Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Poor Trump. If only his henchmen would tell him the truth he’d be making much better decisions:

Donald Trump was in the Oval Office during the third week of the Iran war when a group of his most trusted advisers came to deliver some unwelcome news. 

His longtime pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had conducted surveys that indicated the war Trump launched was growing increasingly unpopular. Gas prices had surged past $4 per gallon, stock markets had tumbled to multi-year lows, and millions of Americans were preparing to take to the streets in protest. Thirteen American service members had been confirmed killed. Some of Trump’s key public supporters were criticizing a conflict with no clear end in sight. It fell on White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and a small group of aides to tell the President that the longer the war dragged on, the more it would threaten his public support and Republicans’ prospects in November’s midterm elections. 

For Trump, the stark warning was unsettling. The President has begun many recent mornings watching video clips compiled by military officials of battlefield successes, according to a senior Administration official. He has told advisers that being the commander in chief to eliminate the nuclear threat posed by Iran could be one of his signature achievements. But Wiles, according to two White House sources, was concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically, telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. She had urged colleagues, the officials say, to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks.

The meeting reflected a reality the White House can no longer ignore: time is running out before the President, his party, and the American public pay an even steeper price. Trump had promised to revive the economy and keep the U.S. out of foreign conflicts. Now he has started a war he had not gotten a mandate to wage, and the economic pain may only be beginning. A month into the largest oil shock in modern history, global growth forecasts are being slashed, shortages are emerging across Europe and Asia, and energy traders warn the world has yet to feel the full severity of the disruption. A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is the primary exit route for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, could tip the global economy into recession. 

The President was left frustrated by the predicament, at odds with some of his own officials, and fuming at the negative impressions of the war. The mounting political and economic toll has left him looking for an off-ramp, according to two advisers and two members of Congress who have spoken to him during the last week. Trump told them he wants to wind down the campaign, wary of a protracted conflict that could hobble Republicans heading into the midterms. At the same time, he wants the operation to be a decisive success. Allies say he is searching for a way to declare victory, halt the fighting, and hope that economic conditions stabilize before the political damage hardens. “There’s a narrow window,” says a senior Administration official, who like others interviewed for this account of Trump at war was granted anonymity to provide candid observations about the President’s thinking.

Magical thinking, that is. He fucked up and doesn’t have a clue about how to deal with it. And it’s all his fault. He listened to the sycophants because he wanted to hear what he wanted to hear about what a great leader he is. And he has endless faith in his ability to wriggle out of every scrape because he always has.

And get a load of this:

Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth “was caught off guard. There’s no question,” says a person familiar with his thinking.

It would really be helpful if we had people in charge who know something about Iran, war, history, human psychology instead of Fox News Brain rotted weirdos. Jesus.

War is not simple politics. You can easily lie yourself into one but they aren’t easy to lie yourself out of. Trump is finding that out. And people are paying with their lives.

So, a judge has put the kibosh on Trump’s hideous ballroom/temple/personal memorial saying that the Congress has to approve it. So far, there hasn’t been any sign that they’re anxious to do that:

Mike Davis, a conservative judicial activist who is close to the White House, said in an interview Republicans “need to” take action.

“Are they just going to let the ballroom just sit there in disarray … they’re just going to let the construction zone be a fucking disaster for the next three years?” Davis added. “Like, come on.”

But most Republicans who sit on committees with direct jurisdiction of White House and public property matters have so far been silent on whether they’ll shepherd through legislation to protect one of Trump’s top priorities. Doing so could put them in the crosshairs of Democrats, who have already made clear they think the ballroom is proof the president cares more about entertaining wealthy donors than passing policies to lower the costs of everyday goods — and who, in the Senate, have the ability to block any ballroom authorization measure from ever reaching Trump’s desk.

Just leave the wrecked hulk of the East Wing right where it is. It’s the most fitting Trump memorial of all.

Trump says let the states take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare “all these individual things.”

The White House took this down but it was too late. It was already out there:

Trump: "The US can't take of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We're fighting wars. Medicaid, Medicare — they can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. But all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take… pic.twitter.com/G2s3WTNxpI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 1, 2026

He says he told Russ Vought to stop funding day care. The King has spoken.

I will just remind people of what he said about child care during the campaign:

I know it hurts the head to listen to that gobbldygook and he’d obviously never given that issue a moment’s thought before the question was asked. But he did promise that it would be available, that he would back legislation and that the tariffs would bring in so much money that everyone would be able to get it. Now he’s telling Vought to defund it and telling the states to pick up the slack.

Trump likes to say “if you don’t control the border you don’t have a country anymore.” I think it’s clear that if you make Trump president you don’t have a country anymore. He said it: “the federal government can only take care of one thing — military protection.” I’m sure he believes that DHS thugs should be part of that too.

Basically he’s saying the U.S. government is nothing more than a protection racket. The states are all individual countries responsible for the welfare of the citizens. Good to know.

It’s interesting that they took down that video after it had been posted. I can’t imagine why they would be worried about anything he says in it. After all, he spent the day calling Springsteen a dried up old prune and posted deeply weird stuff about Jasmine Crocket being related to Davy Crocket (with a picture of Fess Parker who played the role on TV.) It’s clear that he’s lost his mind. But I would guess it was comments like this that sent terror through the GOP incumbents who knows that saying the federal government can’t pay for day care, Medicaid and Medicare is the kiss of death for them.

It’s a GOP priority

Little did Digby know when she asked me to join her in August 2014 that I’d be writing from one of the nation’s premier hotbeds of Republican mischief. After their 2010 REDMAP victories, the GOP had gerrymandered the hell out of North Carolina. They had passed their 2013 Voter Identification Verification Act (found in 2016 “to discriminate against African American voters” with “almost surgical precision”). But they had yet to pass their infamous 2016 “bathroom bill.” Republicans in late 2016 had yet to strip incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s “control over state and county elections boards and its powerful university system.” Republicans had yet to redraw congressional districts multiple times in response to Democrats’ court challenges, or to contest a 2024 state Supreme Court election they’d lost with six months of recounts, court battles, and an attempt to throw out tens of thousands of ballots.

But here we are. And they are at it again. As David Pepper warned, schemes cooked up in these “laboratories of autocracy” may eventually find their way to where you live.

Remember the GOP’s alleged commitment to the notion that “government closest to the people is the one that governs best”? That was then. The GOP still mouths it. They just don’t believe it. This comes via Carolina Forward:

A major issue brewing in our state legislature today is over what to do about property taxes in North Carolina.

Pretty much since forever, property taxes have always been decided on the local, county level. Local elected officials – each county’s Board of Commissioners – sets its own property tax rate based on whatever it is their local voters want and need.

But now, that might change. The leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are now considering whether to take away local counties’ ability to set their own property taxes based on local needs, and lock them into a formula – set and controlled, of course, by the state legislature.

For almost 150 years, voters in North Carolina have decided their own local property tax rates through local elections. Don’t like your property taxes? Go elect some different county commissioners. People do it all the time. After all, it just makes sense that the people of Polk, Cabarrus, Clay, Wake, Bladen or Gates counties choose different tax rates, since the counties are all very different themselves. Local elected officials, who are closest to their voters, are usually the best-informed about their needs.

But the leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are no fans of local control. Many of them seem to be of the mind that they – not the local voters most affected – should decide the matter. Through some combination of levy limits and/or assessment caps, state lawmakers may soon end North Carolina’s 150-year tradition of local control over property taxation.

Here’s something for everyone to consider, though: it’s easy for our centralized state government to take power away from local counties. It’s very hard to give it back, and it doesn’t often happen.

Power flows from the pursestrings. When counties’ ability to raise revenue is limited, they’ll become more reliant on the state legislature. More and more counties will need to pay for lobbyists to prowl the halls of our legislature; county commissioners will need to spend more time in Raleigh pleading their cases.

Local elections matter. Tomorrow, they may just matter a little less.

I wrote here in 2017:

GOP-led legislatures are implementing changes to governance and revenue streams, strategically starving cities of revenue, leaving city leaders with no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut services and piss off voters. It’s happening in North Carolina and elsewhere [dead link is corrected]:

After a couple of cycles, Republicans will be running candidates who blame North Carolina cities’ financial woes on “mismanagement and waste” by Democrats, and counting on voters to forget by then who precipitated the crisis in the first place. They’ll succeed if we don’t remind voters at every opportunity that it’s their strategy. It is deliberate.

About that N.C. Supreme Court election mentioned above. The court’s GOP majority may have picked up the delay, delay, delay gambit from the sitting president (WRAL):

The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out the multibillion-dollar plan to improve North Carolina’s public schools in a ruling that ended the long-running lawsuit known as Leandro.

Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina was initially filed in 1994 and accuses the state of not providing an adequate education to the state’s more than 1 million students. The lawsuit has sought to shore up education in the state and improve outcomes for the state’s students.

Parties had come to an agreement on a plan in 2021 that would have drastically increased funding by more than $5 billion — funding for things such as special education, teacher pay, counselors, social workers and school nurses. It also included many policy changes, on things such as school improvement.

The court threw out that plan Thursday in a 4-3 decision. The ruling invalidates the last decade’s worth of actions in the case. But instead of remanding the lawsuit for further action on the claims of the original five school boards that sued — Cumberland, Hoke, Halifax, Vance and Robeson — the court dismissed the case entirely without giving parties the ability to re-file. Justices in the majority tossed the case in part because they contended that today’s education system has changed too much in the past 20 years and that the lack of any current students as plaintiffs means no plaintiffs have their rights at issue. 

Of the 50 states, North Carolina ranks second-to-last in cost-adjusted, per-pupil funding.

Did I mention that North Carolina is nine months into its budget year and the GOP-controlled state legislature has yet to pass a budget? Or that it has not had a new budget since 2023? Even in the wake of Hurricane Helene?

They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

(h/t NK)

What could go wrong?

Pete Hegseth is the joke. And he has a message from your Department of WAR!

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum directing military installation commanders to allow War Department personnel — namely, uniformed service members — to request to carry privately owned firearms while in their nonofficial duty capacity on DOW property within the United States. 

“Before today, it was virtually impossible … for War Department personnel to get permission to carry and store their own personal weapons aligned with the state laws where we operate our installations. … Well, that’s no longer,” Hegseth said during a social media video released today. 

In requesting private carry, there will be “a presumption of approval.”  Including at the Pentagon. Just not inside the building.

Rather, it states that the Pentagon Force Protection Agency must allow fair consideration for Pentagon personnel to “store a privately owned firearm in a vehicle on the Pentagon Reservation,” pursuant to the Code of Federal Regulations.  

Our military installations have been turned into gun-free zones—leaving our service members vulnerable and exposed.

That ends today. pic.twitter.com/IQ204YepZ0

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) April 2, 2026

Jack them up. Teach them to kill, kill, kill. And be sure they can walk around the base packing their own pistols. Or worse?

There seem to be no restrictions on what kind of private heat. Will troops be allowed to carry their tricked-out AR-15s into the mess hall? Or multiple weapons? Watch that space.

“Not all enemies are foreign, nor are they all outside of our borders — some are domestic,” he said, in reference to the oath all U.S. uniformed service members take upon swearing to serve their country. 

Enter Acting AG Todd Blanche

According to reports early this afternoon, Pam Bondi is no longer attorney general. She’s been fired (The New York Times):

The dismissal of Ms. Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.

The president’s support for Ms. Bondi has been steadily eroding since last summer, when her initial mistakes in managing the release of the Epstein files created a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate — a role he thought would suit her talents.

That did not take long.

Trump posted that just after a drone(?) camera video of the destruction of a bridge being constructed in Karaj, Iran. Iranian media claims two people were killed.

CNN:

Trump had in recent days talked to allies about the possibility of firing Bondi, and he talked with her personally on Wednesday about the possibility it would happen, sources said. In the conversation, which one source described as “tough,” Trump indicated Bondi was not long for her role and he would be replacing her in the near future, sources said.

Sources said Bondi was told she would be given a different job later. In their conversation, two sources said, Trump floated the possibility of appointing her as a judge after her departure from the Justice Department.

The big question now is whether that “Truth” was Bondi’s notice or whether Trump had the nerve to fire her in person. The next question is whether she’ll have anything to say about it as barbed as her comments in congressional hearings.

Trump has appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former Trump personal lawyer, as acting AG.  (He can serve for 210 days.) He’s no improvement. A number of names are in the mix for Bondi’s replacement, including Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin, an election denier. Anyone Trump nominates will face a very tough confirmation. That’s why Trump filled many high-level jobs in his first term with acting officials.

NPR reported in March 2020:

Trump has often said he likes installing “acting” officials because it gives him more flexibility. His administration has been sued over this, and recently lost a court case over the practice, when a federal judge found that it hired a top immigration official unlawfully.

Now the Trump administration is increasingly turning to the more obscure tactic that leads to those lengthy titles. It’s known as delegation.

“That’s the shocking thing — just how many positions are working because of these delegations,” says Anne Joseph O’Connell, an expert on administrative law at Stanford Law School.

Why not just name acting directors and deputies to fill these open positions? The answer, O’Connell says, lies in a law known as the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which lays out extensive rules about who can be appointed to serve in Senate-confirmed jobs, and for how long.

But that was in Trump’s first term. His entire administration is operating in a rules-optional manner. God knows what we’ll see in Trump 2.0 now that he needs a new AG.

Not that it isn’t deserved but it’s interesting that Trump has only fired women from his cabinet this term. Word is that Tulsi is next. I guess it’s natural. They’re “DEI” hires after all.

Unfortunately for the country, Todd Blanche is even worse than Bondi. And if Trump does put Lee Zeldin in as replacement, he’ll be equally unacceptable. Still, I don’t think anyone will miss Bondi. That performance before the Congress was the worst in history. That’s not why she was fired, of course. But it should have been.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez note the day:

On this day in 1992, a New York jury found mob boss John Gotti guilty on 13 counts, including murder. A key witness was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a former Gotti lieutenant who confessed to 19 killings and who would one day make headlines by endorsing Donald Trump. “We need a gangster,” Gravano said in 2024.

They write about Iran and it’s a banger:

Trump’s own administration – are actually buying his effort to declare victory in Iran and move on. “However poorly you think the war is going, it is worse,” one senior administration official said in recent days. A different senior US official bluntly stated: “Iran can declare victory, too,” adding that “nobody will buy our attempt to sell this as a big win.”

Still, if you are the US commander in chief, and you’re one month into a major war that you launched, the one communications job you have is to be able to go on live TV and project calm, confidence, and reasonably high energy to the American people, when you’re telling them how well the war is going.

On Wednesday night – April Fools’ Day, funnily enough – President Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do that. (He’s a former reality TV star; he is supposed to be good at doing TV.) Setting aside for a moment the typically incoherent jumble that pervaded his televised address, the American president delivered a jarringly listless, elderly-seeming speech that did little to inspire confidence – including in his own ranks.

During and after his address, an array of Trump advisers, administration officials, allies on Capitol Hill, and rich Mar-a-Lago buddies gave Zeteo their snap reviews of Trump’s message and delivery. (Yes, they asked for the cloak of anonymity, so as to not piss off God King Donald.) Virtually across the board, the president was panned by his own people, with some denigrating the speech as pointless, and others reiterating how much senior members of the administration never wanted this to happen in the first place.

One Trump administration official said the following on Wednesday night: “It reminded me of listening to Joe Biden speak.”

In Trumplandia, that is perhaps the worst possible thing you could say about anyone, much less the sitting president and leader of the GOP.

So today he calls Bruce Springsteen a “dried up old prune” and we hear that he’s going to fire Pam Bondi cementing the impression that his mind is actually mush. Biden never sounded so confused, much less were his policies totally incoherent. In reality the worst thing you can say about anyone is that they remind you of Donald Trump.

The best excerpt?

Before the speech, Politico reported that Trump intended to use his address to tell Americans the war is winding down. But the visibly deteriorating president didn’t seem prepared to pick a lane, and viewers were hard-pressed to find a message that didn’t sound like it was scrawled in a notebook by a serial killer.

I was unable to watch the speech in real time so I just got to it today. Oh my God. He is not well.

Josh Marshall’s pithy take is the best one I’ve read:

I think any press person who watched President Trump’s Iran cheer-up session speech on truth serum would have to concede that this was a speech he shouldn’t have given. He meandered. He looked bad and worn out. He had the requisite moments when his degenerate inner monologue creeps into the open: he said that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something for importer countries in Asia to deal with, that they should “grab and cherish” the strait, as though it were some underage beauty pageant contestant Trump was hungering to assault. What is important is that in political and public opinion terms, there was nothing new or newsworthy in this speech. They didn’t even manage to accomplish this in the narrow and cynical sense of saying anything new that could be a fresh point of public discussion. It was a rambling set of unconvincing excuses no one with any real concern or anxiety about this war (the only real audience) would find convincing. Why are you complaining, he asks? This war hasn’t gone on nearly as long as World War II! LOL.

Market watchers will note that the White House is now solidifying around the idea that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something importer countries will have to deal with, that it’s not America’s problem. That means that the economic fallout of the war will continue unabated. This is simply rebranding a massive strategic defeat as some kind of America First swagger. Of course, oil markets are global. It doesn’t really matter if the U.S. makes as much oil as it consumes. That’s not how prices work.

The “middle powers” as Mark Carney calls them have already banded together to come up with a solution to the problem without U.S. involvement. Trump will proclaim that as a personal victory but, in fact, it is the beginning of an alliance of erstwhile allies against our mutual adversaries — and us. Together, they are as powerful as we are.

What choice do they have? Any country that would elect that decrepit pile of bronzer and malice as their leader twice simply cannot be trusted to protect global security.

Gas prices are all Iran’s fault, claims real estate Developer-in-Chief

At an event the other day, I overheard someone complaining that the price of blueberries had shot up to $7. A visit to Trader Joe’s confirmed that. It’s now common to walk down the cookie aisle of a supermarket and see packages that once sold for $3-$4 now priced a $5 or more. And breakfast cereal? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Gasoline is now over $4 per gallon according to GasBuddy. Donald Trump last night claimed the price hike is “entirely the result of the Iranian regime” that closed the Strait of Hormuz after Trump attacked them.

At home, Americans’ patience has worn thin. Department of Homeland Security employees are working without paychecks for another week as Congress cannot get its act together (The Atlantic):

Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

[…]

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing  celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

TMZ has photos of the Scotland trip. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina took off for Disney World.

Gas and grocery prices will have many Americans planning staycations this summer.

One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

Sign Guy’s message for the week reads: ARE YOU WORKING TWO OR THREE ‘GOOD’ JOBS?

Lexus and Mercedes drivers don’t get it. Those who do shout, honk, and pump their fists. They feel seen.