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.
Is this a tween mean girl or the president of the United States?
One of the things that worries me greatly these days is the fact that this man has been a dominant force in the culture for the past decade and I’m afraid this malignant attitude has become the accepted way for adults to publicly communicate. There are kids who have seen this behavior as normal nearly their whole lives.
Whether we like it or not, presidents are role models. My God.
Headlines suggest that Donald Trump is not feeling as sheathed in a coccoon of warm, sychophants as he’s used to. This makes Captain Insecure agitated and unnerved. Answer? Fire someone.
AG Pam Bondi is in the headlines for just that reason (New York Times):
President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files, according to four people familiar with the conversations.
Mr. Trump has floated the idea of replacing Ms. Bondi with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations by the president.
Mr. Trump has not made a final decision, and Ms. Bondi’s allies pointed to photos of her and the president traveling to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to dispute the notion that the president is planning to fire her.
Rumors are also flying about DNI Tulsi Gabbard (The Guardian):
Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
It is not clear that Trump will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.
Like the war in Iran he started, the firings could distract Trump from deciding what flooring and chandeliers to pick for his now-on-hold ballroom, suggests New Yorker cartoonist Matt Reuter.
Trump was taking questions from reporters aboard Air Force One when he began holding up a series of architectural drawings and talked at length about the project he began pursuing early in his second term.
“We have all bullet-proof glass, we have drone-proof roofs, ceilings,” the president said as he shuffled through the renderings. “Unfortunately, we’re living in an age when that’s a good thing.”
Unfortuately, we’re living in an age dominated by billionaire tech bros and a president as incompetent as the people he hires to cover his ass.
You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible
Trump tells another “Sir” story about meeting the families dead U.S. service members: “And every single one of the people, their loved ones, said: ‘Please, sir. Please finish the job.’ Every one of them.”
Donald Trump addressed the country Wednesday night to provide an update on his war/not-war with Iran. In Trump’s view, what he’s dubbed an excursion (that’s incursion) is “nearing completion.” Yet he repeated threats to destroy Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, to hit Iran “extremely hard,” and to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” if it did not make a deal on ending the war/not-war. Except Trump presented no details of any proposed “deal.”
“Trump only repeated “the same statements he has been circulating for weeks,” Al Jazeera commented. “The US president did not provide details on how the war would actually end or what kind of deal he is seeking with Iran.”
David Rothkopf lambasted the address in the Daily Beast:
The U.S. president, looking addled and unsure of himself, unleashed a torrent of lies, untruths, misrepresentations, deceptions, and distilled nuggets of crapola so vast that it may well live up to the most Trumpian of descriptive phrases: “nobody has ever seen anything like it before.”
Compounding the fact that he managed to speak for almost 20 minutes without uttering nearly a single truth was the equally mind-numbing reality that, despite the White House having advertised his national TV appearance as a major address on the Iran war, nothing newsworthy crossed his thin, ever-so-lightly glossed lips.
His address was not so much a speech as it was a greatest hits compilation from his Truth Social account since the beginning of the current war in Iran, known to those who know as Operation Epic Fiasco.
With nothing new to say, Rothkopf writes, “the reason for this speech is that the opposite of everything Trump was saying was true and it is bad news and he wants to hide it.”
Iran’s fissile material is still there. The world is less safe than it was before Feb. 28. The world’s economy is shaken. Iran’s leadership is more hardline than ever and determined to wait out Trump’s shrinking attention span. As a Taliban leader reportedly said to the U.S. in Afghanistan, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”
Trump appears ready to abandon his effort and leave others to clean up his mess:
And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.
“Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump advises in what sounds unnervingly like echolalia. Because Not. My. Problem. says the Great Deal Maker. U.S. adversaries including China and Russia are gleeful.
It would all be humorous if not for the death, destruction, and worldwide economic disruption. Again, not Trump’s problem. It’s never Trump’s problem.
The BBC’s “Friday Night Comedy” last week found some humor nevertheless, and made more sense of Trump than Trump. “What the fake is going on?” You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible.
Has Donald Trump been spreading ‘fake news’ about the war in Iran? From The Skewer’s Jon Holmes and host Andrew Hunter Murray, this week’s Friday Night Comedy looks at a fresh way of dressing the week’s news in the altogether and parading it around for everyone to laugh at. Friday Night Comedy | Listen on BBC Sounds
(Trump’s address came after his morning glare-a-thon at the Supreme Court — I got that wrong; he actually did attend, but only for Solicitor General John Sauer’s arguments that fell flat with most justices.)
McCormick: "We were horrible in Vietnam until we did Rolling Thunder Two, then we won. As soon as we do half-measures, we lose. The faster we get this over the better. If we seize Kharg island, it could be done almost flawlessly. If we have enough firepower, it would be very easy to defend."
So now they think we won the Vietnam war? With Rolling Thunder, the 3 year long bombing campaign that resulted in absolutely nothing? It didn’t break the North Vietnamese will and ended as a strategic defeat of historic proportions. Just as Trump’s Iran debacle is going to be.
Spencer Ackerman points out the absurdity of this view. He lays out Trump’s and, more recently, Rubio’s fatuous attempts to say that the war has achieved its objectives and writes:
[I]t’s necessary to point out that Rubio has abandoned as unachievable the fantasy of regime change. And while any state would prefer to have an intact navy and its air force, Iran has just proven that its ability to project power resides in its missiles and its drones, rather than its conventional military. And seeking a “significant reduction” in anything is a tell that you know you cannot eliminate the threat from that thing, so you employ a vague term you can define as needed to save face. But most importantly, Rubio is making one gigantic elision: the state of the vital commercial waterway, open when the U.S. and Israel launched this war, now throttled by Iran, which blocks ships flagged to the U.S. coalition.
“One way or another,” after the war, Rubio hand-waved, the strait will be opened. “We’ll achieve those objectives in weeks, not months, and then we’ll be confronted with this issue of the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “And it’ll be up to Iran to decide. And if they choose to try to block the strait, then they will have to face real consequences. Not just from the United States, but from regional countries, and from the world.”
It’ll be up to Iran to decide is the only accurate thing Rubio said. Here we have the foreign minister of a belligerent power—the regnant superpower, no less—insisting that if the U.S. ceases fighting with the Strait of Hormuz closed, it’s still victory by the original terms the U.S. set out, no matter how thoroughly Iran has obviated those terms. Rubio has no choice but to persist with this absurdity, since otherwise he’ll contradict Trump, the only fireable offense he could commit. Whether or not Rubio believes what he’s saying, what he’s describing is a situation in which the U.S. quits the war, leaving other combatants—the sort that never manifest and would certainly never manifest within range of Iranian missiles— to impose “real consequences” on Iran. That’s not just a lost war. That’s a humiliation.
It’s not the first time we’ve lost a war but it’s certainly the first time we didn’t even have a real reason for starting it — well, other than the president is a delusional megalomaniac who thought it would be a cakewalk and blew up the middle east instead. What a horrific decision and what a predictable outcome.
This is an excerpt of a piece by John Ganz called “The Juggler”
Everything he writes is incredible.That he also sees the Trump dynamic in this way reassures me. Trump does think he is a rare genius, a great historical figure, blessed by God, perhaps gifted with magical powers. Many of his followers obviously agree. Nothing could be more dangerous.
I highly recommend that you subscribe to Unpopular Front if you have the means. It’s inspirational.
The Justice Department is struggling to decide how to respond to President Trump’s lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion from the I.R.S., as the department’s lawyers try to resolve by a mid-April deadline the profound ethical questions the case raises, according to two people familiar with the dynamic.
In late January, Mr. Trump took the extraordinary step of suing a federal agency that he oversees, accusing the I.R.S. of not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020. The suit immediately elicited questions about whether and how Trump administration officials would defend against a lawsuit filed by the head of the executive branch. The government has not yet responded to the case.
[…]
While former Justice Department officials see clear flaws in the president’s case, some Trump administration officials worry that assigning a lawyer to contest it would pose an unworkable conflict, given that such a person ultimately works for the president, according to the two people. Defending the case could also contradict a White House executive order that binds all government lawyers to the president’s interpretation of the law.
Another option under consideration is to try to delay the case, either by requesting more time to respond to the suit or by asking the judge to put it on hold until after Mr. Trump leaves office in 2029. Mr. Trump’s lawyers served the government with the suit on Feb. 18, giving the Justice Department 60 days to respond.
The Justice Department could also ask the judge in the Southern District of Florida presiding over the case, Kathleen M. Williams, an Obama nominee, to take other action to resolve the conflict of interest faced by the government’s attorneys, the people said. The judge could appoint an independent counsel to defend the case instead of the Justice Department, for example.
Settling the case would involve some of the president’s top aides, including one of his own former defense lawyers, approving a potentially gigantic disbursement of taxpayer dollars to Mr. Trump and his family, a possibility that is likely to provoke political blowback. Regardless, Trump administration officials expect that they will ultimately have to consult Mr. Trump himself on how the government should respond to his lawsuit, the people said.
Political blowback? Maybe. But It’s just as likely his cult will say he deserves it and we’ll all wring our hands about polarization and that will be that.
He says he will give he money to charity as if that somehow makes it ok to abuse his power to steal money from the taxpayers so he can make a point. And we can only imagine what “charity” he plans to give the money to. The ballroom? The Trump Presidential Library/hotel?
Trump: "I have a lot of powers to do things. We use the powers where appropriate. They're a little severe, and then people accuse me of being a king." pic.twitter.com/xpCPwCMGMh
President Trump on Tuesday stepped up efforts to promote his false claims of widespread voting fraud, signing an executive order of questionable constitutionality seeking to create a national list of citizens that would determine voting eligibility and restrict mail ballots
Mr. Trump acknowledged that the order, which comes as a bill he has been pushing to restrict mail voting has languished in Congress, could face legal hurdles.
“I believe it’s foolproof,” Mr. Trump said about the executive order before signing it in the Oval Office. “And maybe it’ll be tested. Maybe it won’t.”
It will be tested so it likely won’t have any impact before 2026. But Trump wants something to blame for the “stolen” election in November and this is part of it. And there’s at least a fair chance it will pass muster with the Supremes when it finally gets there, so 28 is on the menu.
[W]hile Trump may think that Democrats are voting by mail in higher numbers than Republicans, a data analysis by the New York Times found that despite Trump’s attempt to disparage the practice, Republicans made almost universal gains in mail voting during the 2024 election — including, the report notes, in “battleground states like Pennsylvania, red states like Florida and blue states like Connecticut.”
Do they really think only Democrats vote by mail? It’s ridiculous. Trump is an imbecile but the rest of them can’t all be that dumb.
Pete Hegseth’s military is becoming a bunch of undisciplined yahoos.
The helicopters were on a training mission when they stopped by Kid Rock’s house, said Maj. Jonathon Bless, public affairs officer for the 101st Airborne Division. The helicopters also flew over a “No Kings” protest against Trump in downtown Nashville, but Bless said their presence had nothing to do with the protest.
Kid Rock posted two short videos on social media Saturday. Each shows a helicopter hovering alongside his swimming pool while the entertainer claps, salutes and raises his fist in the air. One post included a caption by Kid Rock disparaging Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump critic
In the videos, Kid Rock stands next to a replica of the Statue of Liberty and a sign by the pool that reads, “The Southern White House.” His home on a hill overlooking Nashville was built to resemble the White House.
Kid Rock said he thought it was “really cool” that they stopped to hover at his house.
“If it makes their day a little brighter for their service to our country, protecting us, I think that’s a great thing,” he said.
Asked about possible repercussions for the crews, he said, “I think they’re going to be all right. My buddy’s the commander in chief.”
Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is a dark, repressive place. But Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think-tank that has given America, among other gifts, Project 2025 — has called it not just the “model for modern statecraft, but the model. Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Australians — everyone — can and should learn from it.”
Those words may sound odd coming from a right-wing American activist, the type who would have previously heaped contempt on anyone who suggested that a country other than the United States is the model the world should follow. But these are different times, and America’s right-wing intelligentsia has had a crush on Orbán for some time now. The question is whether the Hungarian people are as enamored as they are. For the first time in 16 years, Orbán is facing a tough reelection battle.
Hungarians will go to the polls on April 12, and if the elections are fair and uncorrupted, it appears Orbán and his Hungarian Civil Union Party, known as Fidesz, will lose. Current polling averages show his chief rival, Péter Magyar of the Respect and Freedom Party, more commonly referred to as Tisza, with a healthy 15-point lead that has held for most of the past year. But in Hungary, which has been defined as an “electoral autocracy,” a manipulated electoral map coupled with Orbán’s years of corruption mean there is no guarantee that Magyar can pull off a victory, even with a commanding lead. Still, it’s the best chance in years to unseat the prime minister, as the widespread discontent has caused several other parties with smaller constituencies to step back in an effort to consolidate the anti-government vote behind Magyar and Tisza.
By any objective measure, Orbán is a demonstrable failure as a government leader. His overwhelming corruption, anti-democratic practices and cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin — even as Russia threatens all of Europe with its aggressive war in Ukraine — has made Hungary increasingly isolated from the European Union, with which the country does almost all its business. The E.U. has frozen aid to Hungary for the past several years, and the economy is in bad shape, contracting 0.8% in 2023 and growing by only 0.5% over the two following years. People are feeling the pinch, and they might be finally realizing just what a disaster his tenure has been.
But that doesn’t mean Orbán doesn’t have friends. Virtually every right-wing extremist in the world counts him as an inspiration, starting with his good pal Putin, who supplies almost all of Hungary’s energy needs, and China’s Xi Jinping, who counts Hungary as its closest E.U. ally. Nearly every far-right leader in Europe — France’s Marine LePen, Germany’s Alice Weidel, Spain’s Santiago Abascal, Poland Karol Nawrocki and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders — has made appearances in support of Orbán. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his endorsement, as did the chainsaw-wielding leader Javier Milei of Argentina.
Donald Trump, who has long looked to Orbán as a role model, has also provided his “complete and total” endorsement, and has dispatched Secretary of State Marco Rubio to offer promises of financial support — the same gambit that many observers think made the difference in Milei’s win a few months ago.
Donald Trump, who has long looked to Orbán as a role model, has also provided his “complete and total” endorsement, and has dispatched Secretary of State Marco Rubio to offer promises of financial support — the same gambit that many observers think made the difference in Milei’s win a few months ago. Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to visit Hungary and lend his support to Orbán just four to five days before the election.
The Hungarian prime minister is revered by authoritarians everywhere, and because he has been such a path-breaking autocrat demonstrating the new soft fascism, his impending loss seems to be making them nervous. They must be wondering what it could mean for them. After all, Orbán’s anti-democratic policies were intended in part to not only prevent a defeat from happening, but also to keep people from ever wanting it to happen.
For all of his failures at actual governance, Orbán boasts quite a list of autocratic accomplishments. He perverted the rule of law and institutions through constitutional changes and the appointment of cronies to previously nonpartisan positions. He took over private media outlets and obliterated the state media’s independence. He marginalized academia and non-governmental organizations. He ran an intimidating culture war, attacking and ostracizing the LGBTQ community, pushed so-called Christian values and rewrote history. But mostly Orbán has simply been monumentally corrupt, pressuring every sector of the economy for the benefit of his cronies.
Magyar has made the corruption and cronyism of Orbán’s so-called “mafia state” a focal point of his campaign, and most observers point to that decision to explain why he has gained and maintained so much traction in the polls. He has also pledged to rebuild public services with the return of frozen E.U. funds. As a former member of Fidesz, Magyar is a conservative politician in his own right; he left the party over a major scandal that implicated Orbán in a pardon linked to a cover-up of child abuse in a state-run children’s home. But he’s not tainted with the prime minister’s venality, and that’s the key.
Orbán, on the other hand, is simply running a massive smear campaign against Magyar. But the usual fear tactics don’t appear to be working. That failure has left Orbán to try a new strategy, according to the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, in what “may be the world’s first post-reality campaign.”
Fidesz is spending a fortune using social media, posters, artificial intelligence and even foreign help in convincing people that Ukraine is about to invade Hungary. The notion is ridiculous; as we know, Ukraine is a bit busy at the moment trying to fend off the Russians, who are trying to take over their country. No matter, Applebaum writes, calling on the world to “pay attention, because this may be the future of electoral politics: Multiple politicians from several countries are shoveling propaganda at an electorate in order to build terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all.”
The smears are so crude they make Trump’s team look tame by comparison. They include the AI slop of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy snorting cocaine and counting money while sitting on a golden toilet, and a fake Magyar saying that Hungarian factories should be turned over to foreigners. Even stranger, a SpongeBob-type character accuses Magyar “wip[ing] up cocaine with me after he accidentally sneezed and it all fell to the floor.” (Cocaine must be a particular bête noire in Hungary.)
All this smacks of desperation, something we’re starting to get a whiff of here in the United States, as Trump and his supporters are pushing mightily to suppress voting rights through the SAVE Act and posting footage of the Iran war combined with violent video game clips. We haven’t yet reached the cocaine-on-the-toilet stage, but I’d guess it’s coming.
Viktor Orbán may yet be able to hold it together for another term, but the writing is on the wall. A defeat on April 12 would be seen as a loss for all the right-wing tyrants and various despots around the world who have been inspired by his “model state” and strongman tactics. This includes Donald Trump, whose new world order was largely inspired by the Hungarian prime minister.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader,” the president said on March 8, 2024, as Orbán visited Mar-a-Lago. “He’s fantastic… He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”
From undermining America’s democratic institutions and the rule of law to spreading disinformation about and cracking down on immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people and the media, Trump has attempted to emulate Orbán’s success — and he has succeeded to varying degrees.
Hungary is a cautionary tale for Americans under Trump. Let’s hope that April 12 will prove to be a day of reckoning.
