Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Visa and green cards. Citizens next?

This subhead from The New Republic encapsulates where we are in this country and where Trump 2.0 is taking us: Even legal residents and tourists are being terrorized by Trump-emboldened officers at ICE and CBP.

The article discusses the cases of Fabian Schmidt, Mahmoud Khalid, and Rasha Alawieh who we’ve discussed previously, and notes:

You have, at some point within the last week, probably broken the law. You jaywalked or smoked in a no-smoking park or ignored a stop sign or any of a thousand other daily things that we hardly think about but which are on paper illegal. The reason you most likely weren’t arrested or even ticketed for these things is because it would not be possible for police to spot every single one of these violations, and because even if the cops did witness it, they decided that it just wasn’t worth the bother (or the paperwork).

But now Trump 2.0 is hunting enemies hiding in woodpiles to detain, arrest, and extrajudicially punish.

For a long time, certain populations in particular have been used to generally favorable discretion. Undocumented immigrants—in particular those from developing countries—never could expect much grace, but high-skill work visa holders, international students, European tourists, Canadian day-trippers, and others in this higher-status sphere enjoyed a lighter touch. Perhaps if there was confusion around their visa, they would get directed to file paperwork to fix it and sent on their way, or at worst merely turned away at the border. But now, it seems, immigration agents are increasingly using the full statutory powers that they always had, choosing to detain, abuse, and deport these tourists and workers instead of working with them.

At this point, traveling outside the country is a risk for holders of visas and green cards if the Trump administration looks at them sideways. And a tourism industry dependent on foreign visitors to the U.S. will begin to collapse. But that’s just the beginning.

Consider this report from NPR on Tuesday’s sparring match between Trump Department of Justice lawyers and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg over their ignoring his Saturday order to halt their deportation of 250 alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. The DOJ sent the detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador without any court hearing to test evidence that each was associated with TdA as the DOJ claimed:

In court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department complied with a judge’s order for a sworn declaration about how planeloads of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang landed in El Salvador — hours after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued emergency orders temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using wartime powers to quickly deport people.

The DOJ complied with Boasberg’s Monday order with a Tuesday “declaration from Robert Cerna, a top official at the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in Harlingen, Texas” on what happened and when on Saturday. But Boasberg was unsatisfied. He gave the Justice Department by noon ET on Wednesday to provide a more detailed account of these flights before declaring the DOJ in contempt.

In his Monday filing, Cerna claimed that ICE had vetted each “to ensure they were in
fact members of TdA,” but in effect asked the court to take his word for it. Now consider this part of Cerna’s declaration (brackets and bolding mine):

While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their [alleged] association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are [alleged] terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.

I lack a criminal record and complete profile! Likely, so do you.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of authoritarianism, warns:

When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.

We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.

The Trump administration is in open defiance of judicial branch scrutiny.

I don’t have to spell it out. The law no longer protects you.

Are the people who Trump sent to a Salvadoran prison actually gang members?

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

It may not be a typical one, but when police start busting into private buildings on the order of the president, it sure comes close:

Employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency entered the U.S. Institute of Peace on Monday despite protests from the nonprofit that it is not part of the executive branch and is instead an independent agency.

“DOGE has broken into our building,” the organization’s CEO, George Moose, said.

USIP employees called the Metropolitan Police Department and reported a break-in. Police cars were outside USIP headquarters in Northwest D.C. Monday evening.

The alleged intrusion came after the Trump administration fired most of the USIP board and sent its new leader into the Washington headquarters of the independent organization on Monday, in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.

The remaining three members of the group’s board — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Defense University President Peter Garvin — fired Moose on Friday, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

USIP is a congressionally funded independent nonprofit that works to advance U.S. values in conflict resolution, ending wars and promoting good governance.

Apparently, they were unwilling to let this play out in court. They just went ahead because they believe they are the ones to interpret the law and the Congress is a bunch of potted plants and trained seals who apparently have nothing to say about anything.

“The employees of our building are not federal employees, executive branch employees,” Moose said. “They are employees of the institute. We have our own, separate board; we have our own bypass authority to go directly to Congress in order to get our money. Somehow, all of those arguments have not prevailed.”

The DOGE workers gained access to the building after several unsuccessful attempts Monday and after having been turned away on Friday, a senior U.S. Institute of Peace official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

[…]

The nonprofit says it was created by Congress in 1984 as an “independent nonprofit corporation,“ and it does not meet U.S. Code definitions of “government corporation,” “government-controlled corporation” or “independent establishment.”

Josh Marshall dug into the role of the Metro POlice in this because it’s weird that they actually came in and evicted the legal tenets of a building without any due process. Apparently, they were told to do it by Trump’s personal henchman, Ed Martin the acting US Attorney in Washington:

It’s actually worse than what I suspected.

According to the MPD they first got involved when they were contacted by the DC US Attorney’s Office, the one currently run by acting US Attorney Ed Martin, the election denier and Jan 6th lawyer. The US Attorney’s office told the MPD that there was a disturbance at the US Institute of Peace offices and that some intruders or trespassers were refusing to leave. They gave the MPD the contact information for the guy Trump says he has appointed to run it. That would be Kenneth Jackson, though the statement doesn’t include his name. They talked with Jackson and then forced the USIP staff to leave based on what the US Attorney’s office told them about who had rightful possession of the office.

They play coy about exactly why the staff left.

MPD members went to the USIP building and contacted an individual who allowed MPD members inside of the building. Once inside of the building, the acting USIP President requested that all the unauthorized individuals inside of the building leave. Eventually, all the unauthorized individuals inside of the building complied with the acting USIP President’s request and left the building without further incident, and no arrests were made.”

…The police showed up and said they had to leave and they left. I don’t think the USIP folks or their lawyers were up for a police and barricades situation. The real issues here is that the US Attorney or at least the US Attorney’s office contacted the MPD and told them that there was no legitimate dispute and they had to make the staff leave and they did.

They just do what they want when they want it. There was no real reason for this. It could have been litigated without taking over the place. But that chainsaw has a life of its own.

Today a Judge ordered Elon Musk and DOGE to restore access of USAID employees, including those on administrative leave, to USAID computer systems. Judge Theodore Chuang, Obama appointee, also bars DOGE from actions related to USAID shutdown. I think it’s the first time Musk has been named personally.

These orders against Trump and DOGE are adding up. The Supremes are going to get involved sooner rather than later.

TNR explains:

While it’s not entirely clear what set the president off this time, earlier this month, Parker and Scherer had published a piece titled “Trump’s Own Declaration of Independence” about Trump’s outlandish demand to move the Declaration of Independence into the Oval Office.

This request presented as ridiculous for two main reasons. First, the president seems to eschew all the convictions held within the actual document: that all men are created equal, that power is divined from the consent of the governed, and the crucial rejection of monarchy, supposedly celebrated by the president who jokingly calls himself the “King.”

Secondly, on a purely logistical level, it seemed impossible. The original document, made of animal-skin parchment, is kept in an oxygen-free, argon-filled case behind heavy glass, which retracts into the wall at night and is kept away from bright lights.

But Trump seems intent on redecorating his digs to add as much pomp and circumstance as possible—and it seems he got his way, or at least some facsimile of it: A copy of the Declaration of Independence is currently hanging in the Oval Office, shielded by short blue curtains.

The oval office is quickly turning into a beat up Atlantic City casino version of Versailles.

It sure looks like it’s possible

Business is pulling back on capital expenditures because Donald Trump has created the most unstable economy (unstable world!) that anyone can remember with his capricious, decision making and Elon Musk’s chainsaw. Nobody can predict anything but chaos going forward and business is betting that taking any risk right now isn’t worth it. I don’t blame them.

Economist Mark Zandi told NY Magazine’s Benjamin Hart that he has raised his expectation of a recession this year from 5% to 35% based upon Trump’s actions on tariffs, DOGE and all the chaos:

Despite all of this uncertainty, the recent data on inflation and unemployment is pretty solid. I was reading Justin Wolfers’s arguments on why recession fears may be overblown. He wrote that “the hard numbers tell us that the economy is in very good shape.” Do you agree? And do you expect that to last in the next couple of months? Because obviously we’re just beginning to understand the effects of all these haphazard policies.
The economy came into the year performing exceptionally and growing strongly. GDP last year was almost 3 percent, and growth was almost 3 percent. That’s a really good year. We created 2 million jobs. That’s a lot of jobs. Unemployment was 4 percent across every demographic. That’s very low. And it’s been there now for three years, which is just extraordinary. We have our problems, but the top-line performance of the economy arguably couldn’t be better coming into the year, so it would take a lot to diminish and derail it. But that’s what’s happening.

I can’t think of another example like this of somebody coming in and just single-handedly creating such a bad economic situation.
Yeah, recession by design. It will take a lot to push the economy off the rails, but if the president follows through on all the tariffs he’s discussed and articulated, most importantly the reciprocal tariffs, then holds them there — not on again, off again, but says, “Okay, here are the tariffs and we’re sticking to them” — other countries will retaliate. They already are. Once they realize that these tariffs are going to be around for a while, they’re going to respond in kind. Forget about all the other economic policies and everything else going on, that would be enough to push the economy into recession later this year.

I will be shocked if he pulls back the tariffs, although anything is possible. He believes in them like a religion and thinks they will magically force all manufacturing to immediately move to America and basically end trade altogether. It’s stupid and simplistic but that’s what he thinks. With the way his dementia is progressing into even more grandiose delusions, I don’t think reality is going to have much influence on him.

It was nice to hear someone say this:

Do you lay any of the blame for this current situation on Joe Biden’s policies? Or is this all sort of self-inflicted, this new uncertainty?
This is all self-inflicted. Again, the economy had its issues. There are always issues. But coming into the year, it was performing exceptionally well. It was far and away the strongest economy on the planet.

The envy of the world.
The envy of the world. So it’s hard — impossible in my mind — to lay any of this at the feet of President Biden.

And yet, new polling shows that views of Biden are, as Philip Bump wryly pointed out on BlueSky, “just a tad better than Adolph Hitler.” Sadly, that’s not much of an exaggeration.

They are literally saying that this man got the medal of honor because of DEI?

They restored the page on Monday saying that it was part of an “auto-removal” which can only mean that their system automatically removes Black (and women and other racial/ethnic minorities) under the assumption that they are all DEI and thus undeserving of any recognition. Why else would that have appeared in the new url? (That url was preserved in the wayback machine archive.)

It’s not the only example. You already know that Hegseth fired all the top women in the military and removed the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs because he believes they are unqualified. They aren’t big, strong, drunk white rapists like he is. Last week it was reported that:

Arlington National Cemetery has begun wiping from its website histories highlighting Black, Hispanic and women veterans. The change is in line with President Trump’s directive to remove references to and support for diversity, equity and inclusion from the federal government.

Maybe if they can get rid of all mention of minorities and women everywhere in world the insecure white wingnuts can finally feel secure that they are the only people who matter.

Update —

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”

Why it matters: From 1942 to 1945, the Navajo Code Talkers were instrumental in every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

• They were critical to securing America’s victory at Iwo Jima.

Axios identified at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers that had disappeared from the U.S. Army and Department of Defense websites as of Monday.

 The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

• The Internet Archive shows the deleted Army pages were live as recently as November, with many visible until February or March. None are shown with error messages until Trump took office.

Asked about the missing pages, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot replied in a statement: “As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. … We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.”

• “In the rare cases that content is removed that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct components accordingly.”
• The statement did not address whether the Code Talkers are considered divisive DEI figures that “erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution.”

Far right MAGA provocateurs have a sick idea to make this country explode

I’m pretty sure this is designed to spur massive street protests so that Trump can do what he wanted to do the first time: shoot protesters:

Prominent supporters of President Trump — led by podcaster Ben Shapiro — are fueling a major push to pardon Derek Chauvin, the white former Minnesota police officer convicted of killing George Floyd in 2020…

Shapiro, whose podcast episodes often break the Top 10 on Apple’s charts, launched the campaign early this month with a petition to convince Trump to issue the pardon. Shapiro has long dismissed the existence of systemic racism.

• Earlier this month, Trump said he hadn’t heard of the push to pardon Chauvin. Shapiro’s petition has now surpassed 50,000 signatures.
• Shapiro is launching a five-part docuseries titled “The Case for Derek Chauvin” that will start airing on his show Tuesday.
• Shapiro claims that Chauvin was unjustly convicted and that Floyd’s death was caused by underlying health issues and drug use.

Chauvin would not be released if Trump pardoned him because he was also convicted on state charges. Shapiro claims that Chauvin could be released earlier if he were pardoned on the federal charges because it would somehow show that the conviction was unjust.

This is why I think it’s a ruse to cause an explosive reaction so that Trump can bring the hammer down. There’s no other reason to do it.

I will not be surprised if Trump goes there. He is addled and drunk with power. Why wouldn’t he?

I know that sounds weird, but that’s what the new leader of the agency says

I think we all assumed that the job of the Environmental Protection Agency was pretty specific: the protect the environment. The new administrator says that while they want to ensure that America has clean air and water they have a much bigger priority:

Zeldin touched on regulatory reform and the changes the agency will make that he says will spur economic growth.  “It means that it’s going to be easier to purchase a car. It’s going to be easier to heat your home. Operating a small business is going to be easier for people who are looking for employment, are going to have more opportunities.”

I thought we had other agencies that focused on that but ok. How does he plan to do that? By decimating the department and ,consequently, the environment:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

The strategy is part of large-scale layoffs, known as a “reduction in force,” being planned by the Trump administration, which is intent on shrinking the federal work force. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget. That would be a drastic reduction — one that experts said could hamper clean water and wastewater improvements, air quality monitoring, the cleanup of toxic industrial sites, and other parts of the agency’s mission.

The E.P.A.’s plan, which was presented to White House officials on Friday for review, calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there.

I guess King Donald is going to sign an Executive Order declaring that all water, air and land be free of pollutants and it will be done. That’s the way America works now, apparently.

By the way:

The E.P.A.’s science office provides the independent research that undergirds virtually all of the agency’s environmental policies, from analyzing the risks of “forever chemicals” in drinking water to determining the best way to reduce fine particle pollution in the atmosphere. It has researched synthetic playground material made from discarded tires; found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, can contaminate drinking water; and measured the impact of wildfire smoke on public health. The office also helps state environmental agencies figure out how to address algae blooms, treat drinking water and more.

Who needs it, amirite?

Oh, marvelous me!

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern sum up where we stand only eight weeks into American Carnage 2.0 — The Return of the King.

The pair summarize for Slate the multiple examples of the administration asserting its supremacy over the judicial branch just over the last week: the Lebanese doctor from Brown University, the 250 Venezuelan migrants, the Monday hearing in which DOJ lawyers refused to present evidence that they did not deliberately defy another court order they unilaterally deemed not “lawful.”

The Trump administration’s position seems to be that “all judicial rulings are merely advisory, or just suggestions, and the three coequal branches of government have been replaced by an elected monarch.” Except for the elected part. Trump and his hangers-on have no real use for elections unless they validate his manliness.

Lithwick and Stern write:

Trump capped off this weekend of lawlessness by announcing, in the early hours of Monday morning, that Biden’s preemptive pardons for Jan. 6 committee members are “void” because they were allegedly signed by autopen. This declaration rejects well-known, long-standing guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel (which the Justice Department has not yet withdrawn), and seems to be based on a conspiracy theory promoted by the Heritage Foundation. The reason these facially absurd autopen claims are so vitally important to the emerging theory of the imperial presidency is that they reveal precisely how cynical Trump’s view of boundless presidential power really is. These novel assertions of authority are not statements about presidential powers, but rather statements about Trump’s powers, which clearly apply to no other president. And the fact that DOJ lawyers are comfortable standing up before both federal judges and the American people to claim that Trump’s constitutional authority is without limit—whereas Biden’s was part of some ongoing criminal conspiracy and wholly illusory—shores up the notion that none of these claims attach to the office of the president, but that they inhere in fact in the person of Donald J. Trump.

For those folks who have been waiting to climb the pole and ring the “constitutional crisis” bell, it would appear we have arrived. Neither Judge Sorokin nor Judge Boasberg believed that he was signing a meaningless order, and both judges demanded compliance that never came. We are long past the point at which courts have any reason to believe Trump’s lawyers when they use rhetorical tricks and deliberate misdirection to suggest that judicial orders were ambiguous or that compliance is inadvertently delayed in good faith. We are now at the place, only eight weeks into this presidency, at which judges must decide if they will take the necessary steps to enforce their decisions, including sanctions and contempt, or if they will agree to be made irrelevant. Those are the remaining options. And if the courts surrender now, the people will lose their last line of defense against an administration that wields Article II like a cheat code to subvert democracy.

Trump will of course appeal any adverse rulings all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and expect his SCOTUS majority to support his kingship. “The best support,” Lithwick and Stern explain, “comes from a solo 2015 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that even Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed as promoting ‘a presidency more reminiscent of George III than George Washington.’ ”

Thus, I would not say Trump is destined to be disappointed by SCOTUS. These days the court majority has found ways to get around disappointing him in rulings nearly as creatively evasive as the DOJ’s lawyers have proven this week. But the Roberts court majority might as well slit their own wrists as allow Yertle to declare himself unreviewable by the judicial branch.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment

Adding to the chaos in Washington is the fact that there is no one reactionary agenda at play in Trump 2.0. Yes, there is Donald Trump’s attempt to “king me” and join the exclusive Autocrats’ Club with all the appertaining riches and corruption. There is the well-documented Project 2025 with its Heritage and Christian nationalist influences. Bit players are the spineless Republicans kowtowing to Trump and minority Democrats’ flailing in House/Senate disunity.

And then there is Elon Musk and his DOGE coders doing their thing almost independent of everything else. But what their project is is not well understood. Efficiency and cutting waste are a smokescreen.

Mike Brock commented Monday (reacting to a February post by Noah Smith) on the ideological project behind Musk’s activities at Notes from the Circus. “[W]e face not chaotic incompetence but deliberate subversion,” he explains.

Short version, Musk’s anti-democratic DOGE project is in reality “a mechanism of state capture.” Behind him and behind J.D. Vance is eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley billionaires with their goal of establishing a “post-liberal order” imagined as a “domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.”

When you examine what DOGE is doing in the context of those goals, DOGE makes more sense. But the media has yet to take that project seriously because it sounds so much like a conspiracy theory.

I am reminded of this exchange about another crazy-sounding scheme from Captain America: The First Avenger (2011):

Dr. Arnim Zola: Schmidt believes he walks in the footsteps of the gods.
Col. Chester Phillips: Hm!
Dr. Arnim Zola: Only the world itself will satisfy him.
Col. Chester Phillips: You do realize that’s nuts, don’t you?
Dr. Arnim Zola: The insanity of the plan is of no consequence.
Col. Chester Phillips: And why is that?
Dr. Arnim Zola: Because he can do it!

Brock elaborates:

But if you recognize that Musk’s project is not merely about efficiency but about who controls the levers of power, then you see DOGE for what it is: a mechanism of state capture. A vehicle to strip the government of neutral expertise and replace it with an ideological vanguard, loyal not to institutions but to Musk’s broader anti-democratic project.

Similarly, if you see Peter Thiel merely as a wealthy libertarian with eccentric views, you miss the larger picture—that his project is not just about tax cuts and deregulation, but about the construction of a post-liberal order in which governance is no longer constrained by democratic accountability, but instead functions as a domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.

[…]

This is the Silicon Valley delusion in its purest form—the belief that technical proficiency is a substitute for political wisdom. But power is not just about competence. It is about ideology, incentives, and institutional control. Musk is not a stabilizer; he is an accelerant. He is not a bulwark against Trump’s excesses; he is a visionary for a different form of autocracy—one optimized for oligarchic rule rather than nationalist demagoguery.

It also explains Trump’s interest in Greenland. He’s been influenced by Dryden Brown’s Praxis project, another of those “network states” imagined by libertarians with too much money and no sense of civic responsibility as a democracy-free techno-dystopia. Run by them, of course, over your plebian objections.

They also imagine setting up AI-driven, deregulated “freedom cities” in this country and they are presenting those ideas to the Trump administration. Josh Marshall calls it “an important window into what’s happening right now with DOGE.” He emphasizes, “Once you get beneath what we might call the cyber-libertarian spray tan, these are really digital lordships which at a fundamental level would be very at home in the Middle Ages or in the early transitional phases of a number of European maritime empires.”

Marshall warns:

… the real idea here is to stand up what amounts to a sovereignty-free-zone where private corporations can step out of democratic self-government, which is of course the point. As I said, there’s nothing particularly “digital” or “networked” about any of this. These are just lordships which oligarchs now want to carve out of a democratic Republic. 

As Brock sees it:

If anything, Musk represents an even more insidious danger than Trump’s erratic nationalism. Trump’s movement is destructive and lawless, but ultimately incompetent—prone to self-sabotage, incapable of sustained governance. Musk, on the other hand, represents the rationalization of autocracy. He doesn’t oppose strongman rule; he wants to optimize it—to strip away inefficiencies, to replace its vulgarities with precision, to run a dictatorship like a well-engineered company.

Run by digital Medicis.

As Zola warned, the insanity of the plan is of no consequence if they can do it.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

As a follow up to the post below, just read this. The Washington Post got audio of the Kennedy Center Meeting Trump attended today:

Trump and board members floated names such as Paul Anka, Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Mathis and Andrea Bocelli for the award.

The president also suggested giving awards to Elvis Presley, Luciano Pavarotti and Babe Ruth, though the Kennedy Center Honors are not given posthumously. Pavarotti was honored in 2001. Trump floated expanding the event to include politicians, executives and athletes.

“Elvis sells better as a dead man,” Trump said.

During the board meeting, Trump railed against previous Kennedy Center Honors, saying, “In the past, I mean, these are radical left lunatics that have been chosen. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t watch it. And the host was always terrible.”

It is unclear how many members will be added to the committee. Their identities are also unknown. “We’re expanding the committee so that the search for the Kennedy Center Honors is more inclusive,” said one board member, who could not be identified by voice alone.

No you didn’t accidentally drop acid. They actually used the word “inclusive” a word which has been deleted from every government website.

This will be ratings gold for sure:

Trump seemed to say he would agree to be the ceremony’s host. “I don’t want to, but I want this thing to be successful,” he told the board.

Another bit of evidence of his decline into delusional megalomania.

Luckily, he’s got such great taste that the center will be incredibly successful:

He said he hopes to bring in Broadway shows. (The center routinely books tours of Broadway productions.)

Later, Trump and board members mentioned several shows they would be interested in bringing, including “Hello, Dolly!” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Camelot,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Cats.”..

At other points during the meeting, Trump shared personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw “Cats” and which members of the cast he found attractive. He also spoke about how dangerous the Potomac River can be. The center is adjacent to the river.

Oh my God.

You may have heard that Trump toadie Ric Grenell was mad at people for booing JD Vance at a performance the other night but you may not have heard what he wrote:

He cited the center’s diversity as a strength and urged tolerance for different political views. “As President, I take diversity and inclusion very seriously,” he wrote. “I have met with many of you, and I love that we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, agnostic, gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic and absolutely different.”

As I said, you aren’t on drugs. He actually said that.

This is actually a good thing, though. The more time he spends destroying the Kennedy Center, the less he has to destroy the country. I think he should devote at least four days a week to it.