During a town hall meeting, when discussing Medicaid benefits, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) responds to someone: "Well, we all are going to die." pic.twitter.com/HDj0w27vHJ
The line emerged on Friday as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) attempted to defend the cuts before angry constituents during a contentious town hall. It was delivered with a smirk, and then, apparent impatience. “For heaven’s sakes, folks,” she said as the audience gasped.
It is true: Every one of us will indeed perish. But implicit in Ernst’s cavalier response on Friday is that the inevitability of death neutralizes how death comes for us. Jeopardizing health care for the most vulnerable? Why the hell not. Speeding up death for the oldest Americans by making them sicker? Well, we all are going to die.
I think that’s what’s known as a Kinsley Gaffe — when a politician accidentally says what they really believe. That attitude is typical among the MAGA types.
She’s not alone in the cruelty Olympics today:
Trump on Joe Biden, who recently announced a cancer diagnosis: "If you feel sorry for him, don't feel so sorry, because he's vicious … I really don't feel sorry for him."
The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.
I suspect the Stephen Miller types, the fully formed Nazi style fascists, actually believe that we need to cull the herd.
Joni Erst is actually a bit vulnerable in 2026. Let’s hope the Democrats there can make sure everyone sees this clip a thousand times.
If it didn’t ever occur to you that Musk was on drugs then you weren’t paying attention. The only question was what he was on and who knew about it. Apparently a lot of people knew about it. The NY Times has a blockbuster report about this morning:
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
He also took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the events.
On Oct. 5, he appeared with Mr. Trump at a rally for the first time, bouncing up and down around the candidate. That evening, Mr. Musk shared his excitement with a person close to him. “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight,” he wrote in a text message. “Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”
“This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,” Mr. Musk added about an hour later. “‘Lasers’ from space.”
Hookay….
Meanwhile, here’s the drug-addled dad of the year:
One of his former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been fighting with Mr. Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Mr. Musk is extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile gatherings that are broadcast around the world.
Ms. Boucher has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in which she and Mr. Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about the boy’s safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming his health.
[…]
By 2022, Mr. Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Ms. Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together.
But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher was furious to discover that Mr. Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world’s declining birthrates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth.
Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations.
There’s a lot more about his relationships with women. It’s not pretty.
Trump allowed this man to have access to some of America’s most closely held secrets. He took him with him all over the world and let him represent the United States. He was omnipresent for months. And, by the way, he will probably be best remembered for the deaths of millions of poor people around the globe. It’s quite a legacy.
This level of degeneracy really feels like late stage Nazism.
Long before Donald Trump ever ran for office he had a thing for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Way back in 2007 he told CNN’s told Larry King: “Look at Putin – what he’s doing with Russia – I mean, you know, what’s going on over there. I mean this guy has done – whether you like him or don’t like him – he’s doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.” And he’s always been pretty clear on specifically what that meant. In his 2011 book called “Time To Get Tough: Making America #1 Again” he wrote:
Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe. Putin has also announced his grand vision: the creation of a ‘Eurasian Union’ made up of former Soviet nations that can dominate the region. I respect Putin and the Russians but cannot believe our leader allows them to get away with so much – I am sure that Vladimir Putin is even more surprised than I am. Hats off to the Russians.”
It’s possible, of course, that Trumps’ ghostwriter put that in but assuming he ran it past Trump it appears that at least back then Trump understood Putin’s larger ambitions and didn’t seem to have a problem with them. In recent years he’s been much more cagey about Putin’s long term plan, blaming “the West” and NATO and even blaming Ukraine for failing to give Putin everything he wanted without a fight.
I think in the beginning Trump’s adoration for Putin was really just about his strongman image, which Trump loves, and also a very obvious pecuniary interest in currying favor with the man who might grease the skids for him to build a Trump Tower in Moscow just in case the whole presidential thing didn’t work out. (Little did Trump know that he could have just gone ahead and built the thing even if he was president — the boys are doing that all over the world now and nobody raises and eyebrow.)
But I think all that changed after it became clear that Russia had helped him win the 2016 election with the hacking of the Clinton campaign’s emails. His ego is so huge he took that to mean that Putin really respected him and wanted him to be president so they could work together to make great deals for their countries. Obviously that was a childish delusion but Trump has clung to it through thick and thin, even fantasizing that they had a special bond. In that humiliating scene with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the oval office he actually said:
“Let me tell you: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and ‘Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia.’ You ever hear of that deal?”
Yes, I’m sure it was very traumatic for Putin. No doubt they both cried into each other’s arms when they were alone in those one-on-one meetings although it’s probable that Putin was crying with laughter.
Trump obviously truly believed that Vladimir Putin was his friend and I think he also truly believed that he could just pick up the phone once he was elected and his buddy would congratulate him and tell him that he couldn’t wait to do a deal to end the war. As a gesture of good faith he’d probably initiate a ceasefire there and then.
Unfortunately for all concerned Trump was wrong about that as any sentient being could have told him. He was right that Putin was thrilled that he was back in the White House but only because he knew that Trump would divide the allies, favor him over Ukraine and essentially help him achieve his goal. After all, Trump had said he was a “genius” and very “savvy” for invading in the first place. He’s also extremely naive and ignorant, even after having already been president once. This was a big win for him.
Trump has spent most of his time in these first months pretending that he never said that he’d end the war in 24 hours and instead tried to muscle Zelensky into surrendering to Putin, insisting he “doesn’t have the cards.” (Apparently it hasn’t occurred to him, even now, that it’s not 1975 and Russia might not be the big powerful military giant he seems to think it is since it hasn’t managed to win in three long years.) He wanted to sweep in and just give Putin all the land he’s managed to grab, and maybe a smidge more if he really wants it, Ukraine agrees to be a vassal state to Russia, Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize and Bob’s your uncle.
Yeah, that’s not going well. Ukraine won’t surrender and Putin is basically telling Trump to pound sand. Trump keeps trying to broker a ceasefire, Zelensky says yes and Putin refuses, all the while relentlessly bombarding Ukraine.He indicates he’ll show up at peace talks if Trump comes too and then refuses to show and Trump has to back out too or look even more like an idiot. He’s playing Trump like a Stradivarius and this past week Trump seemed to realize for the first time that Vladimir isn’t the loyal best pal he thought he was.
After a two hour phone call, all Trump had to show for it was a promise that Russia would produce some kind of peace memo (which hasn’t happened) and no agreement for a ceasefire. When Trump got on the horn with European leaders right after he plaintively sighed, “I don’t think Vladimir wants peace.” What was his first clue?
Now he’s taken to threatening to take America’s ball and go home (there goes that peace prize), telling reporters that he “doesn’t know what the hell happened to Putin”, and ranting like a lunatic on Truth Social:
A Russian spokesperson said that Trump is suffering from “emotional overload.”
Russian state media responded with this:
He backed off a bit in the last day or so telling the press that he’s given Putin another two weeks (which we know is Trump-speak for “I don’t even have a concept of a plan to deal with this.”) He built his relationship with Russia on the illusion that Vladimir liked him, he really liked him. And now he’s found out that it was all just a big beautiful dream.
After all these years, it’s clear, even to him, that Putin knew a long time ago what the Wall Street traders have just figured out — TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.
Lawmakers, it seems, haven’t yet fully inhabited the 21st century, explains The New Republic. Fifty years ago, the country was “88 percent white and 90 percent Christian, and less than 5 percent of the population was foreign-born.” Most pols and businesses have figured out that those days are gone. They’ve had to:
And yet, when it comes to the family structure itself, the system (public and private) is stuck in an earlier era, one which assumes a “traditional” household made up of a married couple and their offspring. Lawmakers proudly brand themselves “pro-family,” and vow to fight for “working families.” There’s Family Day at attractions and entertainment venues, and family discounts on everything from phone service to cars, retail and college tuition. The best value for consumables is the “family-sized” version that will rot before a single person can finish it. Solo diners are shooed to the bar at restaurants, with tables reserved for couples or families. Single people subsidize family health insurance plans, pay higher tax rates for the same joint income of a married couple, and can’t get Social Security death benefits awarded to a widowed spouse. Companies that brag about being “family-friendly?” Ask a single person: That means they work nights and weekends.
Policy makers are in denial that that family model is no longer dominant.
“It’s not that [leaders] don’t understand that families have changed very much from what they used to be. It’s that they don’t want to confront the reasons why families have changed,” said Stephanie Coontz, author of five books on gender and marriage. It’s not that people don’t want to couple—most do, she added—but marriage is not necessary anymore, especially for women who no longer need a man for financial support and don’t need to stay in an unhappy or abusive relationship. They want intimacy, but with equality, and “women have the ability to say, if I don’t get that, I’ll hold out,” said Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
There’s a misguided longing, especially among conservatives, to return to a storied American family that never really existed, Coontz argues in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In reality, drug abuse, alcohol consumption, and sexually transmitted diseases were more prevalent in the 1950s, but economic conditions (in part because of government support for families) make the mid-20th century family look idyllic in retrospect, Coontz argues in the book.
Democrats want an American economy that works for you. Republicans want an America where you work for the economy. Since Reagan, that’s what we’ve built, and it’s taken a toll on those old, familiar families. But they’ll neither admit it nor adapt.
BTW, family values conservatives, your avatar in the Oval Office has been married three times and has five kids by them. Etc., etc. Their panic over the supposed breakdown of the American family hasn’t changed how they choose leaders. Their fretting over the decline in fertility and in birth rates continues, but it hasn’t forced them to reevaluate public policy that’s stuck in the 20th century. They might reconfigure, but it’s easier to quadruple down on forcing “Americans back to an earlier, mythic demographic era.”
I’m having a similar problem bringing Democrats’ campaign strategy into the 21st century. Their principle voter targeting and turnout tool was designed over two decades ago for a time when, here in North Carolina, Democrats were 48% of registered voters and independents were 18%. Now independents are 38% and Democrats are 31%. But the basic approach to voter targeting and turnout has not changed. We update our software and implement new software tools, but all it means is we’re campaigning the same ways, just tracking our progress digitally.
Donald Trump loves him some American flag. It’s Americans he can’t stand. Americans like Manu Borges Santos, age 2, now officially a tourist in Brazil.
Manu is American. She was born Emanuelly Borges Santos in a Fort Lauderdale hospital in September 2022. But in February, she was taken into custody in Florida alongside her mother and father, both of whom were undocumented, and placed on a deportation flight to Brazil, where the family has been plunged into a bureaucratic morass.
It is not known if Manu has a criminal history or any tattoos.
Manu, who is not a citizen or resident of Brazil, was forced to enter the country as a tourist. In the tense months since, as authorities here tried to figure out how to give her legal status, the girl has been left all but stateless — removed from her country of birth and not yet adopted by her parents’ ancestral home. She has no right to routine pediatric checkups in Brazil’s public health-care system. She cannot easily enroll in a Brazilian school or day care. And she’s living on a temporary tourism visa that’s set to expire in weeks.
What then? Does Brazil deport the two-year-old to her home country whose flag-fetishizing president exiled her in February? If so, then birth tourism meets “deportation tourism.” Perhaps Trump will issue a meme coin. It bears his initials.
Manu is not alone. The Migration Policy Institute found in 2020 that “4.4 million U.S.-citizen children had at least one unauthorized immigrant parent.”
Deporting unauthorized immigrants is only part of the MAGA agenda. The administration is also revoking the student visas and green cards of people who’ve committed (or are suspected to have committed) what MAGA considers thought crimes.
But getting back to little Manu, the American exile:
Last month, at least three American children were sent to Honduras alongside their undocumented mothers. One of the children, who was also 2 years old, was sent against the wishes of her father, court filings assert.
The removal of that child elicited a sharp rebuke from Terry A. Doughty, a federal judge in the Western District of Louisiana. He called it “illegal and unconstitutional to deport” U.S. citizens.
But you know, constitution schmonstitution.
In Jennifer Palmieri’s account of Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hopes and Dreams” show yesterday, she offers this anecdote about being an American outside our borders:
It is not a great time to be an American abroad. I was reminded of this when the security agent at the Manchester airport told me, “You can go ahead and put the eagle away.” He was pointing at the logo of my American passport. There was an edge in his voice that suggested he had been hoping for some time that America would get its comeuppance.
Well. Little Manu has gotten hers for the effrontery of being born in Fort Lauderdale to noncitizen parents. It is not a great time to be an American toddler in exile.
Bolts Magazine has the lowdown and it’s juicy. Click over to read it. I’ve only heard about a few tidbits until now:
New Jersey, New York, and Virginia—three populous states that are electing hundreds of state and local officials this year—are holding their primaries over a busy 15-day period in June.
In the highest-profile elections, Democrats are choosing their nominees to replace New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy. Further down the ballot, progressives are hoping to leave a mark in New York City’s council races and New Jersey’s legislative races. In Virginia, both major parties already know their nominees for governor, but Democrats will select other statewide candidates.
These elections are important not only to the states involved but to the rest of because the east coast media always turns them into bellwethers whether they are or not. They always color the coverage of the midterms. So pay attention…
NOTUS: A NOTUS investigation found that the MAHA commission report cites studies that appear to not exist. Does the WH have confidence that the info coming from HHS can be trusted?
LEAVITT: Yes. I understand there were some formatting issues, but it does not negate the substance… pic.twitter.com/i1d5SMlGYy
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.
Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.
Read the whole thing. You won’t believe how bad it is. But you will believe that Bobby Jr. is thrilled because it coincidentally finds that all of his cracked, personal hobby horses turn out to be totally true!
‘At its core, this report is a call to action for common sense.’ – @SecKennedy 🇺🇸
By the way, it’s not just HHS that’s sloppy and full of shit:
DOGE claims to be responsible for $175B in estimated savings but investigative reporter @Fahrenthold tells @InsidePolitics, "A lot of that claim is not substantiated at all. They haven't shown us the receipts… When you look closely, you find that there's huge errors." pic.twitter.com/QaUDUJIusz
The Atlantic’s David Frum [gift link] had an insight about Trump’s corruption I hadn’t thought of. He lays out the full scope of them, in both the first term and so far in the second but notes that he gets away with it largely because of a rhetorical sleight of hand he developed back in the first campaign:
In August 2015, Fox News hosted the first of the 2016 Republican-primary debates. Trump then led the polls, but he was still generally dismissed as a novelty candidate, certain to fade as summer turned to autumn and the contest became more serious. After all, Trump had briefly led the polls of prospective candidates in 2011 too, but never entered the race. Trump was asked a question that must have looked deadly when it was drafted by the Fox hosts:
Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies; you’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations, saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”
The trap set for Trump in this seemingly damning choice is either to justify his support for liberal causes or to condemn himself as a crook who paid bribes for corrupt favors. Trump answered:
I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.
The moderator tried to close the trap: “So what did you get from Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi?”
Trump nimbly pivoted and thrust the likely Democratic Party nominee into the trap instead: “I’ll tell you what. With Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice! Because I gave.”
Suddenly, a potentially damning image—of Trump grinning for the cameras alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton—was converted from a vulnerability into a weapon. Trump did not care if listeners thought ill of him, so long as they thought equally badly of everyone else. If all were crooked, then the most shameless crook might present himself instead as a brave truth-teller.
I actually think the Republicans pioneered this even before Trump. By harassing Clinton during the 90s over penny ante, gothic, Arkansas politics they helped build a full blown media machine dedicated to portraying Democrats as crooks and it worked as a way of inoculating them from the consequences of their own graft. Trump, with his feral instinct for projection, innately understood this and took advantage of it.
The beauty of it is that Democrats don’t play by their rules so when they are in power the Republicans go crazy with trumped up charges (Biden Crime family, Clinton cash etc) and actually give normal people who don’t pay close attention the idea that not only does everybody do it — the Democrats are worse than the Republicans, even Donald Trump!
Frum goes on to survey previous presidents’ brushes with corruption, starting with Nixon and going back. There has been plenty of pay to play and nepotism, But there is something very different about this president:
One difference is scale. James Roosevelt made a lot of money by Depression standards, but he did not score dynastic wealth. The Grant relations got government jobs—very cozy, but again, not dynastic wealth. Billy Carter was paid $220,000, which, even adjusting for half a century of inflation, seems hardly worth the brouhaha. The Trumps, by contrast, are using the second-term presidency to accumulate billions of dollars.
The second difference is the degree of separation from the president himself. Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name, but the Republican-chaired committee that went looking into the matter found no link either to President Biden’s decisions or to his personal bank account. But President Trump remains the beneficial owner of the Trump enterprises nominally run by his sons. The ill-gotten gains flow directly to him.
The third difference is the utter lack of conscience in this presidential family. When George H. W. Bush ran for president in 1988, he wrote a letter to his sons warning, “You’ll find you’ve got a lot of new friends.” Those friends, the elder Bush predicted, would ask for favors. “My plea is this: please do not contact any federal agency or department on anything.” Franklin D. Roosevelt was not so strict. Yet when James’s business affairs blew up into a scandal, James published his income-tax returns, submitted to press interviews, and resigned from his role as a White House adviser. He moved to California, volunteered for active duty in the Marine Corps in 1940, and was decorated with the Navy Cross for valor in battle. As for Harding, he came to feel ashamed of his own presidency. According to Nicholas Murray Butler, the then-president of Columbia University and an important figure in Republican politics in the early 20th century, Harding confessed to him: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” This is even more true of Trump, but Trump would never have the self-knowledge or grace to admit it.
He concludes:
The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something—something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.
As Trump always says, there’s never been anything like this. In this case it happens to be true.
