Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

MAGA police state

Pam Bondi is not law enforcement. She’s Trump’s enforcer and gun moll.

Trump-Bondi police state

Trump is at war with you. Yes, you.

Show us your badges and a judicial warrant or this is a fucking kidnapping (Charlottesville, VA Daily Progress):

“What alarmed Nicholas Reppucci, head of the Charlottesville Office of the Public Defender, is that the enforcers called in to detain the two men in the city Tuesday morning were wearing plain clothes and did not display badges or arrest warrants.”

Trump’s DHS is now deporting exiling U.S. citizens:

New Orleans, LA – Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.

ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.

[…]

Both families have possible immigration relief, but because ICE denied them access to their attorneys, legal counsel was unable to assist and advise them in time. With one family, government attorneys had assured legal counsel that a legal call would be arranged within 24-48 hours, as well as a call with a family member. Instead, just after close of business and after courts closed for the day, ICE suddenly reversed course and informed counsel that the family would be deported at 6am the next morning–before the court reopened.

That family filed a habeas corpus petition and motion for a temporary restraining order, which was never ruled on because of their rapid early-morning deportation.

In the case of the other family, a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs. In addition, one of the mothers who was deported is pregnant, and ICE proceeded with her deportation without ensuring any continuity of prenatal care or medical oversight.

Erin Hebert, Ware Immigration – “Deporting U.S. citizen children is illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral. The speed, brutality, and clandestine manner in which these children were deported is beyond unconscionable, and every official responsible for it should be held accountable.”

“No meaningful process”

Politico:

A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.

The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

Matt Ford at The New Republic:

“The goal here isn’t to get convictions, at least not yet,” [investigative journalist Radley Balko] wrote. “It’s to harass, intimidate, and incapacitate anyone with the power, money, or platform to thwart this administration’s aspiration for authoritarianism.”

Tell us again about “cancel culture”

You still have power

Use it before Republicans cancel that too.

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Baby Lemur!

Yay!

Maryland Zoo today announced the birth of a Coquerel’s sifaka (Propithecus coquereli). This marks the first birth of a sifaka at the Zoo since the endangered lemur species returned to its collection in 2023.

The as yet unnamed lemur was born to first-time father, Terence, and 14 year-old mother, Arcadia. Arcadia is an experienced mom who was recommended to breed with Terence by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) Sifaka Species Survival Plan – a population management initiative to grow the population and maintain its genetic diversity.

Maryland Zoo keepers who work with primates will name the baby in the coming days.

Sifaka, which is pronounced “shi-FOCK,” are named after their distinctive alarm call. They have a unique brown and white coloration and are distinguished from other lemurs by the way that they move, maintaining a very upright posture and using their back legs to leap through the treetops. They can easily leap more than 20 feet in a single bound. On the ground, they spring sideways off their back feet to cover distance while holding their forelimbs out for balance.

Coquerel’s sifaka are native only to the island of Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa. They spend most of their lives in the treetops in two protected areas in the sparse dry, deciduous forests on the northwestern side of the island. As with many species of lemur, Coquerel’s sifaka are endangered. Habitat loss due to deforestation is the leading threat to the species.

Here’s a video from the Cincinnati Zoo about these lemurs. They’re so wild looking!

Some more footage from the Duke Lemur Center:

Wow.

From the LA Zoo:

You can’t believe a sentient adult much less a president could actually say this but here we are:

Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We’re now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There’s zero deals so far. Why is that? 

No, there’s many deals. 

When are they going to be announced? 

You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals.

Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?

I’ve made 200 deals. 

You’ve made 200 deals?

100%.

Can you share with whom?

Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. Some have been horrible to us. Some have been okay. Nobody’s been great. Nobody’s been great. Everybody took advantage of us.

What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world.

So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us?

Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I’m going to keep us a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—

I’m just curious, why don’t you announce these deals that you’ve solidified? 

I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way.

You’re finished? 

We’ll be finished. 

Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks. 

I’ll be finished. Now, some countries may come back and ask for an adjustment, and I’ll consider that, but I’ll basically be, with great knowledge, setting—ready? We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history.

Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things. But what I’m doing with the tariffs is people are coming in, and they’re building at levels you’ve never seen before.

We have $7 trillion of new plants, factories and other things, investment coming into the United States. And if you look back at past presidents, nobody was anywhere near that. And this is in three months.

Will you call President Xi if he doesn’t call you?

No.

You won’t?

Nope.

Has he called you yet?

Yep.

When did he call you?

He’s called. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf.

But you would think it’s a sign of weakness if you called him?

I don’t–I just look—

Well, what did he say?

If people want to–well, we all want to make deals. But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.

That is incoherent gobbldygook, and he is so far out of his depth now that he makes Pete Hegseth look like Dwight D. Eisenhower.

That comes from his 100 day interview with TIME and it’s kind of terrifying. The people who complained about Biden should be hysterical about this guy. (I guess it’s the bronzer and hair dye?)

How about this?

Inflation remains pretty much the same. And the IMF is saying it’s going to go up. 

No, Eric, you can’t say what they think, because so far what I thought is right. I’ve been right about—

401ks are down. The Atlanta Fed says our economy is contracting -2.2% during quarter one. 

Well, they may have said that, but so far, they’ve been, I mean, I’ve been right. If you look at all of the years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been right on things. You’re gonna—you’re gonna have the wealthiest country we’ve ever had, and you’re gonna have an explosion upward in the not-too-distant future. You know, I’ve been here now for three months, and I inherited eggs, I inherited groceries, I inherited energy. It was all going through the roof. And we had the highest inflation we’ve ever had as a country, or very close to it. And I believe it was the highest ever. Somebody said it’s the highest in only 48 years. That’s a lot, too, but I believe we had the highest inflation we’ve ever had. I’ve been here now for three months. And three months, we are taking in billions and billions of dollars from other countries that we never took in before. And that’s just the start. 

Well let’s talk about the tariffs. You want companies to build and make goods here in America. 

Not in all cases. There are some products I really don’t want to make here.

Like t-shirts?

I can’t–I can give you a list because I actually have a list, but if you want, I could give it to you. 

I have only recently realized that a big part of Trump’s Vengeance Agenda is to prove that he has always been right about everything so he’s determined to press his “policy” ideas or at least pretend that they’ve been successful. He’s sending the whole world to perdition because he has to be right. But no one has ever been so wrong.

Read the whole thing when you get the chance. Have a strong drink handy.

Bondi declares war on the courts: "What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me … they are deranged … we are sending a very strong message today … we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you." pic.twitter.com/K4JjG7kvXt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 25, 2025

She’s responding to questions about the FBI’s decision to arrest a Wisconsin judge for allegedly helping an immigrant evade capture by ICE in her courtroom.

Federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on Friday after she allegedly helped an undocumented immigrant evade arrest, FBI Director Kash Patel said.

Patel announced in an X post that Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan has been charged with obstruction.

The tweet was quickly deleted. The FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on why the post was removed.

But a senior law enforcement official confirmed to NBC News that Dugan was arrested at about 8:30 a.m. local time in the parking lot of her courthouse for allegedly assisting an undocumented immigrant in avoiding arrest after he appeared in her courtroom last week.

From what I understand judges do not commonly allow arrests in their courtrooms so it’s not surprising that she resisted. They are charging her with helping him evade the ICE agents in the hall by giving him the opportunity to leave by another door and they ended up chasing him down the street to arrest him.

You have to love this newfound concern for the safety of the public, when one of the first things they did was drop all pending charges in the January 6th cases and said that those who were pardoned should not be prosecuted even for unrelated gun charges and domestic violence. These people are so dangerous.

Apparently the Nazi FBI and DOJ think it’s important to arrest a judge to show that they will go after them, as Bondi explicitly says above. It’s pure intimidation, the kind of demonstration of police state power that we’ve historically seen in fascist regimes. That’s where we are.

… or a Republican

G. Elliott Morris looks at the youth vote in light of the recent polling. He challenges the idea that they broke so heavily for Trump in the first place, citing a number of conflicting surveys. But there is no doubt that they are not Trump fans now:

Let’s start with the newsy data. According to a new poll published by the Pew Research Center on April 23, 2025, only 36% of adults between the ages of 18-29 approve of the job Trump is doing as president today, vs 63% who disapprove. That’s a net gap of 27 points against Trump, compared to an exit poll estimate in 2024 of Harris +4.

Comparing Trump’s approval directly to the results of the 2024 election, that’s a pretty huge (23-point!) shift. This means there’s a large group of young people out there who do not like Trump, but voted for him last year because either (a) they did like him then or (b) they liked Trump more than Harris. There are also a lot of young people who didn’t vote at all.

Pew’s poll also finds Black and Hispanic voters are more anti-Trump now than they were in 2024, so there’s some amount of overall shifting going on here. As you’d expect with a topline 60% disapproval and 40% approval.

But it’s not just Pew finding Trump doing poorly with the youths. I took all the polls conducted in April and averaged their age-level crosstabs together. That average for adults and voters under 30 is still Disapprove +27, though the other age crosstabs differ from Pew’s findings.

In the graph below, I show Trump’s average approval by age group now compared to his 2024 result with each bloc:

According to these polls, Trump is now about as unpopular as he was in 2020. According to the exit polls, Biden won young people by 25 points.

And young people are not particularly fond of Trump’s policies, either. Below, the latest Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll shows support for key proposals among 18-30 year olds adults:

These two charts certainly put things into perspective… But they’re confusing at the same time. The swing chart shows quite an enormous shift in public opinion in a very short period of time. Did young voters just dislike Harris that much? Are they souring on Trump now for any particular reason? Were they ever even that right-leaning to begin with? Or maybe voting Trump was a manifestation of something else?

Morris speculates that it’s because young voters are “particularly economically sensitive and anti-incumbent.” They’re not partisans, at least in the way we used to think about it. COVID-19, high housing prices and inflation have hit this generation hard. (Read my previous post for a look at what it was like to be a young person during the stagflation 70s… we were anti-establishment, anti-incumbent too.) Corrupt political leadership and revelations of abuse of power lead to cynicism in young people. It took me many years to shake off the reflexive pessimism and disdain for politics. Add to that the huge societal changes wrought by technology and the isolation it’s fostered and it’s understandable that young people would not find much to like about either political party or politics itself.

It’s not helping Trump, that’s for sure. But it may not help Democrats either:

For Democrats, the concern is that they need to win the trust of these young people back. 18- to 30- year olds tell Harvard they have an even worse impression of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. That will matter in the next election, when the question will not be “do you like Trump?” but “who do you want to vote for?”

But equally, it’s easy to see how 4 more years of disastrous policy for young people could see the Republicans suffer the same fate Harris did in 2024. If young people are mostly just elastic, anti-system voters, then the young Trump converts in 2024 aren’t really MAGA Republicans so much as stressed-out, ideologically unaware, alienated young adults, in want of a party.

The Democrats really are the only viable party for young people and I hope they find a way to speak compellingly to their needs. It’s guaranteed that the Republicans won’t do it through anything tangible — their only message is hate. Unfortunately, if things get really tough that could be a message that resonates. It has in the past.

David Frum has written an interesting (and alarming) piece today about what we may be in for. He starts the piece with a little trip down memory lane that was very familiar to me:

In the 1970s, it cost much more to print a menu than it does today. Restaurants did not change them often. When prices rose, they’d retain their old menu—but affix little stickers with the new, handwritten prices atop the previous ones. When prices rose especially rapidly, the stickers accumulated in stubby columns rising up from the menu. A bored child might scratch off all the stickers with a fingernail—and, like a young archaeologist, reveal a lost world.

The term that came into use to describe the era was stagflation: stagnation plus inflation. Until recently, it seemed a relic of the disco era, but the economic chaos of Donald Trump’s second presidency has resurfaced the old word. Stock markets are warning of a recession. Bond markets are anticipating inflation. Perhaps one market is wrong, or the other, or both. More likely, they portend the return of a half-forgotten nightmare.

From 1969 to 1982—just 13 years—the United States suffered four recessions. Three were severe. Two were both severe and protracted. Recoveries were comparatively feeble. Even during the recessions, prices kept rising.

The era’s economic turmoil unnerved Americans. Mass-market best sellers such as The Late Great Planet Earth prophesied the imminent end of the world in a biblical apocalypse. Americans absorbed a secular version of the end-of-the-world obsession from books such as The Limits to Growth, which claimed that humankind was overconsuming almost every natural resource and had no choice but to strictly ration the pitiful remains.

In his famous 1979 speech, which came to be known as the “malaise” address, President Jimmy Carter warned: “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Conversation everywhere, the historian Theodore White wrote, was “stained and drenched in money talk, by what it cost to live or what it cost to enjoy life.” Especially outside the upper classes, people “winced and ached. Some mysterious power was hollowing their hopes and dreams, their plans for a house or their children’s college education.” What could they do? How could they recover? “Faith in one’s own planning was dissolving—all across the nation,” White wrote. “The bedrock was heaving.”Trump’s tariffs are like a hundred self-inflicted oil shocks, all arriving at the same time.

The unease destabilized American politics. Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980; his predecessor, Gerald Ford, likewise had been voted out in 1976. Richard Nixon might well have survived Watergate (as Trump has survived his many scandals) had the investigation not unfolded during the most miserable American economy since the Great Depression. In House elections, the party of the president suffered unusually heavy losses: 49 seats in 1974; 26 in 1982.

Finally, the stagflation was choked to an end in the fourth and climactic recession of 1981–82. In late 1983 and ’84, the U.S. economy rebounded powerfully—and this time, the inflation did not return. Stagflation vanished into history. The economy has seen its share of tumult in the 21st century: the Great Recession, a recent bout of high inflation. But it’s been a very long time since Americans have felt recession and inflation at once.

This is why many of us of a certain age cringe a bit when we’re told that we had it so much better when we were young. As a member of a family that was anything but wealthy, that’s not how I remember it. I was young and resilient and, frankly, didn’t know any better, so it wasn’t something I thought too deeply about at the time. But the truth is that we didn’t have a lot of stuff or a lot of disposable income. We were fine but this idea that everyone was living a life of luxury and freedom is just wrong.

I’ve included a gift link to the whole article for you to read about why we might be facing another round of this and it’s depressing particularly since this time it’s entirely self-inflicted by Donald fucking Trump. We tried to warn them…

As Donald Trump approaches the 100 day mark of his ambitious presidency, the news isn’t looking very positive for him. The shock and awe of these first three months has left the country dazed and confused and it is starting to rebel. Pollsters always go out into the country as a president reaches this milestone and the results show a floundering administration that’s lost the support of a sizeable majority on virtually every issue.

The “flood the zone” strategy has revealed the classic Trumpian chaos and ineptitude that too many people dropped down the memory hole last November in favor the braggadocious hucksterism at which he excels. Virtually all of his promises during the campaign have come up short.

He said he would end the war in Ukraine on the day after he was elected. It rages worse than ever with Trump openly selling out Ukraine. He has produced a ludicrous tariff policy which every economist, hedge fund manager, CEO, small businessman and stock trader knows is virtually designed to cause inflation, if not stagflation and recession. (He’s saying that gas and grocery prices have come way down but he’s lying.)

His immigration policy, driven by the increasingly unhinged Stephen Miller, is far more draconian than he even said it would be, randomly hitting foreign students, tourists, scientists and business people and the brutal deportations to a Salvadoran gulag have brought shame and dishonor on America around the world.

And then there’s Elon Musk, the wealthy weirdo nobody in America voted for, to whom Trump gave the keys to the federal government and told him he could fire anyone he wanted to. That’s resulted in pandemonium in the U.S. and all over the globe as life-saving services have been abruptly ended, people have been fired and programs that Americans depend on are no longer functioning. All of that in the name of saving money which doesn’t appear to be materializing.

Meanwhile, weirdo #2, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has taken another wrecking ball to the American health care system, ending decades of medical research, firing the scientists who know what they’re doing and replacing them with cranks determined to chase conspiracy theories down the rabbit hole. Following up that demolition of the medical system, Trump himself has decided to destroy the education system including some of the most prestigious universities in the country by dictating they change their policies and curriculum or lose the funding that has made the United States the leading nation in the world for scientific research.

Foreign policy and national security are both bleak and dismal nightmares. There is the above mentioned Ukraine “peace deal” which comes down to forcing Ukraine to surrender to Vladimir Putin so Trump can do some of his vaunted “deals” with Russia. He’s alienated our closest allies, made demented proposals such as offering to have the U.S. ethnically cleanse Gaza to build an international resort there, demanding that Greenland give itself to the United States and essentially insulting every international institution that America helped build. On top of that, he’s put the U.S. military in the hands of a weekend TV show host so out of his depth that even his closest allies are abandoning ship.

Pundits and analysts keep saying that the huge drops in the stock market and the subsequent, ongoing volatility are a reflection of their deep dissatisfaction over Trump tariff policies. And it’s true that their dramatic reaction has had some success in tempering some of his worst impulses. But it actually seems to be more than just that. The weird behavior in the bond and currency markets and the way the world has reacted to his erratic and bizarre behavior suggests, as some economists and important investors are saying, that people are “selling America”

Well, why wouldn’t they? It’s not just his economic policies, as daft and dangerous as they are. It’s that whole (waves arms frantically) list of atrocities I just outlined above. Donald Trump and his administration are totally berserk and America is in the middle of an unprecedented, turbulent maelstrom. Who would buy something in condition?

When you look at it that way, it’s very hard to see how any American can support this president and his administration but apparently quite a few do. The good news is that fewer and fewer of them are standing behind him every day. The spate of recent polls have his approval ratings lower than he was at this point in his first term, which was the lowest of any president up to that time. So he’s breaking his own record.

Even the Fox poll has him underwater:

New Fox News poll: Trump is -15 on taxes (38% approve, 53% disapprove), -18 on the economy (38% to 56%), -25 on tariffs (33% to 58%), & -26 on inflation (33% to 59%).

In new Reuters/Ipsos poll, only 37% approve of Trump's handling of economy, 57% disapprove.

Scary #s for GOP. https://t.co/rKT9MuxRmH

— Jim Messina (@Messina2012) April 24, 2025

The Pew Poll shows him right at 40%

Pew has Trump’s approval at -19 from -4 in early Feb

Leaned party ID is 48-48 (weighted against the 2024 NPORS)

Pew is notable bc they have a super intense weighting structure and some overlap between samples — movement is less likely to be entirely from differential response pic.twitter.com/Q7d706yXvw

— Dj (@DjsokeSpeaking) April 23, 2025

And these polls are all showing that the public disapproves of his other policies as well. Even on immigration, his supposed strong suit, he’s underwater. The Economist You/Gov poll shows:

45% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling immigration, while 50% disapprove, a net approval of -5. That’s down from 50% approval and 44% disapproval — a net approval of +6 — on Trump’s handling of immigration when it was last asked about two weeks ago

The drop comes as Americans are more likely to side against Trump on the highest-profile immigration case over the past week: that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was recently deported to El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting his deportation. 50% of Americans say Trump should bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., and 28% say he shouldn’t.

That’s consistent with the other polls as well. And according to Pew, 78% of Americans believe that the administration must obey the rulings of the courts. That includes 65% of Republicans. If the Supreme Court were to issue the ruling, that goes up to 95% among Democrats and 82% among Republicans. If Trump decides to defy the high court and trigger a constitutional crisis he will not have the support of the American people.

At the 100 day mark, President Donald Trump finds himself more unpopular than any other president at this point in their terms and he’s sinking fast. Contrary to his repeated lies that he won in a landslide and has a mandate for the radical change he’s enacting, even many of the people who voted for him did not expect this level of chaos, ineptitude and lawlessness.

Whether he cares about that remains to be seen. Trump will never face the voters again and he is determined to use his power to wreak vengeance on his enemies and prove that his cockamamie ideas about tariffs and world dominance through threats and bullying were right all along. Despite the massive amount of damage his shambolic first 100 days has already caused and will likely continue to cause for some time, none of that is actually working. People are beginning to fight back. The public is turning on him. The courts aren’t buying his arguments.

He’s proved once again that he’s a weak, vain, ignorant man which should have been obvious to anyone who lived through his failed leadership during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it’s only been a hundred days. We’re going to have to find a way to survive the 1,365 days that are left and I don’t think anyone knows yet how we’re going to do that.

Salon

Trump has slapped a 135% tariff on them

Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed not to take over the whole of Ukraine, Trump bragged on Thursday.

In tragicomic, “universally revered” news from The Onion (via John Amato):

White House sources have confirmed the successful execution of 19-year-old college sophomore Evan Dixon late last night by an elite team of special forces.

Stand in the breach, please.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

May Day 2025 | 50501 site, May 1
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

Into the ditch

Elon Musk arrived triumphantly in Washington “brimming with Silicon Valley swagger,” Zachary Basu writes for Axios. He leaves (to spend more time with his several families?) “with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for DOGE but chaos and contested savings.” His plan to slash $2 trillion in “bureaucratic fat” from the government has worked as well as his self-driving cars.

Don’t go spending your “DOGE dividend” on tariff-inflated consumer goods just yet. DOGE, an enterprise worthy of the Trump name, has cut only about $150 billion. And that number is contested.

But wait! There’s less!

Elizabeth Williamson of The New York Times explains:

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.

Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.

“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

That achievement makes Musk Employee of the Month in a Donald Trump dictatorship determined to sicken or poison us nuevo-poor. Trump’s tariff mania cost world markets $10 trillion since Inauguration Day. Don’t look at your 401k, said one analyst to Americans who have them.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake sees other “myriad signs that [Trump’s] second-term project may be falling apart.” Trump’s approval ratings are tanking:

Multiple polls this week showed Trump hitting new lows. His approval rating has been double-digits underwater in surveys from the Pew Research Center (minus-19), Economist-YouGov (-13), Reuters-Ipsos (-11) and now Fox News (-11).

Trump was already more unpopular at this point in his presidency than any modern president not named Trump; he’s now flirting with falling below where he was at this point in his first term.

But wait again!

The Fox News poll showed Trump doing well on border security (+15), but his numbers on foreign policy (-14), the economy (-18), tariffs (-25) and inflation (-26) are all worse than his overall approval rating. His tariff gambit has pushed his economic numbers lower than they ever were in his first term, with concerns being widespread and bipartisan.

Blake runs through several other figures showing Trump’s slumping approval numbers in various policy areas.

But it’s early. Trump could rebound by the midterms save for his reflex for quadrupling down rather than admit mistakes and reverse course. He came into office in 2017 with zero experience in governing but largely populated his first administration with experienced hands to ignore. Not this time. Trump 2.0 has hired, and the Republican Senate majority approved, some of the least-experienced but camera-ready team of incompetents a world power has ever seen.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tenure has devolved into multiple high-profile problems that bolster the criticisms that the former Fox News host simply lacked the experience for such an important job. That includes his sharing of highly sensitive information on the unclassified Signal app and fighting between him and some recently departed top aides. One of those aides just published an extraordinary op-ed citing the “total chaos” at the Pentagon and suggesting Hegseth can’t continue.

I didn’t believe my ears in the car on Thursday. Trump declared progress toward peace in Ukraine when asked what concessions his man-crush, Vladimir Putin, was prepared to make.

“Stopping the war. Stopping — taking the whole country,” Trump declared. “Pretty big concession,” he added. Putin not killing anyone who gets in his way? That’s some Art of the Deal.

On that, Heather Cox Richardson wrote on Thursday:

“Vladimir, STOP!” wrote President Donald Trump on his social media site this morning. Yesterday Trump berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for rejecting a peace deal that heavily favored Russia; hours later, Russia launched its deadliest assault on Kyiv since last July, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 70 others. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing,” Trump posted. “5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”

Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world. Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.

Trump bleats come in between Trump defeats in the courts, Blake notes, from “a fast-growing and remarkable number of Republicans appointees:

It’s not just the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices who have sided against him on deportation issues; it’s also Republican appointees ruling against him and using strong language. In just the past three weeks, a trio of GOP-appointed judges have cast the administration as making no real effort to comply with the law, including using such phrases as “brazen” and “a path of perfect lawlessness.”

And just Wednesday, a Trump appointee became the second judge to order the administration to facilitate the return of a man it wrongly deported to the El Salvador prison.

In sum: It’s all an increasing mess. Trump might try to muddle through — including by pressing forward on tariffs and risking a constitutional crisis by challenging the courts to actually make him abide by their orders. Trump has clearly demonstrated he feels more untethered in his second term, and congressional Republicans have shown very little appetite for standing in his way.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa (“How to Stand Up To a Dictator”) watched a dictator rise and democracy fall in her native Philippines. She warns that, incompetent or not, “Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.”

I ignored advice, looked at my retirement funds and wondered how long it will take for them to claw their way back. Or if it will matter by then.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

May Day 2025 | 50501 site, May 1
The Resistance Lab
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

I’m surprised they took so long to do this.

Donald Trump is targeting a massive Democratic fundraising tool in an upcoming presidential memorandum banning foreign donations in U.S. elections, according to reporting from Politico.

Donations platform ActBlue, which almost all Democratic candidates use in both primary and general elections, has often been criticized by Republicans—without evidence—for what they see as fraudulent donations from foreign actors. Republican Representative Bryan Steil ordered ActBlue to turn over its records in October and found nothing of the sort. There was actually evidence of ActBlue’s new program for automatic rejections of donations from foreign nationals.

ActBlue raised $400 million in the first three months of 2025, and Trump’s order would effectively choke off donations to the Democratic Party.

That’s the idea.

It’s a real “I know you are but what am I” charge that they are taking foreign donations considering all the Republicans who’ve been caught doing that but that’s how they roll. The right has always been jealous of the success of Act Blue (which is simply a pass through program for small donors) because they were never able to replicate it. So they must destroy it.

I have no idea if this gambit will work. But I always knew they’d try.