Yes, he’s losing it
The wheels may not be coming off the Trump administration just yet, but it’s sure starting to feel wobbly. J.D. Vance’s visit to Greenland last week was a joke. That’s not right. Vance was the joke.
Donald Trump himself is beginning to sound like a broken record.
What about car prices spiking because of his 25% tariff? “I couldn’t care less.“
What signal would it send to the world for him to take over Greenland? “I don’t really think about that; I don’t really care.”
But let’s not obscure what there is to care about. Inflation has hit cruelty futures. Cruelty was the point seven years ago. Now it’s become sadism, argues John Stoehr:
First, consider that US Attorney Pam Bondi has suggested strongly that there will be no investigation of the nation’s highest-ranking national security officials inviting a journalist to a discussion of highly classified military operations on an unsecured messaging platform.
Then consider that a longtime employee of the US Department of Homeland Security “inadvertently sent unclassified details of an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation to a journalist in late January,” according to a report by NBC News.
Days later, the employee was placed on leave pending an investigation, the officials said. She was asked to take a polygraph test and surrender her personal cellphone, which she declined. She was then notified that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said, which could keep her from working in the homeland security space again.
This is a pretty clear picture of unequal treatment before the law. As my senator, Chris Murphy, told MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, on the subject of Signalgate, but not on the DHS employee who’s being investigated: “There has to be criminal investigations as well here. If the criminal code doesn’t apply to powerful people, if it only applies to people without power, then we don’t have rule of law in this country.”
Takeaway: we don’t have rule of law in this country.
Kristi Noem’s “Frau Schmerz” performance in El Salvador got the attention she wanted. She’s running TV ads now warning non-citizens who stick a toe inside U.S. borders “we will hunt you down” if you commit “crimes against the American people.” Evidence suggests that those could be anything from entering illegally, asking for asylum, or speaking your mind.
Stoehr adds:
Andrew Sullivan had the righteous man’s reply: “These wannabe fascists publicly delight and revel in their acts of domination in a manner that even despotic regimes avoid. For the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, to posture in front of a third-world gulag, with a $50,000 Rolex on her wrist, in order to scare any brown person with a tattoo in the US, is an exercise in authoritarian pornography. It is fascistic in its essence.”
True, but it’s also sadistic.
Read the whole thing here or here.
Trump may be losing it, but we’re still at risk of losing the country. So remember this. Challenge Trump strongly (you know he admires strongly) and he backs down.
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