I’m not sure what the federal trespassing law might be or if it exists whether anyone can say that the mayor was violating it, but this is an escalation either way.
And guess who gave the order?
That would be the Acting U.S. Attorney of New Jersey. I have no doubt that she cleared it with Dear Leader. They’re very close.
The UK asterisk is especially rich since we didn’t even have a trade deficit with them, we had a surplus which means that the UK should be hitting us hard with tariffs by Trump’s logic.
And then there’s this. The only thing they did accomplish was putting American car manufacturers at a disadvantage.
A group representing General Motors (GM.N), opens new tab, Ford (F.N), opens new tab and Stellantis (STLAM.MI), opens new tab blasted President Donald Trump’s trade deal announced with the United Kingdom, saying it would harm the U.S. auto sector.
British carmakers will be given a quota of 100,000 cars a year that can be sent to the United States at a 10% tariff rate, almost the total Britain exported last year, compared to 25% for Mexico and Canada and nearly all other countries.
“Under this deal, it will now be cheaper to import a UK vehicle with very little U.S. content than a USMCA compliant vehicle from Mexico or Canada that is half American parts,” the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents the Detroit Three automakers, said on Thursday. “This hurts American automakers, suppliers, and auto workers.”
U.S. automakers are concerned this could be a template for other agreements that could put vehicles they assemble in Canada or Mexico at a disadvantage.
Great job Making America Great Again, Trump…
Right. Let’s trust the amateurs, the hucksters and the “do your own research” fools to be in charge of scientific research. Maybe we can find some witch doctors and voodoo priests to weigh in as well. Lord knows we don’t need any educated, knowledgeable scientists involved. They’re totalitarians. Because they think you should use the scientific method for research instead of the gut feelings of wellness gurus and conspiracy theorists.
Let’s try a little human sacrifice and see if that works, shall we?
I feel like I dodged a bullet as an older person by not getting COVID during those horrible first and second waves. I know people who did, some of whom have never been the same. Some died. These same people didn’t want anyone to wear masks or socially distance and if they’d been in charge at the time, the death toll would have been even more monstrous. As it was the U.S. alone lost 1.2 million people.
I’ve said before that I feel as if the vaccine gave me my life back. When I finally got the bug it was perfectly manageable with Paxlovid and I am convinced that my ability to get the vaccine over these past few years was key. I continued to wear a mask (I still do when in airports because I learned that I could avoid all kinds of illnesses by doing that) and I keep my eye on the surges as they happen. But the scientific advances that came about during the pandemic were literally life-savers and the idea that this worm-addled weirdo is being allowed to run roughshod over medical science because we elected a similarly addled moron to the presidency is almost too much to bear.
Casey Means … Donald Trump’s new nominee for surgeon general, announced yesterday, is a Stanford-trained doctor who is well-spoken and telegenic. Most important, she clearly knows how to draw attention to health issues. Good Energy, the book she published last year with her brother, Calley (who, by the way, is a special adviser in the Trump administration), is Amazon’s No. 1 best seller in its “nutrition” and “aging” categories. She regularly posts on Instagram, where she has more than 700,000 followers.
In many other ways, however, Means is far from perfect. A leading voice in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America healthy again” movement, she has a habit of trafficking in pseudoscience and at times can be hyperbolic, to put it lightly. Means has said that America’s diet-related health issues could lead to a “genocidal-level health collapse” and that “all of us are a little bit dead while we are alive” because of what she calls “metabolic dysfunction.” She has also written about taking part in full-moon ceremonies and about how talking to trees helped her find love—though she admitted that the rituals were “out there.” And Means (who didn’t respond to a request for comment) has used her platform to promote “mitochondrial health” gummies, algae-laden “energy bits,” and vitamins she described as her “immunity stack.”
Means was not Trump’s top choice for surgeon general. His first nominee, Janette Nesheiwat, was pulled out of contention yesterday amid allegations that she had misrepresented her medical training. Presuming the Senate confirms Means as the next surgeon general, she will be another one of RFK Jr.’s ideological compatriots who have joined him in the Trump administration. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary are both also skeptics of the public-health establishment. Earlier this week, Vinay Prasad, another prominent medical contrarian, assumed a top job at the FDA. Now the “MAHA” takeover of the federal health agencies is all but complete. Earlier today, Trump told reporters that he tapped Means “because Bobby thought she was fantastic.”
I think we’re literally entering a new dark age.
Thanks, I need that.
And to think tens of millions of people take him seriously about anything. Lol!
One of my biggest gripes about Trump’s first term was the inability of the media or the congressional Democrats to wrap their minds around the flagrant corruption that was happening right before their eyes. Yes, there were stories written and some investigations undertaken. We all learned what the word “emoluments” means. But it seemed that there was no way to effectively deal with a politician so shameless that he didn’t even try to hide his conflicts of interest so nothing was ever done to hold him to account.
As we learned back then, the president and the vice president are not subject to the conflict of interest laws that apply to every other government official and employee. The idea was that the president should be able to act in the national interest even if it should benefit them personally. (Surely, Mar-a-Lago meet and greets for hundreds of thousands of dollars are in the national interest, right?) Various entities did sue Trump for violating the aforementioned prohibition on presidents accepting emoluments and gifts from foreign governments but the courts dragged their feet as usual and by the time it got to the Supreme Court Trump was out of office that the court dismissed the cases as being moot. Trump is very lucky that way.
The government spent massive amounts of taxpayer money ferrying him around to his commercial resorts where he essentially sold access to the members and promoted his properties in the U.S. and around the world every chance he got. He owned a hotel in Washington D.C. that served as a meeting place for political players and foreign actors who spent lavishly to curry favor with the president. One ethics organization called it a “sinkhole of corruption.” Foreign governments rented out whole floors in Trump office buildings and left them empty.
Trump’s son-in-law and middle east envoy Jared Kushner made a massive $2 billion deal with the Saudi Arabia Sovereign Wealth Fund upon his departure from government and Donald Trump somehow left office $2.4 billion richer than when he came in.
Politics were very lucrative for the Trump family from 2016 to 2020. But all that was chicken feed compared to what they’re doing now. This time it’s no holds barred, straight-up grift and corruption in the billions, featuring foreign governments, sleazy scam artists, and a big play in the arcane world of crypto finance.
Trump is still promoting his properties every chance he gets. This term, however, he’s also involved with LIV golf, which is sponsored by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund group, and holds tournaments in the U.S. at Trump’s golf courses. Trump makes money from the tournaments as an investor and also as the host. It’s a nice little grift and it gives the Saudi sponsors an easy way to grease the president of the United States’ palms. But that’s nothing compared to the rest of Trump’s ongoing involvement in the middle east.
Trump’s son Eric has been all over the region putting together real estate deals with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, countries which are very intimately involved with U.S. foreign policy. Eric Lipton and various other reporters at the N.Y. Times have been tracking these ventures and others and reported last week that there are 6 projects now planned in the middle east in partnership with a firm with close ties to the Saudi royal family:
“They always arrive at the word ‘yes,’ which is a beautiful thing,” Eric Trump said while in Dubai this past week, saying that it took only a month to get the required real estate permits from the government there. “They do it quickly.”
Gosh, I wonder why? Similarly, Don Jr is running around Eastern Europe eating pig with prime ministers and striking deals for new Trump hotels (along with Jared Kushner) in government properties — governments which have many reasons to curry favor with the American president.
But that’s not where the real action is these days. The Trump sons are heavily involved in crypto finance and are using every bit of their access to make some serious big bucks. Lipton and company have reported extensively on their play with the presidential meme coin called $TRUMP, which is basically a sad con that has resulted in a whole lot of ordinary people losing a bunch of money while Trump and a few lucky investors made a bundle. And now they’ve taken it to another level of corruption by holding an auction in which whomever buys the most coins gets to have dinner with Trump and the people at the very top get a tour of the White House. What a sweet way for some rich guys to funnel money directly into Trump’s pocket. It’s so much more convenient than a paper bag full of cash.
And then there’s the Trump crypto company World Liberty Financial. The company’s co-founders, aside from the two Trump sons, are a couple of small time entrepreneurs and the son of real estate magnate Steve Witkoff, Trump’s foreign envoy to Russia, Israel, Iran, everywhere. They have their hands in a number of different areas of the crypto world, but World Liberty is primarily trying to get a specific kind of crypto currency called a stablecoin officially recognized as a functioning part of the financial sector.
Trump called on congress to pass legislation, called the GENIUS Act, to do just that and immediately thereafter World Liberty started selling their own stable coin called USD1, and it immediately went through the roof netting the Trumps another bundle. At the time, it was assumed that the congress was going to pass the law but since the Times’ reporting, Democrats who’d been backing it balked and yesterday it failed in the Senate. The smell of Trump being both the regulator and the regulatee was just too pungent.
I expect they’ll keep trying, however. This is a huge play by the Trumps, maybe the biggest they’ve ever done, and they won’t give up. (If you’re interested in a thorough rundown of all these crypto deals, this interview with Eric Lipton by Terri Gross on NPR is very informative.)
Meanwhile, the administration has completely pulled back pretty much all regulation of the industry and stopped enforcement against a number of companies, some of which are partners of World Liberty. It’s good to have friends in high places.
Apparently, the Trumpers in D.C. have really been missing the old Trump Hotel which the family sold after they left town in 2020, so Don Jr and a few partners decided to open a private club to fill the void. For the small membership fee of $500,000 you can join “The Executive Club” and hob nob with all the Trump insiders and those who are willing to spread their cash around for access and special treatment. One member told Lipton that it’s a “safe place” for the Trump people who are not welcome in liberal Washington to gather and relax. Administration officials like David Sacks, Trump’s crypto adviser, are founding members.
There’s so much grift going on that it’s honestly hard to tell where the Trumps begin and the government ends in this term. One can only imagine what might be coming in the trade talks as companies and countries appeal to Trump for carve outs. There are already reports of countries being strong armed to buy Elon Musk’s Starlink if they want the tariffs lifted. That’s likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
This term there are no more pretenses. If you want to work with the United States of America be prepared to pay the Trump family and their associates for the privilege. Better bring your checkbook — or your crypto wallet. That’s how business is done now in the shining city on a hill.
Salon
“Your department is out of control,” began Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) as he tore into Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during his Senate Appropriations Committee opening statement on Thursday. Murphy is the committee vice chair.
Transcript of his opening statement (video above) from Murphy’s website:
MURPHY: “Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Secretary, thank you for being here. I’m sorry that I missed your call yesterday, and I look forward to working closely with you.
“I say this with seriousness and respect, but your department is out of control. You are spending like you don’t have a budget. You are on the verge of running out of money for the fiscal year. You are illegally refusing to spend funds that have been authorized by this Congress and appropriated by this committee. You are ignoring the immigration laws of this nation, implementing a brand-new immigration system that you have invented that has little relation to the statutes that you are required – that you are commanded – to follow as spelled out in your oath of office. You are routinely violating the rights of immigrants who may not be citizens, but whether you like it or not, have constitutional and statutory rights when they reside in the United States. Your agency acts as if laws don’t matter, as if the election gave you some mandate to violate the Constitution and the laws passed by this Congress. It did not give you that mandate. You act as if your disagreement with the law – or even the public’s disagreement with the law – is relevant and gives you the ability to create your own law. It does not give you that ability.
“Let’s start with your spending. You’re on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE, but the Constitution and the federal law doesn’t allow you to spend more money than you’ve been given, or to invent money.
“And this obsession with spending at the border, as the Chairwoman mentioned, has left the country unprotected elsewhere. The security threats to the United States are higher, not lower, than before Trump came to office. To fund the border, you have illegally gutted spending for cybersecurity. As we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation. You have withdrawn funds for disaster prevention. Storms are going to kill more people in this country because of your illegal withholding of these funds. Your myopia about the border, fueled by President Trump’s prejudice against people who speak a different language, has shattered many of this country’s most important defenses.
“Now let’s talk about the impoundments. When Congress appropriates funds for a specific purpose, the administration has no discretion as to whether to spend or not spend that money, unless you go through a very specific process with this committee. Let me give you two of many instances of this illegal impoundment. The first is a shelter and services program. Senator Britt may want to zero that account out, but that account is funded, and it was funded in a bipartisan way. You don’t like the program. Your policy is to treat migrants badly. I think that that’s abhorrent, but it doesn’t matter that you don’t like the program. You cannot cancel spending in this program, and you cannot use the funds, as you have, to fund other things, like ICE. You have also canceled citizenship and integration grants, which help lawful, permanent residents become citizens, helping them take the citizenship test. I know your goal is to try to make life as hard as possible for immigrants, but that goal is not broadly shared by the American public. That’s why Congress, in a bipartisan way, for decades, has funded this program to help immigrants in this country become citizens.
“Now let’s talk about why encounters at the southern border are down so much. This is clearly going to be your primary talking point today. You will tell us that it represents a success. But the primary reason why encounters are down is because you are brazenly violating the law every hour of every day. You are refusing to allow people showing up at the southern border to apply for asylum. I acknowledge that you don’t believe that people should be able to apply for asylum, but you don’t get to choose that. The White House does not get to choose that. The law requires you to process people who are showing up at the border and who claim asylum. Why? Because our asylum law is a bipartisan commitment, an effort to correct for our nation’s unconscionable decision to deny entry to Jews to this country who were being hunted and killed by the Nazis. Our nation, Republicans and Democrats, decided – wrote it into law – that we would not repeat that horror ever again, and thus we would allow for people who were fleeing terror and torture to come here, arrive at the border, and make a case for asylum.
“Finally, let’s talk about these disappearances. In an autocratic society, people who the regime does not like, or people who are protesting the regime, they are just often picked up off the street, spirited away, sometimes to open-ended detention, sometimes they are never seen again. What you are doing, both to individuals who have legal rights to stay here, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or students, who are just protesting Trump’s policies, is immoral. And to follow the theme, it is illegal. You have no right to deport a student visa holder with no due process simply because they have spoken in a way that offends the President. You cannot remove migrants who a court has given humanitarian protection from removal. Now, reports suggest that you’re planning to remove immigrants with no due process and send them to prisons in Libya. Libya is in the middle of a civil war. It is subject to a level four travel advisory, meaning we tell American citizens never to travel to Libya. We don’t have an embassy there, because it is not safe for our diplomats. Sending migrants with pending asylum claims into a war zone just because it’s cruel is so deeply disturbing.
“Listen, I understand that my Republican colleagues on this committee don’t view the policy the way that I do. My Republican colleagues do not share my level of concern for the way that this administration treats immigrants. That’s fine. But what I don’t understand is why we do not have consensus, in the Senate and on this committee, on the decision by this administration to impound the spending that we have decided together to allocate in defense of this nation. We as an appropriations committee, we work interminable hours to write and pass a budget. This budget is really hard to write and pass. And so we make ourselves irrelevant when we allow the administration to ignore what we have decided. And then, when we look the other way when the administration rounds up immigrants who are here illegally and have committed no offenses worthy of detainment, we also do potential, irreversible damage to the Constitution. These should not be partisan concerns. Destroying the power of Congress, eroding individuals’ constitutional rights–this should matter to both parties. Madam Secretary, thank you for being here and I look forward to your testimony.”
Here is an excerpt from Murphy’s questioning, again from his website. He asked Noem if she believes she has the authority to detain or deport U.S. citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. Noem answered with a single word: “No.”
Murphy asked if she believes her department has the authority to detain or deport legal permanent residents of the U.S. over their exercising those same free speech rights to express political opinions the administration dislikes. Noem hedged and hedged again, deploying word salad about what constitutes political speech and what the administration determines is “affiliation with a foreign terrorist [organization].”
MURPHY: “I assume that you have read the Supreme Court decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia?”
NOEM: “Yes.”
MURPHY: “That court decision requires the administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador. Can you describe the steps that you’ve taken to facilitate this release, and specifically can you answer as to whether you’ve reached out to your counterpart in El Salvador to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release?”
NOEM: “Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador and should never have been in this country and will not be coming back to this country. There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again. If he were to come back we would immediately deport him again because he is a terrorist, he’s a human smuggler, and he is a wife beater.”
MURPHY: “You have read the Supreme Court decision. Does the Supreme Court decision not require you to facilitate the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia?”
NOEM: “The Trump Administration is complying with all court orders and judges’ orders.”
MURPHY: “Does the Supreme Court order require you to facilitate the return of Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Yes or no?”
NOEM: “Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador. It is up to the president of El Salvador to make the decision.”
MURPHY: “You’re a defendant in the case.”
NOEM: “It has been a big topic of conversation between all of us, between the countries. When the president visited the United States of America, it was discussed and talked about there. The president has been very clear on this issue, as the Secretary of State and I have as well. Abrego Garcia is not a citizen of this country and is a dangerous individual who doesn’t belong here. “
MURPHY: “The discussion ends when the Supreme Court rules 9-0 that you have to facilitate his release. And the fact that you can’t even acknowledge the wording of the order which commands you to facilitate his release and you advertise to this committee that you are going to willfully ignore the ruling–that is incredibly chilling for the balance of powers in a democracy that relies on the executive branch to honor decisions made by the highest court of the land.”
I’ve always seen Murphy as pretty low-key, but looking back a decade, he’s expressed himself in ways that remind me he’s my kind of Democrat. Lately, he’s bringing heat more Democrats need to display to a jaded base.
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Scott Galloway, a podcaster and marketing expert, began his lengthy “Deadline White House” appearance on Thursday by condemning the next-level grift of the Trump 2.0 administration. The Trump family doesn’t use government to rake in money. It uses a front loader. Insider trading in Congress is nothing new, Galloway notes, but Trump’s is next-level. In the three months since the inauguration, the family has “weaponized government” to pull in a billion dollars a month. The U.S. has become a kleptocracy that would make Putin blush.”
Galloway is provocative, if not especially animated.
One might have said that America was for sale before, Galloway adds, but now it’s the whole world. What we can see is just the tip of the iceberg.
Nicole Wallace asked how we got to this place. Galloway explains it in terms of voters who feel left behind by the culture.
“This election was supposed to be a referrendum on women’s rights,” he said, but claims his data shows otherwise. The Democratic Party ignored them, he continued, citing groups that pivoted to Trump in 2024, young men in particular.
Young men “are paying the price for the unfair advantage that men of my generation received.” They are four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. The sixteen groups listed on the DNC website include Women, specifically, but do not mention men except as “young people.”
Galloway claims these groups represent 74 percent of the population, but it’s the other 26 percent who want to burn the place down that gave us an insurrectionist president. Trump aimed his pitch directly at the manosphere. Give Republicans their due. They do marketing well, said the marketing expert. Even if his supporters will be hit hardest by Trump policies.
Galloway drew lots of ire online. Especially his advocacy for members of the toxic manosphere. Trump sells a zero-sum view of the culture in which equality for historically disadvantaged or marginalized people comes at the expense of, basically, men. Especially the white men attracted to the manosphere. But the subject is “radioactive.”
I’m sure plenty of readers among the less privileged might say fuck ’em. But as a voting rights geek trying to help candidates get to 50%+1 in a political environment in which disaffected independents now outnumber Democrats, I’m looking to expand the tent not tie off the flaps. So, I’m going to chew on this some more.
“We now have a mob family running the United States,” Galloway says. “What’s worse is Michael Corleone is running the grift and Fredo is running the government.” Democrats need to remind Trump mob members that the statute of limitations is longer than the time left in the Trump 2.0 administration.
My guess is a lot of his lieutenants cannot afford the price of a Trump pardon.
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
I’m glad to see that cover was given an award. It says it all. Dark, very dark. And creepy.
For a deep dive into what brought us here, this piece from a while back by Zack Beauchamp at Vox is well worth reading.
The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?
One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.
That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.
Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.
Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.
And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.
The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.
[…]
Though “Trump was elected in fair elections,” his subsequent policy agenda amounted to “revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society” — one that attempts to replace the rules and norms that define democratic politics with something very different. Understanding America in this more textured sense, as a country under a new and confusing regime that is both democratic and not, helps us make better sense out of the Trump tariff debacle.
On the one hand, an electorate that picked Trump is getting one of Trump’s signature policies. Sometimes, in democracies, demagogues win elections — a problem so old that you can find a discussion of it in Plato’s Republic.
On the other hand, democracies rely on legal rules constraining the executive to prevent any such demagogue from becoming a dictator. In the American system, that means a complex system of constitutional checks and balances — one of which is the Constitution granting taxation powers to Congress and Congress alone. Yet instead of asking for statutory authorization to raise tariffs, Trump is exploiting broadly worded emergency legislation to do an end-run around the legislative branch.
This is what a hybrid political system looks like in practice. The United States still has free and fair elections at all levels of government, and is in that sense democratic. But elections don’t matter in the way that they’re supposed to, because the people’s representatives in Congress are not playing their constitutionally assigned policymaking role. This is the autocratic component of the current American system, one that enables the president to sabotage the global economy if he so wishes.
He looks closely at the feckless congress of course. And has this to say about the judiciary:
The judicial branch deserves some blame too. While the Supreme Court has occasionally stepped in to address presidential overreach, it has done so in a haphazard and partisan way. Moreover, it has long deferred to the president on key issues like immigration, trade, and war.
There were the internal checks like the reliance on Office of Legal Counsel, quasi independence of the Justice Department and plain old personal integrity on the part of the president and his men. But they were all voluntary norms and the reliance on them was clearly a mistake since we’ve now see what can be done by a president who doesn’t understand or care about them.
Beauchamp points out that this “hybrid” system of ours has tremendous weaknesses which Trump and his henchmen have learned how to exploit:
One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.
Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.
Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.
For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.
Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.
Like I said… dark. But it’s best to know what we’re dealing with and as I’ve pointed out so many times, and as that cover above illustrates so perfectly, we are dealing with an authoritarian who is also a circus performer and a con man. I don’t know if that combination makes him better or worse than any other autocrat but it does make him different and, I think, weaker than those others. So much depends upon people loving his act. Will they love it so much if he falls off the high wire and goes splat or gets gobbled up by a hungry lion (he forgot to feed?) We’ll see.
President Donald Trump is strongly considering installing Fox News host and former prosecutor Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The potential selection comes as Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday that Ed Martin, who is currently serving as D.C.’s interim top prosecutor, would not be taking the position permanently after losing support among top Republicans in the Senate.
An announcement about a new interim U.S. attorney could come as soon as Thursday, sources said.
Maybe he won’t end up doing it but the mere fact that he’s thinking about it says everything.
UPDATE: He did it. Jesus H. Christ…
Here’s what he had to say about his new choice for Surgeon General today, a woo-woo “wellness” influencer, conspiracy theorist and huckster:
He cares deeply about the health of America, dontcha know.
I really don’t understand why he hasn’t brought in Laura Loomer for Director of Office of Personnel Management. She’s operating as a “vetter” anyway, why not give her the top job? Maybe he could name Nick Fuentes or Kanye West for the EEOC. The Hauk Tuah girl would be a perfect nominee for a federal judgeship.
Fox News hosts, MAGA influencers and Mar-a-lago bootlickers are the only people he trusts and he believes that they are the best, smartest, most qualified people in the world because they love him. It’s demented.
Aaaand scene:
That was Iwo Jima, one of the most famous images of the war in the pacific! That war didn’t end until August of 1945, not May.
He couldn’t even put up a picture of the war in Europe to illustrate VE day. He’s that ignorant.