. It’s easy to slag off the Democratic ‘base,’ which has been Black people for Slotkin’s entire life, when nobody is inviting you or your potato salad to the cookout anyway. It’s a little harder when you are running to represent all of America, not just the White folks who think they should own the place.”

Co-president Elon Musk is watching his Tesla vehicle empire skid downward, almost as fast as his pyrotechnics rocket company, though not quite as flashy. Sales are dropping dramatically worldwide, and dealerships are experiencing violent actions from an angry anti-Musk crowd, not to mention individual car and truck owners having their vehicles damaged and getting new paint treatments, or protest stickers applied surreptitiously. A post on Quora shares a definition of the portmanteau word, ‘DePlorean,’ combining ‘deplorable’ and ‘DeLorean,’ which has been applied to Tesla’s Cybertruck. The early 80s DeLorean sports car had a brushed aluminum exterior similar to the C-Truck, and carried similar social connotations of audacity, impracticality, and irritating behavior. While the DeLorean, which originally sold for $12,000 is now a prized collector’s item, the Cybertruck at $100,240 is an overpriced, poorly constructed symbol of excess, greed and stupidity, and much uglier when seen up close than online photos reveal. A UK-based group, ‘Everyone Hates Elon,’ recently unveiled an advertisement for a ‘Swasticar,’ which shows Musk standing in one of his cars while giving the Nazi salute, with printed copy proclaiming the vehicle “goes from zero to 1939 in three seconds.” The bus stop posted image has gone viral, and the group encourages supporters to spread it far and wide, saying, “Not happy with fueling the far-right in the USA, Elon Musk is now doing the same in Europe. We can’t let the richest man in the world poison our politics.” A GoFundMe page has been set up to raise cash to plaster the ‘Swasticar’ ad in more public places, as well as for production of small stickers reading “Don’t buy a Swasticar,” giving emphasis to their motto: “Pissing off Elon Musk, one small action at a time.”

In the UK, Musk has supported the far-right, anti-immigrant Reform Party, and attacked the Labour government by spreading “lies and misinformation” about the criminality of immigrants according to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. A few weeks back, Musk expressed support for Germany’s Alternative for Germany party, which gained support in their losing election campaign, even though it has been classified as a suspected extremist group by Germany’s intelligence service. Two left-wing activist groups — UK’s Led by Donkeys, and Germany’s Center for Political Beauty, claimed responsibility after they beamed an image of Elon Musk making the Nazi salute onto Tesla’s factory in Berlin, accompanied by the words “Heil Tesla.” A jeering crowd who erupted at the mention of Musk’s name on the ‘Late Show‘ caused Stephen Colbert to comment, “That is the sound of Tesla sales plummeting.” He also joked, “Millions of young people can’t stand him — and those are just his kids.” Colin Jost on ‘Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update‘ reported that “experts are saying that Trump’s tariffs will raise the cost of a new car by as much as $12,000, or you can get a free Tesla, since people are throwing them away.” Update co-host, Michael Che reported that European leaders have been coaching Volodymyr Zelensky on dealing with Trump —“kind of like how you need extra training to be a special ed teacher.” Che referred to a Trump claim that “no president has changed government more in 43 days,” to which Che replied, “Yeah, and nobody changed airport security more than bin Laden.” Addressing Trump’s constant back-tracking on his tariffs, amid concerns among consumers and investors, Che joked, “It’s a cunning political tactic experts call ‘bipolar disorder.”

AN AMBUSH, KICKING THE DOG, KICKING THE CAN, NO-NO-NOBEL

The world is still reeling from the embarrassing Oval Office clash between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, and Vice-Intruder Vance last week. A much-anticipated agreement with the USA to move toward a settlement between Ukraine and Russia to resolve Putin’s ongoing three-year attempt to rejoin Zelensky’s country into the Russian fold was simply a shameful ambush by the White House. As Sabrina Haake writes in her column, “The flip side to shame is revulsion. Watching Trump and Vance kick Zelensky for the cameras was like watching a neighbor starve his dog, then kick it for looking at his food bowl.” Haake says watching Trump’s and Vance’s attempts to pressure the Ukraine president into surrendering to Putin made her sick with shame, since they wanted him “to agree to a ceasefire with no security guarantees and to ‘trust’ Putin to honor his word.” The 2014 invasion of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, coupled with Putin’s murdered critics (watch out for that open window!) and disappeared rivals emphasizes to Zelensky that Putin is unrelenting in his quest. Our two ‘leaders’ accused Zelensky of “being disrespectful” and “trying to re-litigate” the morals of the war for the press and the cameras — all arranged by Trump for his anticipated glory and that now-trampled Nobel Peace Prize.

Norwegian parliamentarian Christian Tybring-Gjedde is quoted as saying that Trump’s dictatorial bullying doesn’t qualify as a diplomatic outreach that warrants a third nomination to follow the two that we saw in his first term. “He is dictating terms that the Europeans are very scared of and are really worried about what’s going to come of this. Right now, I don’t think there’s a prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize. But you never know,” said Tybring-Gjedde. The dark and foreboding browbeating heaped upon Zelensky for not saying ‘thank-you’ enough times for US firepower used against Putin’s invasion, has spoiled Trump’s pledge to “end the war on day one.” It’s obvious that Trump’s whining over the lack of the Nobel on his résumé remains a sore point, as he responded to a reporter’s question during a press conference recently: “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.” National security advisor Mike Waltz, and Representative Elise Stefanik, both told conservatives that Trump is a “president of peace” who deserves the award. Yet, fears have now risen that the president will use his dominance to end the war on Russian terms, with his rhetoric having grown more hostile to Ukraine over the past few weeks — calling Zelensky a “dictator” and accusing Ukraine of being the aggressor.

Sitting next to Trump, with arms folded, Zelensky was scolded like a disobedient schoolboy, bombarded by Vance’s accusation, “Have you said ‘thank-you’ once in the entire meeting?” Following the cancelled meeting, after Zelensky was unceremoniously escorted to his limo, and without having to delve into suppressed files, CNN posted thirty-three occasions in which Zelensky expressed his gratitude, one before a joint session of the US Congress in 2022 — a more comprehensive search would certainly have doubled, tripled that number. Attempting to one-up Vance, a testy Trump then said, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think that’s going to be pretty, but you’ll fight it out. But you don’t have the cards.” Mafioso Trump seemed to forget that he was in the Oval Office as he went into presidential campaign mode, talking about the “phony witch hunt” he endured regarding Russia’s 2016 election meddling. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump whined. MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace responded to this diatribe with a twisted-face “Awww….” as if to say, “Isn’t that sweet?” After the Ukraine president had left the building, Trump announced he was not welcome back, until he is “ready for peace.” Or until Trump is seriously ready to compete for that Nobel. Should he forge an agreement favorable to Russia and leave Europe vulnerable to an aggressive Putin, Trump doesn’t ‘have the cards’ in his quest, since the Nobel selection committee is appointed by the Norwegian parliament, leaders of a country nestled next to an expansionist Russia. Trump is still obsessed over Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize which he was awarded nine months into his presidency, and in 2018 expressed dismay that plant scientist Norman Borlaug won for helping to combat global famine: “Can you believe it? He won the Nobel Peace Prize!” Yeah! So take that, USAID!

The Oval Office conflagration with the demand that Zelensky bend the knee and kiss the ring was off to a bad start even before the televised blowup, after Zelensky was presented with a minerals-for-security agreement by the White House — with no security deal guaranteeing protection from Russian aggression. Ukraine’s president, prior to his trip to DC, had repeatedly specified that security assurances would need to be included, and with his rejection during final discussions, the anger of Trump and Vance spewed out in the subsequent pathetic meeting with the media. Columnist Phil Boas of The Arizona Republic likened the spectacle to “a food fight with petty insults, imbecilic logic, the barking immaturity that is the vernacular of loudmouths and incels, and cosplaying freaks who occupy so much of the social web. Gone were diplomacy and decorum as the world watched with mouths agape, trying to process the consequences. And how long can the Trump administration walk this tightrope, this knife’s blade to restore what it calls American greatness? When you blow past old rules of conduct, through longstanding guardrails, you may think you’re making progress, but you are surely wreaking your own destruction. If you don’t respect boundaries, your political foes won’t either. They’ll come at you, and with fury.” Boas calls Trump an agent of destruction, who currently finds it rough-sledding in his attempt to follow through on campaign promises; Americans sought change in the November election, but the roller coaster is out of control and if the president and his mob don’t slow it, the American people will — and sooner than the next election.

Bill Maher on HBO’s ‘Real Time’ was visibly outraged about the treatment of Zelensky by the Trump White House, dejectedly joking, “Great day to be an American. My first thought is that he’s browbeating a guy who speaks English as a second language. So we’re all agreed this is deplorable. I’ve tried not to use the word deplorable as much as I can, but when it’s deplorable, it’s deplorable.” World leaders, politicos and average Americans on social media posts agreed that the Zelensky takedown was lacking in the decorum expected of a sensible and reliable USA. Maher’s guest, Fareed Zakaria, called it “tragic” to see an American president “bully, berate” and “demean” a nation’s leader “who depends on the US for its survival” — before giving a cheeky suggestion to Zelensky. Zakaria joked, “The way to have gone in there, is first, you begin by saying, ‘President Trump, you are a genius. You have completely transformed the landscape. I have with me the highest order of merit — Ukraine has never created a civilian honor this big — for you.’ You have a big medal, put it on him, then say to him, ‘I look forward to working with you.'” John Stoehr, of The Editorial Board, an online newspaper, writes, “I think it’s emblematic of the fact that Donald Trump surrounds himself with grown men who are willing to act like little boys if that’s what it takes to make Big Daddy happy.”

The Trump/Vance performance took place just in time for NBC’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ to take full advantage for a cold open to the show last week. James Austin Johnson as Trump opened the sketch with, “I’d like to welcome President Zelensky to this incredible trap.” Referring to Zelensky’s casual attire, which Trump called attention to as soon as Ukraine’s president stepped out of the limousine, Johnson’s Trump complimented Mikey Day as Zelensky: “I’d like to thank President Zelensky for dressing like casual Star Trek. We love Star Trek because there’s no DEI. The white guy was the leader and he bossed around Spock who was, I believe, Guatemalan.” Mikey Day portraying Zelensky, was unable to speak any lines within the shouting match, being interrupted by Bowen Yang’s JD Vance as soon as he opened his mouth to enter the ‘conversation.’ “I have to jump in here because that’s how we planned this. You didn’t say ‘thank-you.’ You didn’t say anything about us being handsome,” and interrupting Day’s Zelensky again, says, “You have been talking this entire time. I’m sorry, does the sign outside say ‘Ukraine House’? No, it says ‘America House.'” The SNL couch potato portraying a wide-eyed Secretary of State, ‘Little’ Marco Rubio, only sunk deeper into the cushions, muttering, “No Inglés!”  Johnson’s Trump threw out the “I have the cards” line from the embarrassing Oval Office display: “You say you want to end this war, but frankly you don’t have the cards. I have the cards. I have ‘Skip’. I have ‘Draw Four’. I have ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ — the Supreme Court gave me that one.” Comedian Mike Myers crashed the meeting as Elon Musk, chain saw, black t-shirt and mannerisms that were accurate in depicting the real DOGE terrorist. Myers/Musk asks Johnson/Trump, “Uh, Donald, what are you doing in my office? You know I’m president now. I’m kidding! I’m kidding. Maybe not!” He joked about the scores of firings accomplished through DOGE actions: “They’re saying I’m firing people with no cause. But I do have cause. It’s ’cause I feel like it.” Reality bites!

Satirist Andy Borowitz reports that Zelensky is bowing to Trump’s demand to call for an immediate election with the condition that it be held in the USA and he be allowed to run for president. “For almost 250 years, the USA has been a beacon of democracy and freedom,” he said. “It should have a president who respects those ideas, and I will gladly relocate from Ukraine to do the job.” He was optimistic about his chances of defeating Trump, adding, “I have heard his approval rating is 4 percent, and most of that comes from Elon Musk’s children.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE army of college dropout hackers, termed the Nerd Reich by federal workers, are using threats and intimidation to gain access to governmental departments and the sensitive data trove in order to gut essential government services, eliminate regulators, a dismantling meant to reshape the federal workforce to serve Trump’s interests and those of his wealthy contributors. One official laments, “I can’t believe this is how they’re blowing up the Constitution — this little nerd army — God help us.” ‘Tonight Show‘ host Jimmy Fallon mocked Musk’s directive to have US federal workers list and submit five things they’ve done in the past week to justify holding their jobs or face termination — for which Musk has no official authority. Workers were dismayed and angry, mostly for getting a work email on a Saturday, joked Fallon, but he had a response for those who dared: “1) I received this email, 2) I opened this email, 3) I read this email, 4) I laughed at this email, 5) I deleted this email. There’s five,” said Fallon, “It’s hard to take seriously when rules from ‘Cinderella’ are being stolen,” as he referred to the 11:59 PM deadline for a response. Social media also gathered a few contributors: 1) Woke up, 2) Got out of bed, 3) Dragged a comb across my head, 4) Found my way downstairs and drank a cup, 5) Looking up, I noticed I was late. Another had a suggestion that would suffice for several weeks of reporting: 1) Put your right arm in, 2) Take your right arm out, 3) Put your right arm in and you shake it all about, 4) Do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around, 5) That’s what it’s all about. Trump is known for attempting to insult Obama by insisting he was born in Africa simply to diminish his standing in the eyes of his base-in-waiting — now he has Elon, who was actually born in Africa, ruining the country for him.

The White House said that Cabinet secretaries could have the final word on whether employees must respond with their week’s accomplishments, as stated by press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Leavitt said, “The president defers to his Cabinet secretaries who he’s obviously entrusted to pursue the guidance relative to their specific workforce. And for some of the agencies that you’ve seen that have said ‘please don’t send these emails,’ it’s in their best interest for that specific agency, and the president supports that.” She added that over one million responses had been received, “to insure that federal workers are not ripping off American taxpayers, that they are showing up to the office and that they are doing their jobs.” The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) informed Cabinet heads that response to Musk’s edict is voluntary and failure to do so will not be considered a resignation — that threat not appearing in the email, but given voice by President Musk. New FBI Director Kash Patel said, “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, pause any responses.” Predictable mass chaos reigned as Johnny-Come-Lately Trump arrived on the scene to praise Musk’s email — in order to gather details on employee accomplishments, and to find if employees even exist who are issued paychecks! This led to the OPM issuing yet another statement, quietly stripping the ‘voluntary action’ sentence, with Musk sending a second email demand. Needless to say, it remains a chaotic and unclear situation across all departments with the State Department still advising employees not to respond. Philosopher and essayist George Santayana is quoted as saying, “Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.” But we could narrow it down to a confederacy of dunces, huh?

Twenty-one staff members of the US DOGE Service (formerly the US Digital Service) submitted a letter of resignation, citing the destruction of the federal government, which follows on the heels of department employees who were laid off earlier. The letter addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and posted publicly, reads, “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions. As civil servants, we remained committed throughout the Presidential Transition to delivering better government services through technology and stood ready to partner with incoming officials. Each of us left senior private sector technology positions to pursue nonpartisan public service. We swore to serve the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments at the United State DOGE Service.”

Press Secretary Leavitt revealed last week that a dramatic change is being initiated in the press access for journalists covering President Trump, with the White House press team overseeing the press pool instead of the White House Correspondent’s Association. “Legacy outlets who have participated in the pool for decades will still be allowed to join,” she announced, but the change will bring in ‘new voices.’ “We will continue the rotation of the five major television networks to ensure (‘endure’ might be more apt) the president’s remarks are heard far and wide around this world. We will add additional streaming services which reach different audiences than traditional cable and broadcast,” she clarified. The WHCA’s president, Eugene Daniels responded to this abrupt change, saying, “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will select the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.” Daniels revealed that Leavitt and her team didn’t include him and the WHCA in any discussions for the change, claiming that the organization is already expanding into a wide range of outlets as part of the overall pool. Trump, in his pettiness, is still barring the Associated Press over their refusal to acknowledge his executive order by changing their stylebook to read ‘the Gulf of America’ instead of ‘the Gulf of Mexico.’ Weird that Trump shared an AP article on social media in criticizing Zelensky for saying the end to the Russian/Ukraine war is “far away.” Fox News and Newsmax have urged Trump to lift his ban, and a federal judge has declined to order the White House to do so. The WHCA’s annual gala dinner in DC is on schedule, and Trump is surely to skip the event, with the expected stinging barbs being thrown in his direction.

‘Tonight Show’ host Jimmy Fallon mocked the administration’s expropriation of the press pool by saying, “Yep, Trump will now only take questions from Fox News, Foxier News and Foxiest News.” Leavitt explains, “So by deciding which outlets make up the limited press pool on a day-to-day basis, the White House will be restoring power back to the American people who President Trump was elected to serve,” — justifying the reason to allow independent journalists on TikTok to apply for press credentials?

Attorney General Pam Bondi made a big deal of her announcement that the Epstein files would be released, which contain lists of clients and flight logs of passengers flown on his private plane to his private island. After release of the documents, word quickly got around that it was information previously made public — no bombshells! To counter the uproar, Bondi pointed a finger at the FBI, who she blamed for withholding “thousands of pages of documents.” Conspiracy theorists were accusing the Deep State agents for lack of transparency, providing Jimmy Kimmel with fodder for his show’s monologue. “That’s right, the deep state agents are trying to hide it. Well, first the deep state agents need to go through the documents to make sure they dot every ‘i’ and cross out every ‘DJ-T,’ and then they can release the documents,” he offered. Continuing, he said, “You know, the fact that these Looney Tunes keep conveniently forgetting that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were good friends is unbelievable.” Reading from a 2002 issue of New York magazine’s profile of Epstein, he said to the audience, “This is a quote from Donald Trump: ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years, terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.'” “And they’re running around with binders,” Kimmel chuckled, as he cited a New York Times report: ‘Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had a party at Mar-a-Lago, calling it a ‘calendar girl’ competition.'” Kimmel concluded, “It was only two men and 28 disappointed calendar girls — I hope that’s in the binder when it comes out.” We can rest assured that Kash Patel will get to the bottom of this deep state mixup!

A BRIONI TUTU, GOLDEN AGED EGGS, 400 YEARS, ANOTHER DIRTY WORD

It appears that Donald and Elon, along with the Project 2025 mob, have resurrected ‘The New Pledge’ which ran in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic strip back on December 16, 1994. The pledge reads: “I pledge allegiance to and wrap myself in the flag of the United States Against Anything Un-American, and to the Republicans for which it stands, two nations, under Jesus, rich against poor with curtailed liberty and justice for all, except for Blacks, homosexuals, women who want abortions, Communists, welfare queens, tree huggers, feminazis, illegal immigrants, children of illegal immigrants, and you if you don’t watch your step.” Our current government makeup didn’t miss a beat in the intervening thirty years, and we can bet with assurance that they have a New Constitution waiting in the wings.

Gregory E. Sterling, dean of the Yale Divinity School, in an article on the MSNBC website says that the US Agency for International Development being cast into the “wood chipper” by Musk is a sign that a core Christian value of caring for others “is under threat.” Distressing to Sterling is the alarming and tacit support of many, including Trump’s evangelical horde, who proclaim the Gospels as their guide, and by doing so “have sold their souls in a Faustian deal for political power.” Cited is an NBC News exit poll in the presidential election with the upshot that 63% of voters in the “Protestant or other Christians” demographic supported the new administration — and if restricted to Whites, the number climbs to 72%. In the Catholic fold, 59% supported Trump, with 63% of White Catholics voting for the convicted felon. But — yikes! — 82% of White evangelicals went for King Donald. The Dean is concerned that many will associate Christianity with the worrisome programs of the MAGA administration, and that the “younger generation will either come to dismiss Christianity as amoral or identify with it for its relationship to political power rather than its moral and spiritual principles” — neither of which he finds acceptable.

A colleague of Sterling’s, Phil Gorski, author of ‘The Flag and the Cross,’ an exploration of the rise of Christian nationalism, seconds the concern about Christianity becoming a “dirty word,” and, an acquaintance who is senior pastor of a large Manhattan church now describes himself as a “follower of Jesus Christ,” abandoning his descriptor as ‘Christian.’ Sterling closes his piece by saying that the “closure of USAID and the pulling of funds from other agencies and groups that care for the ‘hungry…thirsty…stranger…naked…ill…imprisoned’ is anti-Christian at its core. It reflects a rejection of a basic value that Jews and Christians hold sacred. Christians may disagree about a number of important issues, but the imperative to care for the downtrodden is not one of them.” A recent caller from Georgia on C-SPAN with right-wing pundit Armstrong Williams recalled his family’s vacations in the Great Smoky Mountains, when they would feed bears at the side of the road — until it was declared illegal. He claims that once this largesse was terminated the bears starved to death because they didn’t know how to fend for themselves, referring to the old proverb about teaching a man how to fish. Host Williams called his story well taken, saying, “The best Department of Health, Education and Welfare I had growing up was my mother and my father.” Right! Empathy is for losers! Ignore those roadside cadgers!

During Trump’s 2016 campaign he sought the backing of the religious right, granting them unprecedented access to empower their agenda during his first term; therefore, they poured millions in contributions toward his 2024 campaign to reseat themselves in the White House to continue their oppressive agenda to strip away rights and freedoms, and to make it safe to “once again” to say, “Merry CHRISTmas!” The level of influence held by the religious right turned the Executive branch into a virtual policy-making arm of their movement in Trump’s first term, and with their continuing domination we see the appointment of lifetime federal judges from religious-right legal groups who will further dismantle church-state separation and undermine our freedoms. With Trump’s favoritism toward these groups, their appetites for even more power and control has brought an uptick in overt and aggressive Christian nationalism, a threat not only to freedom and core democratic values, but non-acceptance of religious pluralism. This movement is also more likely to support authoritarianism and political violence, while nurturing racial resentment and hostility toward immigrants in their so-called “biblical worldview.” Their belief that Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country once again was recently mirrored by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson — genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Raymond De Vries who calls himself “a sad observer of political decline” posts on Quora in response to a questioner who asked, “How can you call yourself Christian and not support our most Christian president yet, Donald J. Trump?” His answer: “You seem to think a Christian is someone who says the homeless ‘will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment and services if they’re willing to be rehabilitated.’ And, it’s just fine for Christians to praise war-waging invaders as ‘genius’ and ‘savvy’ and refer to the displaced and dead in the invaded country as ‘independent.’ Or skipping community services to play golf, and call military service members who gave their lives for their country, ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’ And since when is it Christian for someone claiming to be a multi-billionaire to beg for the charity of wool-pulled-over-their-eyes sheeple who donate millions of dollars (or buy overpriced Bibles and other tchotchkes) to cover his legal defense costs against charges of rape, financial fraud and insurrection? And asking, ‘Why do I have to repent, to ask forgiveness if I’m not making mistakes?’ But methinks anyone who thinks Donald Trump is a Christian has been possessed by the devil….”

But we know that Trump likes the title, employing the tactics of a mob boss, as demonstrated in many of his proclamations and threats, one of the latest being against Ukraine president Zelensky after he criticized The Don for siding with Russia in the ongoing war. Ukraine has been particularly critical of the supposed ‘peace talks’ between only Russia and the US — no Ukrainians allowed, please. Trump calls Zelensky a “modestly successful comedian” who conned the US out of $350 billion to fight a “war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a war that he, without the US and TRUMP, will never be able to settle.” He also whined that the US spent $200 billion more than European nations contributed as a guaranteed loan, while the US will get nothing back. In a peacetime scenario, Zelensky would have termed-out of office, and despite Trump’s calls for wartime elections due to a “4% approval rating,” the Ukrainians show support at around 60% with no calls for an election, though Zelensky has offered to step down “in the interest of peace if necessary.” Trump called the Ukrainian president a dictator who is responsible for starting the war — words straight from the Putin playbook. British satirical magazine, Private Eye, ran its latest cover with a poke at the Trump/Zelensky standoff. A photo of Trump and Zelensky walking side by side has word balloons added with Trump asking, “Guess what the deal is?” Zelensky replies, “I give in.” “Correct,” Trump agrees. Even the Rupert Murdoch Wall Street Journal’s editorial board called Trump’s criticism of Zelensky an “assault,” warning that his “seeming desperation for a peace deal could come at the expense of his own presidency.” The board wrote: “The only dictator in the war is Mr. Putin, who poisons exiled Russians on foreign soil and banishes opponents to Arctic prison camps.” And a punch to Trump’s gut: “Call us when he holds a free election.” Further, Trump’s attempt to turn the Ukrainians against Zelensky is likely to have the opposite effect, and they agreed with Zelenksy’s “retort to Trump which suggests he’s living in a ‘disinformation bubble.'” WSJ board sums it up with: “Ultimately, any deal that results in Ukraine’s surrender will be a blow to American power — the opposite of Mr. Trump’s promise to restore a golden age of US prestige and world calm.”

A couple of weeks back The Don was facing criticism and mockery on social platforms for calling the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts a “woke” venue, though he admitted he has never attended any events — only that he “got reports” and that “people said the shows were terrible, a disgrace.” Consequently, he announced some new board appointees after “reports” of drag performances, and expressing his desire to become board chair “to make sure it runs properly. We don’t need ‘woke’ at the center.” Social media sprung into action, calling his comments “MAGA movement in a nutshell.” GenXGuy posted, “He heard it from many people the shows were terrible…big strong men…with tears in their eyes…’sir, these shows are terrible. Only you can save the Kennedy Center.'” True to form, satirist Andy Borowitz of The Borowitz Report posted: “Donald J. Trump tightened his grip on the American arts scene on Monday by naming himself principal ballerina of the Kennedy Center Ballet. Announcing a purge of the company’s ballerinas, Trump declared on Truth Social, ‘I will soon be announcing a new roster of ballerinas, with an amazing ballerina, DONALD J. TRUMP.’ He said he was ‘disgusted’ to discover that all of the company’s current ballerinas were women, a state of affairs that he blamed on DEI. Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center has surprised millions of Americans, who previously thought that the worst thing that could happen to the Kennedy brand was JFK’s nephew strapping a dismembered whale’s head to his minivan.”

Of Trump’s intrusion into the arts, The Daily Beast website said, “Revenge, as the saying goes, is a dish best served cold and in Washington time always a moveable feast…When Donald Trump seized control of the performing arts venue, unseating David Rubinstein as chairman, it quickly became clear among the Democrat board members (and some Republicans) there was little they could do to prevent it. And so they will do what the true establishment does; they will bide their time…DC’s permanent elite believe Trump’s sudden, random interest in the center had little to do with content, and more to do with his own, more obvious, payback. The insiders didn’t accept him last time around and they won’t this, and it prickles under his skin like a rash that won’t go away. His own redress is to try to take away their toys. ‘He has kicked over a beehive,’ said one knowing person, ‘but he won’t know until it stings him in the ass.’ They will forgive the intrusion for now…but they won’t forget…even if the Kennedy Center morphs into the Trump Center overnight. ‘This isn’t the Deep State,’ said one insider. ‘This is Deep Society.’ However, if Trump thinks his coup is bloodless, at least for now, then he’d better look closer to home. Melania had apparently told friends she wanted to become more involved in the Kennedy Center and was already on the board as an honorary trustee along with other former first ladies Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton. Now her husband has stolen her thunder once again. She’d probably get a warmer welcome at the Women’s National Democratic Club.” Strike up the US Marine Corps band! Or how about Trump’s J6 Prison Choir? Never grow tired of those guys, do we?

Steve Schmidt couldn’t refrain from heralding the new Chairman Trump: “Donald Trump, chairman of the Kennedy Center, is a man with no taste and less integrity, who buried his first wife on a New Jersey golf course. Easily distracted and perpetually bored, Donald Trump has given away the powers of his presidency to Elon Musk, while using the prerogatives of his high office to launch meme coins and install himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center. Donald Trump may soon demand that his slow shuffle and jerky spasms to the songs of ‘The Village People’ tunes be called ballet. When this happens 49% of the country will wear leotards on their heads, and cheer for the most beautiful ballerina in the land — the one dressed like a schlub in an oversized Brioni suit, with a too-long tie made in China. It is in this moment that Trump will do for the arts what Tulsi Gabbard is going to do to the intelligence agencies, RFK is going to do to the public health agencies, Kash Patel is going to do to the FBI, and Pete Hegseth is going to do to the military.”

We all remember how Elon Musk flew to Germany to campaign for the ultra-right wing AfD party in the lead up to their national elections, and how he then flew back to DC to stand beside the Resolute desk and lord it over a seated Trump, with Elon’s son, X, wiping his boogers on the desk and telling Trump his time in the chair was about to end? Well, it happened again — this time in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. According to Leigh Kimmins on The Daily Beast, Trump looked like he was hung out to dry by Musk and Hannity, as they ignored the president, or interrupted him in this high-profile sit-down take-down. Hannity’s softball questions in the Roosevelt Room in the White House briefly became a love-in, but further in it became apparent that the president was being shunted aside, with Musk portraying himself as a hero to save America in his indiscriminate machete-wielding attack on government departments. Trump attempted to chime in about Europe “taking advantage of us,” but bosom-buddy Musk shot him a look in order to keep up his own diatribe. Trump again tried to compliment Musk on his achievements, but was interrupted by Hannity who looked at Musk to ask if he was “trying to be president, as the media suggests.” Another Trump attempt to join in was interrupted by Hannity who wanted to talk to Musk about sending ships to Mars. Their chat rambled on, with Trump blasting left-leaning outlets, and feeding tired, classic lines to his voter base…gotta keep ’em happy, you know! After viewing the interview, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote: “Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. But I am still not sure who’s in charge.” The official answer from the White House says Trump’s in charge, and that Musk isn’t even in charge of DOGE, or involved in the agency at all — only a “senior adviser to the president with no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” Time to disarm Musk of his machete? Let’s ask Hannity!

Text for a much-needed bumper sticker: MUSK — THE MAN WHO SAVED CANCER! A bill that was up for a 2024 renewal of funding for the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program was trimmed of this $190 million amount last year because Elon didn’t like the bipartisan effort under President Obama that established the program. The original bill, as presented by Republicans, included the renewal but Musk and former Republican Leader Eric Cantor drove forces that led to its being cut. Musk showed his cruelty by posting on X, photos of the two versions side by side, captioned “Yesterday’s bill vs today’s bill,” accompanied by a laughing emoji. Ultimately, the House rejected the new bill 174-235, with nearly 30 Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it. House Republican Leader Steve Scalise said the same bill will not be brought forward for a vote. Not discouraged by this failure, Musk and his DOGEs have hobbled a federal government facility that does critical research into Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. According to Greg Sargent of The New Republic, the “Trump-Musk cuts” have resulted in the firing of numerous top researchers at the National Institute of Health, “a prediction of big setbacks to fighting dementias.” “The Trump-Musk rationales for deep cuts to spending on medical research are an insultingly ridiculous farce,” Sargent alleges. “Republicans once lavished praise on this research. Trump and Musk are hobbling it. What will those Republicans say now?” Any suggestions, Hannity? How about we start a GoFundMe to buy Musk a seat on his first rocket to Mars — the first Earthling to set foot on the Red Planet — irresistible!

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, got some acerbic replies to his post on X directed at his one million followers, when he asked, “Are you enjoying America’s new Golden Age?” The critics seem to think Trump’s term number two is, so far, a case of all glitter and no real gold. Hunter Petro suggests, “Call it the ‘Golden Age’ because it takes a bag of gold bars to afford a dozen eggs,” and Ron Smith offers, “NO, President Musk is a terrible president.” Gojo18 posts a question, “Are we living in the same country?” Eleazar’s Virgins claims, “Yeah, now that USAID has been shuttered, pronouns banned, racists applauded, and water has been poured out of California’s reservoirs, my life is so much better.” Nicadispatch feels as many of us do by requesting, “Let me know when it starts.” Miller, whose title conceals the massive influence he actually commands with Trump and throughout the administration, is helping to drive a maximalist immigration enforcement agenda from which he obviously derives immense sadistic satisfaction. He spearheaded efforts to enact sweeping changes in presidential authority for the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy and to reduce or eliminate entire departments. Miller has worked on his plan for years — prior to his first gig with Trump’s first term — and has now had four years between terms to perfect his plan. He unapologetically pushes traditional boundaries to test the waters, and he avoids the limelight to avoid outshining the boss. In the effort to overwhelm the administration’s opponents, Miller worked to have in place for signatures, on Day One, the dozens of executive orders of which Trump made a spectacle as he signed. “Hello to the Golden Age of America and welcome back Donald J. Trump,” Miller said as he addressed the crowd at Capitol One Arena in DC on inauguration day. “It’s been four long years. It’s felt like 400 years.”  On the other hand, it’s been four long weeks and it seems like 400!

In an essay in the Ohio Capital Journal, David DeWitt writes that in January 2020, he wrote about how politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and as human beings. He concludes his latest piece with, “America’s love affair with swaggering ignorance and confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need to be paid. The damage will be extensive.” As if to second DeWitt’s statement, Donald Trump on Saturday made his own statement that stunned observers, in posting on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes attributes this loosely to both France’s King Louis XIV, and Navarre, saying, “L’etat c’est moi,” translation being “I myself am the nation.” Columnist Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times called it “the single most un-American and anti-Constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” Conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol said, “We’re getting into real Führerprinzip territory here.” Tech reporter Matt Novak offered, “Dude is quoting Napoleon now. When do we get to the exile portion of the Napoleon timeline?” In a darker vein, writer and actor Bill Corbett adds, “Trump making an excellent argument for his own assassination — good one, dummy!”

In a podcast interview prior to the election, Trump’s FBI deputy director, Andrew McCabe who was fired in 2018, was asked if he thought Trump is a Russian asset, to which he answered, “I do, I do. I don’t know if I would characterize it as an active, recruited, knowing asset in the way people in the intelligence community think of that term…he has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem, and I think his approach to interacting with Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.” McCabe also questioned Trump’s approach to his supporting Ukraine and NATO in the face of Russia’s aggression, and certainly in light of his claim that Russia would have avoided aggressive action into its neighboring country had he been president. Trump still maintains that all he wants is “peace — and Ukraine’s rare metals deposits — negotiate, and get this over with!” We have to remember Kamala Harris ridiculing Trump during their presidential debate that his so-called friendship with a known dictator would only result with his being eaten for lunch. McCabe ended his interview, declaring that Russia’s “interest is just simply sowing chaos and division and polarization. If they can do that, it’s a win. If they can actually hurt a candidate they don’t like, or help one that they do like, that’s an even bigger win.” Score one for the dictator(s)!

The Daily Beast columnist, Julia Davis, who monitors Russian media, has reported that there is glee in the Kremlin regarding Trump’s cabinet choices, an ominous sign for the USA. Vladimir Solovyov, on his show ‘Sunday,’ said, “What an excellent team is coming along with Trump! Not with respect to Ukraine, but as far as everything else goes. If they are allowed to get in, they will quickly dismantle America, brick by brick. They are so great.” TV host Olga Skabeeva enthusiastically pronounced the cabinet picks, “…totally wonderful!” And her husband, Evgeny Popov who is host of Russia’s ‘60 Minutes,’ agreed, calling Trump’s selections his “…radical dream team. All of them personally despise Zelensky,” and on a cautionary note adds, “They aren’t friends of Russia, except for Tulsi Gabbard.” How does that phrase go — ‘Forewarned is fore…‘ — never mind! Russia’s predictions are already being borne out by the actions of those put in place by the GOP-dominated Senate, hellbent on undermining the very agencies they ‘lead,’ brick-by-brick, stone-by-stone. Ja’han Jones of MSNBC says, “Trump is constructing a kakistocracy — a government filled with incompetent or otherwise unsuitable characters. And based on Russian state TV, the Kremlin couldn’t be happier.”

Julia writes that Moscow was initially unsettled by Trump’s stern proclamations regarding the Russia/Ukraine impasse, but his latest actions have transformed into pure joy as he self-destructs America’s standing as a global superpower. The new-old president is also well into his plan to undermine international relationships with our long-standing allies, exceeding Russian expectations. Propagandist Vladimir Solovyov gloated over these developments, saying, “It’s awesome, right? The Canadians and the Mexicans thought all was well, but Trump told them ‘By the way, I don’t like you either.'” This statement provoked jolly laughter from the other pundits in the studio. Putin called President Zelensky’s tenure “illegitimate,” prompting US envoy Keith Kellogg to suggest Ukraine hold a presidential election since “…most democratic nations have elections in their time of war. I think it is important to do so.” Solovyov takes this as a US adoption of the Russian view, and Dean Henry Sardaryan of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations agrees that serious efforts behind the scenes have led to a seismic shift in the American approach. Sardaryan has interpreted words of Secretary of State Rubio to mean the US is abdicating its global leadership position in favor of multipolarity, with Tucker Carlson being “unleashed” to publicly “demolish Zelensky” in order to sway citizens to accept Trump’s future decisions toward Ukraine. Moscow is looking forward to stepping into the void left by the demise of USAID, by creating a tool to exercise influence over other countries, much like China has been doing for years.

By Trump’s outright rejection of bipartisanship in his first term, political scientist Dmitry Evstafiev had predicted the disintegration of existing political institutions in the USA, to be replaced by an authoritarian system — now, to the delight of Russian experts, Trump isn’t letting them down. Andrey Sidorov notes that the US is rapidly moving into a dictatorship, with Americans unable to reverse this trajectory by the usual democratic means. Current Russian prediction for the US: “everything is excellent.” Co-president Elon Musk has co-president Trump’s blessing to dismantle the government and to gut popular programs — a decision that will likely come back to haunt him says the Washington Post’s Philip Bump. Bump suggests Musk is taking his cues from X, where he has cast himself as the main character in a rightwing bubble, and he is being disingenuous or ignorant if he believes his unscientific polls on the platform represent the desires of Americans — not just his echo chamber. According to Bump, Musk seems to believe Americans want less out of government, rather than better — a fatal misreading. “While a significant portion of those who did vote approved of the idea that Trump would overhaul the government, many were voting for other reasons. There’s a reason the bureaucracy exists at the scale it does, which is that constituencies and advocates have convinced representatives that those programs are worth funding. As Musk himself pointed out, when funding stops, complaints start. We can expect a staggering number of complaints over the coming months.” And it has already started — several Red States have dared to criticize the gutting of programs. Musk is following the same stratagems as when he took over Twitter, by slashing budgets, engaging in massive layoffs, while ignoring the long term effects to create his own world, rather than the one the end users want. Bump cautions, “…this is governance, not a right-wing social club. If X crashes, users shrug. If the government crashes, people die. The former is not good for business. The latter is not good for politicians.”

On ‘The Last Word,’ MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell had much to say about the joint Trump/Musk Oval Office press conference last week, pointing out the power displayed by Musk over the sitting president. Elon stood beside the Resolute desk expounding to the press (with 3,666 words), and a seated Trump (who spoke only 2,487 words), that the non-official DOGE is saving American taxpayers trillions of dollars — no breakdown, just take his word for it and ignore the suffering and chaos. O’Donnell described the scene as “a picture of presidential subservience the likes of which we have never seen, the most powerless image of a President of the United States ever created by a camera.” The t-shirted, MAGA-hatted Musk conveyed, with his son X in tow, without saying a word, that “Donald Trump is not the boss of me.” Trump’s first-term Vice President Mike Pence “never had a day like that in the Oval Office with Donald Trump,” and current VP JD Vance “will never have a day like that in the Oval Office with Donald Trump because Donald Trump is the boss of JD Vance,” O’Donnell added. To top it off, Musk’s son was rumored to have admonished Trump with, “Shush your mouth,” when he started to speak. Roy Wood, Jr. appeared on the ‘Daily Show’ giving his take on how much control President Trump has over the DOGE leader as he runs roughshod over the federal government, saying, “I look at this Trump-Elon relationship — you ever had a homeboy who had a girlfriend nobody liked? And the friend has to act as if ‘Oh, we’re fine. We’re happy.’ It is going to take a consecutive series of brave people to keep this administration from going off the rails. You’re going to need a bunch of brave judges because he’s going to come for their heads, too.”

In the aftermath of the joint Oval Office press conference, where Trump also made a big show of signing various death sentences for government agencies, satirist Andy Borowitz wrote a dateline Washington coverage in his The Borowitz Report: “Boasting that it was ‘like taking candy from a baby,’ on Wednesday Elon Musk tricked Donald J Trump into signing a reverse mortgage on the White House. ‘All these years, you’ve fixed it, you’ve taken care of it. Maybe it’s time for your home to start taking care of you. There you go,’ he whispered into Trump’s ear, putting the pen in his tiny hand. Assuming ownership of the White House was just the latest real estate coup for Musk, who earlier in the week tricked Trump into signing over the deed to Mar-a-Lago.”

Former RNC chairman and current MSNBC host, Michael Steele, took a Saturday morning discussion into a blistering tirade against both Democrats and Republicans for groveling beneath Donald Trump’s relentless destruction of democracy. ‘Weekend‘ co-host Alicia Menendez read from The Nation’s recent report which said “the courts cannot save us,” spurring Steele to hit the ceiling. Co-host Symone Sanders Townsend asked him, “What would you have us do?” Steele blasted back, “I would like you to show that you give a damn! That you got a little emotion about the fact that people are losing their jobs indiscriminately. That this individual sitting down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has given absolute power to one man who brings his son into the Oval Office, whose son says to him, ‘You’re not the president, you shouldn’t be in that chair.’ Now, where did he get that from? He got it from his daddy, because that’s what his daddy thinks of the man who brought him into the Oval Office. So, I’d just like to see somebody wake the hell up and get excited about the fact that your country is under assault! They’re not at the gate anymore, they’re in your bedrooms, they’re in your living rooms, they’re in your businesses, they got your data, they got all your stuff. Elon Musk has his tentacles in everything you’re doing, not just off of X, but now he’s in the Treasury Department, he’s in the Labor Department, he’s in the Department of Homeland Security and nobody seems to give a damn, so that’s all I want. Somebody to show that they care enough to get off their fat ass and say something about it.” When co-host Menendez attempted to interject and point the finger at complicit Republicans, Steele went off again, “The hell with Republicans! They’re not going to do anything, they’re the problem!”

Along with Democrats, Alaska’s conservative Senator Lisa Murkowski is lamenting and criticizing the Trump administrations’s terminating the employment of about 200,000 civil service workers who were in their probationary periods. Murkowski warned of negative repercussions in Alaska with potentially 100 or so in her state being fired. She posted on X, “Any of these abrupt terminations will do more harm than good, stunting opportunities in Alaska and leaving holes in our communities,” continuing that she shares “the administration’s goal of reducing the size of federal government, but this approach is bringing confusion, anxiety, and now trauma to our civil servants.” Some X users were not having her “whining,” and arguing that she and her party are the ones inflicting damage. One post reads, “Your party & you propping Trump up has allowed this to happen. Stop whining about something you enabled.” Another reads, “I didn’t think the leopard would eat MY face,” while another reads, “You failed Alaskans and all Americans by voting for his Russian assets, Fox pundits, election deniers, conspiracy theorists, useful idiots, DOGE and other frauds. What could possibly go wrong?”

Steve Schmidt wrote in his The Warning blog that it was clear in watching Trump’s meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, the king was “struggling to maintain his composure and dignity as the American president blustered like a fool about a vision for the future of the world that is both utterly insane, and would be a disaster for the USA, Israel, Egypt, Europe, Jordan and the Palestinian people, who would live in ignominy as a crime against humanity,” getting resettled from their homeland. “It is also a repudiation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, architected by the US. Think about the arrogance at hand. We are witnessing a historic moment. Before it is over, we will all have a role to play. Trust me on this. The king knows what is coming. He just doesn’t know what to say. What can be said? Whatever must be said, it must be said by an American first. The world is waiting to hear a sound, even if it is a whisper. It is the sound of an opposition stirring that makes clear that liberty is not a hollow faith. Or is it?”

On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon joked that on Valentine’s Day Melania asked Donald if he forgot again. He was quick to say, “Oh no — I got Elon something.” And Andy Borowitz strikes again, posting, “Melania Trump has determined that the Valentine’s Day card she received on Friday could not possibly be from her husband because her name was spelled correctly, the First Lady has confirmed. ‘If it spelled ‘Melanie,’ ‘Melanin,’ or ‘Malala,’ then I’d know it from him,’ she said. ‘It was signed ‘the President,’ she continued. ‘So guess it from Elon. I wish Justin Trudeau send me card one day,’ she added wistfully. ‘That be best.'”

SPECIAL PROJECTS, SQUIRRELS, MISSING MEL, SELF-LOATHING

On a recent edition of the ‘Late Show,’ Stephen Colbert said in his opening monologue that he didn’t want to “cause panic” as he began to relate all the panic-inducing illegal and unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration. As for the firing of all the Justice Department personnel who investigated the J6 Insurrection case, Colbert said there will be nobody left, necessitating a name change to “the Department-Of-Just-This-Guy,” adding, “The firings are probably illegal, and it’s clearly retribution — unless you ask a Republican like Congressman Dan Crenshaw.” A video clip of Crenshaw, asked about the retribution aspect, said, “Who knows if it’s revenge. I think it’s open to interpretation,” to which Colbert added, “Sure. Who knows? It’s just like that movie ‘V for Vambiguous.’” He decried the administration’s ‘Special Project’ of launching investigations of specific prosecutors who were just doing their job. “Going after honest civil servants doing their job is not a special project. It is a disgrace. A special project is when, to protect you from bullies on the playground, instead of going to recess, you get to help Miss Brogdon clean the erasers,” he explained.

The Bully-On-The-Playground Trump ignores the laws, adhering to the ugly habits that he can’t abandon, even a law that Congress passed as a reform simply because of his behavior during his first term in office. So he charges ahead with his corruption,  not caring, joined by an uncaring electorate who isn’t paying attention anyway. His recent firing of fifteen inspectors general, those independent watchdogs heading agencies of the executive branch to monitor waste and corruption, purging some who were appointees from his first term, is only a continuation of his ripping out the guardrails — no walls here, please! The inspectors came into being in 1978 as a deterrent to scofflaw presidencies, such as Richard Nixon’s, against the abuse of executive power. Originally, there were only twelve inspectors, but over the years that  number grew to 73 — inspectors general for the inspectors generals? The current issue is that under the law, a president had to give Congress 30 days’ notice regarding an intent to fire an I.G., providing some vague reason why it is necessary. Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith wrote at Lawfare in 2022, “More frequently than prior presidents, Trump manipulated vacancies and related laws to fire or dismiss disliked inspectors general and replace them, pursuant to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, with a more like-minded or pliant official.” This prompted Congress to amend the law by replacing the word ‘reasons‘ with the phrase ‘substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons.’ In spite of the law’s change, strengthened because of Trump’s actions, he has mocked it by flouting the original law. No 30 days’ notice, no rationale — he just did it, telling the press that it was all fine and, “It’s a very common thing to do,” which became the catchword for Republicans, Fox News, Sinclair, and the remainder of the propaganda chorus. As you might expect, Senator Lindsey Graham admitted that Trump broke the law, “technically,” but chuckled that he wasn’t losing any sleep as a result.

We can expect the president’s new I.G. appointees to turn a blind eye to petty corruption, but these dark-of-night actions foretell that more serious and aggressive acts are in the offing a la Project 2025, such as attacking executive agencies, as Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic. Tomasky says that’s only a guess, “Not being an evil genius myself, I have trouble keeping up with these people.” He accuses the Democrats of “being their usual wobbly selves, with mealy-mouthed vows to work with the administration, not understanding the situation we’re in.” Sounds very much like most of the media prior to the election, treating the presidential race as a business-as-usual quadrennial event — ho-hum, let’s move along, nothing to see here, it’ll all work out, la-la-la-la-la. Tomasky says, “The situation is this. Trump takes up about 80 percent of the oxygen. His craven party and the right-wing media will applaud everything he does, legal or not, and invent some justification for it. The half of the country who voted for him will agree and approve. They assume, for example in the case of the inspectors general, that these people are corrupt deep-staters who are standing in Trump’s way, so good riddance, law schmaw. They don’t need to be galvanized, in other words. As long as Trump’s getting his way, they’re in the game, and they’re content.” He goes on to say that those who voted against Trump need to be galvanized, but some are still hurting from the election results, others don’t want to engage, while many feel there’s no hope. But somebody needs to step up and lead, choosing issues that will galvanize the anti-Trumpers, instead of ignoring Trump’s missteps as part of the game. Tomasky characterizes this as “such a passive, Democratic way to look at this. There’s always an excuse not to act, if not acting is what you want to do.” He closes by adding, “The president broke the law. Clearly and unambiguously. On his fifth day in office. In what democracy is that NOT an issue? I fear we know the answer.”

To smooth over some of the rough edges of his new tenancy, Trump continues to reach out with his being “saved by God” mantra, which he emphasized in his inauguration “weave.” So now we have, by executive order no less, a new ‘Faith Office’ in the White House to be led by televangelist Paula White-Cain, who has been Trump’s so-called spiritual advisor, with Attorney General Pam Bondi running interference with a task force to root out “persecution” of America’s Christians. These actions will sit well with Christian nationalist cabinet members, and Trumpster Dumpster/Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, despite Trump’s sketchy relationship with religion. His flirting with religion during his first term, is noted by his tear-gassing demonstrators to clear the path to allow him to clutch an upside down Bible in front of a church for a photo-op. Other photo-ops show him praying with evangelicals in the oval office, after which he derided the event, in essence, asking aides, “How do these people believe this stuff?” He recently told a crowd at a prayer breakfast in DC, that he has had a religious awakening, especially since the assassination attempt in Butler, PA during a campaign rally. Evidently, he wasn’t awakened enough to heed Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon when she called for him to show “mercy” toward immigrants and LGBTQ citizens. Many of his appointees and hangers-on have ties to the New Apostolic Reformation Church, which as a Christian Nationalist movement is calling for government and society come under their control. Notably, House Speaker Mike Johnson is linked to this group, as is ‘Faith Office’ leader Paula White-Cain. Secretary of Defense Hegseth belongs to a church affiliated with the right-wing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — you guessed it — a Christian nationalist front, calling for reestablishment of Biblical law, and possible repeal of women’s right to vote. For the moment, Trump is not espousing these views, but he continues to please the religious right with his accommodations — he’s easy! In his prayer breakfast speech, he explicitly called for an increased role in religion, saying, “We have to bring religion back. Let’s bring God back into our lives.” Also hinting that we need to bring him back to a third term in the Oval Office — identity confusion?

Florida’s megachurch preacher, Paula White-Cain, as a proponent of ‘prosperity theology’ fits right into Trump’s credo that God rewards the faithful with material wealth and personal success. Many of Trump’s MAGA supporters are disappointed that White-Cain is now embedded in the Oval Office, considering her theology as heretical by blaming financial woes as a lack of faith, which will only be used to exploit vulnerable churchgoers. Christian podcast host, John Mason, wrote on X, “Paula is a known heretic and known false teacher who has no regard for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Self-described ‘Orthodox Christian’ and leadership coach Scott Ross, agrees that White-Cain is a heretic, calling Trump’s appointment “an abomination, utterly opposed to authentic Christianity, she has had multiple husbands, twisting the Gospel for profit.” Curiously, Paula is currently married to guitarist Jonathan Cain, of the San Francisco-based band, Journey. Ruth Ben-Ghiat whose blog is ‘Lucid‘ via Substack posted on Reddit about an email from a reader recently. The reader states, “I have prayed about writing you. I know you are a liberal but you are also a historian. I want you to know that God himself spared Trump twice from death at the hands of another. This means he has blessing and approval from the Almighty just like George Washington. I think you should recognize that, and admit God wants him as our salvation.” Ruth replied, “Well, Hitler survived six serious attempts and at least 42 plots. God also allowed him to live. Do you think God approved of what he was doing? Do you think he was Germany’s salvation?” Crickets.

The biggest bit of news has been the establishment of a new branch of government to join the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial — the MuskRat, headed by slasher Dork Lord, and now co-president Elon Musk (or Leon, as Trump calls him), and his fake departmental DOGE team of unvetted, non-security-cleared teens and twenty-somethings who are rummaging through the files of governmental departments with their computers and portable hard drives. Hold ’em high guys, for the highest bidder — what say you Mr. Putin? The Blitzkrieg Team has had a field day with access to sensitive Treasury Department data, paramount in that treasury trove being Social Security and Medicare information. Musk and his DOGiEs demanded access to the files, resulting in a refusal from 30-year veteran Deputy Secretary David Lebryk, and upon his refusal to do so, he was put on administrative leave before being forced to resign. Following the DOGE raid, Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter of outrage to Trump’s new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, indignant that “officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. To put it bluntly, these payment systems cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country  and the economy. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access. Sources tell my office that DOGE was granted full access to this system — Social Security, Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies.” Wyden goes on to point out that Medicaid portals in all 50 states were shut down when Trump unsuccessfully attempted to freeze all grant and loan payments, and has concerns that Musk is seeking to gain access to and potentially control the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to carry out a political agenda in violation of the law. The senator says it appears that Musk is forcing out qualified and experienced public servants in order to get his way and fulfill Trump’s goal of eviscerating the federal budget, including potentially by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits for millions of Americans. Perhaps instead of four branches of government we are really looking at only one — headed by two individuals? Just remember, Trump’s first lie of his second term was the oath of office.

Elon Musk revealed that he and Trump were in agreement to shut down the foreign aid agency known as USAID, telling employees not to report to work, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio then declaring that he had taken over as acting administrator of the agency, ending its largely independent status. Without warning, senior officials and hundreds of civil servants have been suspended and eliminated, though Rubio said many of the programs would continue, even as he blamed the radical change on “worker insubordination.” Many USAID employees and Democratic lawmakers gathered in front of the agency’s headquarters in DC, denouncing the shutdown as illegal because Congress created, and funds, the agency as a distinct entity. Over the past several months the omnipresent Musk has gained a growing list of critics, but a voice from his past has been brutal in an analysis of his former confidant’s character. CEO Philip Low, of NeuroVigil, a Bay Area startup, posted on Facebook that Musk tried to undermine the business even after investing in it, because of his own rival business, NeuraLink. Low’s post has less to do with the two enterprises, which only have similar products with different marketing bases, than about personality, as he terms Musk to be “a total miserable self-loathing poser.” Low claims that the 14-year relationship of the two allowed them to share personal problems, with both men having violent fathers who lost their fortunes, both being bullied in high school, then ending up in similar environments in Silicon Valley. He portrays Musk as self-centered, believing he is above everyone else, as a power hungry and cynical individual who persuades people toward far-right political leanings world-wide. Low attributes Musk’s two Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration festivities, to his being a thrill-seeker who knew exactly what he was doing, as he tried to ingratiate himself to the Nazis in the MAGA movement. He says Musk was likely disappointed when the audience didn’t return his gestures to show his complete control and domination over them — and raising his leverage over Trump in the process. The post ends with Low’s warning that Musk readers should stop working for him, not supporting Tesla and X, saying, “He only wants to control, dominate, and use you — don’t let him. Cut him and his businesses out of your, and your loved ones, lives entirely. Unless you happen to be a self-loathing loser, too, he will be much more afraid of you than you should be of him.” But as Rex Huppke posted on Bluesky, “These are not good people. And the time to panic is right freakin’ now!” 

The Little-Day-One-Dictator (you think he meant to say One-A-Day-Dictator?) still has his greedy territorial expansionist gears turning in his head from Canada to Panama to Greenland to Gaza, which can become the Riviera of the Middle East after ethnic cleansing, bomb and land mine clearance, and bulldozing for removal of megatons of debris from demolished buildings. No mention of a wall to prevent residents from returning, or to keep spies, saboteurs and bomb squads at bay. Senator Amy Klobuchar, speaking at the Washington Press Club Foundation Annual Congressional Dinner, mentioned that the organization dates back to a time when the US was comprised of only 46 states, sarcastically joking that the US would be adding more states thanks to Trump’s roving eye to other lands. “Speaking of Greenland, there’s a question for you that I want to pose. What’s the difference between Greenland and Donald Trump? Greenland is not for sale!” she gloatingly cracked. This was met with a chorus of boos from the GOPers in the audience, to whom she said, “OK, to any Republican and Trump administrators out there, who might want to throw eggs at me for that joke — you can’t, because they’re too expensive.” ‘Late Show‘ host Stephen Colbert suggested that Trump probably wants to change Canada’s name should it become our 51st state, and since it’s just above Minnesota, it could be called Maxisota. Then again, Trump might want to investigate leftover names suggested by Thomas Jefferson in 1784, for some of the western territories, a grid divided into sixteen regions. Jefferson submitted ten names, two of which, Michigania and Illinoia survived with editing, but other baroque offerings as Pelisipia, Assensipia, and Cherronesus only made it into the circular file. The Donald will probably grace any new states with names based on his DEI hires: Don, Eric and Ivanka.

President Trump has chosen his next battle to be with paper straws, saying an executive order would “end the push for Paper Straws. BACK TO PLASTIC!” People posting on media could hardly believe it: “This takes an executive order?”, “Clutching at straws, literally,” “Focusing on what really matters!”, “Politics aside, this genuinely reads like a toddler upset at school lunch,” “This is what you voted for?”, and “Congrats, America!” With the flood of executive orders so massive that Trump can’t remember them all, a Congressman said, “They’re running low on squirrels they hope we chase.”

Satirist Andy Borowitz, in his Report a few weeks ago wrote: “In a bid to reassure the nation, Pete Hegseth said if confirmed as Secretary of Defense, he will connect a breathalyzer device to the nation’s nuclear arsenal…instead of being on a car it would be on nuclear weapons. Hegseth added that he would submit to a daily phone conversation with his mother, and ‘if Mom says I don’t sound right, I won’t go near any nukes. Besides, if I’m hung over, I won’t set off anything loud.’ In a final pledge, Hegseth said, ‘I promise the American people: if I’m drunk in the morning, I’ll have someone else drive me to the Pentagon.’” In a subsequent satire, Borowitz indicates things went awry, writing: “Pete Hegseth’s tenure as Secretary of Defense got off to a wobbly start on Monday after he was arrested on suspicion of DUI for crashing an M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank into the Pentagon. The arresting officer, Harland Dorrinson, arrived at the Pentagon shortly after receiving reports of a large battle tank making figure 8s in the parking lot. Finding the smoldering Abrams protruding from the side of  the building, Dorrinson said Hegseth was ‘extremely combative when I asked him to step out of the tank.’ Hegseth was later booked, released, and driven home by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.”

Mr. Trump became the first sitting US president to attend football’s Super Bowl on February 9, and amazingly he managed to make it all about him! He erroneously chose the Kansas City Chiefs to win the game in a pre-game interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, giving high praise to quarterback Patrick Mahomes. He revived his grudge against pop singer, Taylor Swift, when she was shown on the Jumbotron and was soundly booed by Eagles fans in the stands because of her relationship with the Chiefs. Trump turned this negative reaction toward himself when he claimed she was being booed for supporting Kamala Harris in the presidential sweepstakes, saying, “MAGA is very unforgiving! Only the Chiefs had a rougher night.” Raise this man’s golden high chair before he throws another ketchup-laden plate of french fries onto the field! And where was Melania? In the cheap seats?!

UNELECTED BARNACLE, IT’S A COUP, IMPEACHMENT?

Couple of valid entries on social media last week: “They should invent a January that doesn’t drain your will to live!” Sort of fits in with some of the other mopey posts in evidence. And a perfect companion would be this: “Anyone know which wine pairs with societal collapse?” That one may be more valid when we examine what is coming to pass in DC with King Donald and the unelected co-president Elon Musk. Steve Schmidt on his The Warning blog writes that the two, along with Musk’s goons, are locking government officials out of their computers, offices and buildings as they demand access to the governments payment systems, asserting powers they have no right to assert. To which Schmidt declares, “Heil Trump! King Donald has stomped and huffed and shaken things up.” One outstanding question: Has Musk taken an oath, like the federal workers he has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution? Musk, an unelected barnacle (as Rolling Stone’s Nikki Ramirez calls him) to King Donald is now ensconced as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) despite lacking Congressional approval, being tasked by Trump to find ways to slash government spending, reduce bureaucracy, and do away with regulations. As Ramirez notes, DOGE has little legal authority to execute cuts, and no mandate to meddle with the Treasury, but his entanglement with the administration has him influencing every aspect of policy. According to The Washington Post, after Trump’s November victory, Musk and his thug team have been requesting access to payment systems under the Bureau of the Fiscal Service which controls distribution of more than $6 trillion in annual funds, such as Social Security, Medicare benefits, tax refunds, and federal salaries. Now he has crashed through the doorway with complete control.

Treasury official, Mark Mazur, told The Post, “This is a mechanical job, paying benefits, vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for non-mechanical things, at least from a career standpoint — your whole job is to pay the bills as they are due. It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.” Which calls into question why Musk/DOGE are seeking access in Trump’s hard-right takeover of the government. According to Wired magazine, Musk has been able to place three close allies at the head of the Office of Personnel Management, who has sent emails to employees encouraging them to resign, offering them several months of paid leave, but as Rolling Stone reports, “While the administration is pitching the resignation offers as ‘a nice vacation,’ they could still be forced to work.” This resignation letter is quite similar to the one Musk sent to Twitter employees after he bought the social media platform — we saw how that all went down — or came down!  Musk is getting off on his newfound power, but word is circulating that Trump’s inner circle is getting frustrated with Musk’s abuses of his proximity to the president. One Trump ally said to Politico that abuse is clear, however the president has no leverage over the situation and Elon couldn’t care less. So, here we are with the world’s richest man whose companies have grown fat on US government contracts, and now he has a greater financial interest in how the government operates than your average naturalized immigrant. Rolling Stone’s Ramirez asks, “Is it a blatant conflict of interest to have the world’s richest man continue to profit off his investments while serving in a uniquely powerful and virtually unchecked role over US policy, regulation, government spending, and investment? Yes! Will Republicans do anything to stop it? Don’t hold your breath.”

Back in November, Musk and his then-partner in DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy, laid out some of their ideas to the Wall Street Journal about their plans. First, mass firings were threatened to reduce employment by resignations to the minimum to accomplish the constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions, after which Trump could suspend worker protections to enforce a “mass head-count reduction across the federal bureaucracy.” In light of recent events, how many air traffic controllers does he think might be the absolute minimum? With help from the Supreme Court they hoped to usurp new power with would allow Trump to ignore Congress and not spend money, something called impoundment. A $500B cut in spending would target items like foreign aid and public broadcasting, already evidenced by Trump’s attempt to throttle federal grants. Some targets might have merit, such as examination of federal contracting and procurement, but when Medicare becomes a subject of discussion it gets scary, despite Trump’s pledge to protect safety net spending. As Senator Ron Wyden said, “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems. Americans don’t want an unelected and unaccountable billionaire dictating what working families can and cannot afford.” Fears are heightened that Musk and Trump’s cronies are attempting to gain authoritarian control over the government by ousting or sidelining career civil servants and undermining Congress, which has the constitutional authority to decided how the government should spend its money. Representative Pramila Jayapal wrote, “Musk is rooting around in Social Security and Medicare payment systems. He’s reaching his hands into our pockets and firing anyone who tries to stop him. This reeks of corruption — it must stop.” Senator Elizabeth Warren called for this “alarming” news to be investigated by Congress.

The New York Times was told that no payments had yet been blocked and that the stated mission of DOGE is to review payments, not stop them. Musk suggested on X that he was only looking for inappropriate expenditures, but also that blocking funds might be appropriate. He went on to say that it was discovered that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments — they literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Former Treasury officials told the Times that funds are dispersed by a comparatively small staff who rely on the agencies that earmark the funds to vet them, and while there are certain automatic safeguards in place, it was not the role of Treasury to approve or reject specific payments. Lindsay Owens of Groundwork Collaborative wrote: “The Treasury system cuts the checks — Musk has infiltrated the system to stop payments. It’s a COUP!” Owens in an op-ed seen on MSNBC outlined three reasons why Musk might want to access the Treasury payment system: 1) Stop payments to certain programs in order to work around the courts’ block on the administration’s spending freeze. 2) Access list of blacklisted federal contractors in order to boost his own or friend’s companies and harm his competitors. 3) Reduce Social Security or Medicare payments as part of DOGE’s goal of cutting $2 trillion from federal spending. Owens notes that Musk isn’t “chasing these cuts for their own sake. He’s helping congressional Republicans attempt to pay for a new round of tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy — including himself.” A recent poll finding reveals that only around one-third of Americans approve of DOGE and that 52% disapprove of Musk. Olivia Rosane of Common Dreams offers, “If Musk is going to continue running the government like one of his failed businesses, perhaps someone should force his ‘resignation’ too,” and as Michael Phelan of Social Security Works says, “We need to raise holy hell to STOP this.” Asha Rangrappa of The Freedom Academy offers, “In the end, ending this insanity will likely be up to us, the people. Perhaps when people see that their own bottom line is under the control of an unelected, unconfirmed, foreign national billionaire who has no allegiance to the US government, it will spur action in the streets.”

The non-profit Free Speech for People is heading up a new nonpartisan campaign to solicit support for President Trump’s removal from office — ‘Impeach Trump Again’ — with a report that over 100,000 signatures have been obtained on their petition. The group is encouraging Congress to launch an impeachment investigation, claiming that their petition shows “widespread support,” and that the public is unwilling to accept a King Trump. “We need bold leaders in Congress willing to stand up and hold Trump accountable for his abuses of power and initiate an inquiry,” said director Alexandra Flores-Quilty. Sadly, we are in short supply of bold leaders. A post on Quora asks if Trump can be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, drawing this reply: “Last time I checked, it is explicitly illegal to bury someone anywhere who is still alive. However, former presidents CAN be buried there, though it could contaminate the ground, insulting every other human being interred in that sacred ground. Arlington is primarily for military veterans who served honorably, veterans who were decorated during their service; so since Trump is a cowardly, lying draft dodger who has insulted, demeaned, and degraded veterans, having his body anywhere around that hallowed ground would be a slap in the face to every veteran and their family who had ever served this country.”

At this writing, the country and the world, are reeling from Trump’s calamitous misadventure of implementing tariffs upon our three biggest trading partners: Canada, Mexico, and China, all of whom have promised retaliatory measures. Canada and Mexico said their responses would be implementation of their own tariffs against the US, with China saying it would file a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization and enact “necessary countermeasures.” Like taking over the Pana-MAGA Canal? Trump gave a start date of last Tuesday, pronouncing the levies would remain in place “until the crisis is alleviated,” meaning the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants into this country. Tit-for-tat tariffs from this trio of trading partners could send prices soaring for consumers in the US and world-wide. A press conference by Prime Minister Trudeau indicated Canada would levy tariffs on Tuesday on $30B worth of US goods, with additional tariffs in the coming weeks “to allow Canadian companies and supply chains to seek alternatives.” Trudeau said the long history of the US-Canada alliance should lead to a better path without Trump’s punishment, while warning US citizens that this move “will have real consequences for you, the American people.” He also encouraged Canadians to opt for Canadian-made goods over American products, or changing summer vacation plans to stay in Canada. No comments were forthcoming from the White House.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum posted on X that she has instructed the implementation of Plan B, which has been standing by in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs. The plan includes “tariffs and non-tariffs in defense of Mexico’s interests,” but no details were announced. Sheinbaum slammed the tariffs, saying in her X post, “We categorically reject the White House’s slander of the Government of Mexico alleging alliances with criminal organizations, as well as any intention to interfere in our territory,” adding, “Mexico not only does not want fentanyl to reach the US, it does not want it reach anywhere. Therefore, if the US wants to combat the criminal groups that traffic drugs and generate violence, we must work together in a comprehensive manner, but always under the principles of shared responsibility, mutual trust, collaboration and above all, respect for sovereignty, which is non-negotiable. Coordination, yes; subordination, no.” Trump is probably still wrestling with his Webster’s to understand what she posted, or perhaps texting Elon for answers, but then again, he probably doesn’t care.

China’s filing a lawsuit with the WTO may have little effect since the US has blocked the appointment of appellate judges to the organization for years, which leaves it unable to mediate international trade disputes. Therefore, China’s action may only serve to gather international support against Trump’s tariffs. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement, “China calls on the US to correct its mistakes, work toward mutual understanding, engage in candid dialogue, strengthen cooperation, and manage differences on the basis of equality, mutual benefit, and mutual respect. Additional tariffs are not constructive and bound to affect and harm the counternarcotics cooperation between the two sides in the future.” Of course, none of those words and phrases are in Trump’s vocabulary and it’s way too late for him to implement any of them personally, or in his business practices, or in his destruction of the federal government. Both China and Mexico say they have taken steps to address the flow of fentanyl and to stem international flow of the precursor ingredients, so it’s up to the US to address its own domestic demand for the drug. The Chinese government may try to side-step a trade war, since it is still struggling to recover from the COVID pandemic, but pressure will likely mount, giving the Chinese government the impetus to respond, using a new December 1 law which gives it explicit authority to do so.

As for the tariffs, Trump says, “We will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid, we are a country that is now being run with common sense — and the results will be spectacular!!!” No one knows exactly what the impact will be on American consumers, nor how long the tariffs will be in play, but if they should remain if effect for a long period, Trump’s “pain” will become a solid reality. Your next cup of coffee may be more expensive, with prices increasing after Trump and Colombia had a spat over deportation flights — the president reversed a 25% tariff on the country when an agreement was reached. So even though the tariff never happened, coffee markets were rattled by the aspect of tariffs, resulting in price increases in coffee futures. Coffee prices have been increasing over the past several months due to bad weather which has reduced growers’ yield, so Trump’s threat threw unexpected uncertainty into the global trade system which is racing to keep up with increasing demand. Producers will probably continue to gradually increase prices simply as a hedge against the possibility of tariffs, though companies such as Keurig, Starbucks and Nestle lock in prices years in advance which will make them immune, for awhile, to the dynamics of the Trump administration.

About Trump’s tariffs (“the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” he says) announcement, journalist SV Dáte wrote that Trump announced he has increased taxes on Americans by $297B a year. Conservative Bill Kristol said, “If only we had a body, with democratic legitimacy and powers conferred by a Constitution, that could overrule a president who seeks to impose arbitrary tariffs and to deport people who fled here to escape oppression. It could be called the Congress of the United States.” Economist Marc Lévesque chimed in, “So, it’s official. Trump just violated the Canada-US-Mexico Free Trade agreement that he himself signed.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called Trump’s tariffs “a self-inflicted wound to the American economy.” Trump posted, “We pay billions of dollars to subsidize Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have. Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada…and NO TARIFFS!” To this post, Steve Schmidt says, “My friends, this is vile. In fact, it is evil. They are the words of a Putin or Xi. They are the words of international gangsterism and thuggery. These are the words of a Hitler. They are the words of the president of the United States, and they are repugnant. These are the words of expansionism and tyranny. These are the words of derangement.” Schmidt’s essay is lengthy, but poignantly he declares, “Why is this happening?…it is happening because the American Republic is collapsing. It is being destroyed from within, as Lincoln predicted in 1838: ‘…if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher…'”

We might reflect on the words of Ronald Reagan who said, “Our peaceful trading partners aren’t our enemies; they are our allies. We should beware of he demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag.” Or perhaps as Steve Schmidt says, “Fascism has come to America and it is wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” And as Trump says, “Let them eat cake!”

With markets and businesses awakening on Monday morning to the advent of the tariffs, stocks fell, energy costs surged, but word of an agreement from Trump and Mexico’s Sheinbaum to delay tariffs with Mexico agreeing to place 10,000 troops at the border, securing it from migrants, seemed to calm nerves — for now. Same goes for Canada: a 30 day reprieve with promised border security. But don’t relax just yet! That sound of hammering and objects hitting the floor and doors being slammed? That’s Elon Musk and his goons chipping away at our government. Gosh, if only we had a body we might call the Congress of the United States!

ZORRO IMPERSONATOR, WHOPPER OVERLOAD, BEYONCÉ VICTORY

Has it been four years yet? That’s a question raised by a poster on X at the end of an exhausting week of Trump and his antics following his inauguration. It’s certainly a worthy query as many of us will agree. The Crazy Eight website evaluated it with, “In his inaugural speech Donald Trump called for a ‘Revolution of Common Sense,’ where apparently truth is stranger than fiction, and reality is more alarming than satire…His first priorities? Helping everyday Americans struggling to pay their bills by renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America AND profiting billions from his new cryptocurrency! Ain’t that swell?”

Buzzfeed selected a few of its favorite Tweets of the Week: “I don’t care who’s trans, bro — I want doctor’s appointments for $5”; “There’s not going to be lower grocery prices, you stupid slut”; “Being a person with a brain and someone who can read during this period of history is really, really difficult”; “Nobody is telling men they’re losers, and that’s the problem”; “I’d rather get a pap smear from Edward Scissorhands than watch any second of the inauguration”; “Melania’s looking like a smooth criminal”; Referring to the announcement that Trump’s inauguration would be moved indoors, one poster asks, “And, ya’ll want to invade Canada?”; “My BF keeps muttering to himself, ‘We had to get through Hoover to get to FDR,’ like it’s a prayer.” Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update anchor, Michael Che, showing a Tesla Cybertruck picture, said, “Musk can’t be a Nazi, because the Nazis made nice cars.”

The TV ratings are available for the inauguration, and Trump has to be disappointed that no Sean Spicer has stepped up to convince the world that records were broken. According to The Wrap, combined cable and network news totals amount to 24.59M, with Fox News unsurprisingly accounting for 10.3M, nearly half of the viewership, between 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Morgan Stephens of Daily Kos observes “that more people watched Beyoncé’s Christmas halftime show than the 47th president’s inauguration.” Trump’s viewer ratings are well below his own 2017 inauguration (and Joe Biden’s in 2021), garnering only 7.2% of the US population to see that he didn’t place his hand on the Bible and air-kissing Melania in her Zorro hat. Stephens attributes the dip in viewership to general apathy, despondency, Trump fatigue or his polarizing presence, combined with loss of appetite for his theatrics.

Trump made it clear that his second term will be more of the same, as he added to his collection of false and misleading claims, estimated by the Washington Post that during his first Oval Office occupancy he spewed 30,573 whoppers. One critic dubbed him “America’s Liar-In-Chief,” as he launched into his inaugural address about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles, the Panama Canal, his 2020 stolen election, and the January 6 insurrection. His brazen mendacity is not only habitual, but strategic as we see within the MAGA mob’s tactics. A former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, says, “It’s a continuation of Donald Trump’s brand. He knows that sunlight is the best disinfectant, so he’s going to continue to lie to mask what he’s doing. If you can undermine institutions and credible sources of information, you can get away with lying and deceiving people. We’re watching that mass delusion happen right before our eyes in the Trump administration 2.0.” During the following week with reporters, Trump continued to spew misleading assertions, wild exaggerations and blatant lies, culminating on Fox News with his explanation for the blanket pardon of the January 6 rioters and their attacks on police as “very minor incidents.”

CNN reports that Trump, in his attempt to rewrite history detailing the attack on the US Capitol, had a database detailing the array of criminal charges and successful convictions of the January 6 rioters removed from the Department of Justice’s website. That searchable database served as an easily accessible repository of all cases prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia — which declined to comment! Removal of the site coincides with Trump’s decision to pardon all convicted defendants, plus early release of 14 members of far-right extremist groups, including 10 convicted of seditious conspiracy, and a request to dismiss more than 300 unresolved cases. This ‘whitewashing’ of the mob attack wipes out cases against some of the most violent rioters who injured police, and was celebrated in particular by the pardoned Brandon Straka for his role on J6. Straka proclaimed it a “huge victory,” saying that the site was a “weapon of harassment” used by the government to make life impossible for its “targets from J6.”

Acting US attorney, Ed Martin, known for his organizing the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement and being involved in financing the 2021 Trump rally on the Ellipse, is given credit for removing the DOJ website. Straka had campaigned for the site’s removal because the information was available to potential employers, landlords, and social or business contacts, complicating the lives of the J6 participants. Details of the J6 cases are still accessible on the DOJ’s website in the form of press releases about charges and convictions, and are available through court records and services such as Pacer.

David Smith in the Guardian reports that even the White House website has been compromised, with a Trump biography claim that a 2024 “landslide victory defines the American success story.” Omitting the ‘big lie’ regarding the 2020 election, his victory came “a second time despite several assassination attempts and the unprecedented weaponization of law fare against him.” While fact-checkers attempt to hold Trump to account, Republicans are less willing than ever to correct his falsehoods in this now fragmented media environment, with MAGA influencers only too eager to amplify them. Kurt Bardella, Democratic strategist and media relations consultant, says, “If there’s any lasting impact from Donald Trump’s time on the political stage, it’s that we live in a world now where you can just make up your own facts, and truth is however you decide to bend it. There are content creators and content machines that exist solely for the purpose of laundering anything that Donald Trump says and making it true to a certain degree. It’s a play off the Richard Nixon quote: ‘If the president does it, it is legal; well, if the president says it, it’s true. That’s the world that we live in now.'”

Sara Boboltz of B writes, “as President Donald Trump settles into his second term and world leaders ponder what the next four years have in store, some British officials who have dealt with him in the past are sharing words of advice: ‘Expect chaos, but also laughs.’ Workers in the British prime minister’s office during Trump’s first term told Politico EU that small crowds of civil servants and advisers would gather to listen in on phone calls with Trump. ‘The calls were extraordinary — brilliant. Everyone was in there with tears of laughter because they were hilarious.’ Two listeners said that whatever agenda had been planned ‘would quite quickly fall by the wayside’ and the calls ‘were never what you wanted them to be about, broadly.’ Americans are already well-versed in Trump’s meandering style of speech, surprising gaffes and penchant for jumping between topics at whim, which he calls ‘the weave’ with his claims that he always ends up hitting his intended points in the end. One person contributed, ‘Yes, he will say some mad or unpredictable things, but there’s almost always an underlying argument or basis for a negotiation, and if the conversation goes south, Trump is always happy to discuss his UK golf courses.'”

British satirical magazine, ‘Private Eye,’ printed its latest cover with an apology to Donald Trump, headlined ‘Donald Trump: An Apology.’ The document reads: “In common with all other media organisations, we may in the past have given the impression that we thought Mr. Trump was a sleazy, deranged, orange-faced man-baby who was a threat to democracy and who should be in jail rather than the White House. We now realise, in the light of his return to supreme power, that he is in fact a political colossus, the voice of sanity, a champion of liberty, a model of probity and the saviour of the Western world. He is also slim, handsome and young. We would like to apologize unreservedly for any confusion caused by our previous statements and thank President Trump for his kind invitation to give him 94 million pounds to attend his inauguration event.” In smaller print at the bottom of the page, it reads: “This statement has not been fact-checked.”

James Austin Johnson, portraying Trump on Saturday Night Live said, “Just like my founding fathers, I am creating a new country as well. And just like them, we’re doing it very white-ly. Workplaces must go back to looking like the TV show ‘The Office.’ Mostly white people but with one funny Black guy who’s having a really bad time.” Johnson/Trump called his inauguration “a tremendous success,” being held inside “due to cold and fear. We got a lot of surprise guests, like Melania!” He pointed out the presence of his billionaire buddies, “Zuck, Bezos, and of course, Elon. We love Elon, but to quote some of his own children, ‘I do not want him in my life.” Johnson/Trump shared his views about only two genders, “one to work, and one to cook. We’re going back to common sense in regard to gender. No more makeup on men, unless you need it to be president.” On his cabinet appointees, he boasted, “We’re filling my cabinet with some of the best people. They’re all very good except for most of them. How great is Pete Hegseth? He said he’s going to stop drinking if he gets the job, and that’s all I needed to hear.” And, “Who would’ve thought it easier to get a cease-fire in Gaza than lower the price of eggs?” Satirist Andy Borowitz writes that Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman is asking Trump for a pardon out of ‘professional courtesy,’ claiming that he was a DC riot participant. Ready to turn over a new leaf, Borowitz says Guzman promises to stop selling drugs and focus on crypto, while acknowledging he is a controversial figure but, “I’m not some total maniac like Hegseth.”

Stephen Colbert of the ‘Late Show’ ripped into Republicans who showed absolutely no outrage with Trump’s pardoning of 1,500 January 6 rioters who attacked the US Capitol, some of whom assaulted several police officers. Colbert quoted House Speaker Mike Johnson with saying it was not his “place” to question Trump’s decision. “Not your place? They attacked the House of Representatives! That is literally YOUR place!” The Tonight Show host, Jimmy Fallon, says Trump’s granting of clemency took his allies by surprise, with one adviser revealing the president simply said, “Release them all.” Must have been too much trouble to read all those pages of names which would keep him away from his grifting. Fallon noted, “At this point the only prisoner Trump hasn’t released is Melania.”