Up-is-downism goes to 11
Donald Trump could walk into the press room fully naked and reporters would carry on as if nothing were amiss. Any who questioned his sartorial choice or, worse, referenced Barack Obama’s Fox-condemned tan suit, would draw withering ridicule from his official spokesliar. The Trump administration has dialed its up-is-downism to 11 and still the Beltway carries on as if this is politics as usual, even with troops and armored vehicles in the streets.
Another Trump “Sir” story
Trump credited the on-street presence of those federal officers and 800 D.C. National Guard troops for making the city safe for diners overnight (The Grio):
“We went from the most unsafe place anywhere to a place that now people, friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up, and they’re saying, ‘Sir, I want to thank you. My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years, and Washington, D.C., is safe, and you did that in four days,” said Trump.
Trump claims “people that haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days were busier than they’ve been in a long time.”
“Right now, it’s a ghost town”
These D.C. bar owners disagree. Their business is down, way down, since the Trump takeover.
“It’s been miserable,” says one, citing a $7,000 decline in business on Friday. “Right now, it’s a ghost town.”
Fortune reports, “Restaurant reservations in D.C. plummeted last week, dropping 16% on Monday—the day he invoked the D.C. Home Rule Act—27% on Tuesday, and 31% on Wednesday compared with the same days in 2024, according to OpenTable.”
Mad Trump disease has spread throughout the Republican Party. Trump’s attorney general shares the same ethical laxness of boss (The New Republic):
The New Yorker has reported that [Pam] Bondi argued with ethics folks over keeping a FIFA soccer ball, sitting in President Trump’s box at the FIFA Club World Cup at MetLife Stadium, and holding on to a box of cigars that MMA fighter and convicted rapist Conor McGregor had initially given to Trump. Bondi ended up sitting in the box seats.
[…]
DOJ protocol only allows employees to accept “gifts of $20 or less per occasion, not to exceed $50 in a year from one source.”
The woman in charge of the DOJ has already eclipsed that with just one gift, as those FIFA Club World Cup box seats with Trump ran anywhere between from $5,300 to $73,000.
An official fired from her department charges that lobbyists and MAGA-connected lawyers hold undue influence in the settlement of antitrust cases in Bondi’s DOJ.
And the standoff continues down in Texas where Democratic lawmaker Nicole Collier remains a political prisoner of the Texas GOP. She has sued for “illegal confinement.”
View on Threads
In a Twitter back-and-forth with a Red State author, former Republican and author of “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump” Stuart Stevens tweeted:
Trump is a cartoon of what we on R side often falsely accused the left of being.
He is pro-Putin, believes in a police state, constantly putting the heavy hand of government on private sector, supports tariff and is against free trade. He’s a billionaire upper East side trust fund brat who believes church is where you go every so often to marry a model. His best friend was a child rapist. His idea of family values is talking about how hot his daughters are and how he’d like to date them. He’s a draft dodger who called avoiding STDs his own Vietnam. He constantly mocks the military and picked the town drunk to run the military. He’s a pathological liar.
He’s the most anti-conservative president in American history.
It’s hard to argue with that. Everyone in Trump’s orbit carries on as if troops in the streets, massive corruption, and fawning over Russian dictators is perfectly normal.
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