At first glance, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway’s Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution is certainly delusional, but not in a way that’s particularly interesting or insightful for a MAGA movement rooted in a cult of personality.
The hagiography of the Court’s most openly partisan archconservative, premised on insider access to the justices and those in their orbit, reads like the gushing raptures of a K-pop stan.
“Years before the attacks on the Court intensified and conservative justices could still be seen in public, Justice Alito and his wife attempted to get brunch in New Haven, Connecticut, after a speaking event at Yale. Turned away because of a long line and lack of reservation, they ‘calmly walked away and went down the street,’” she writes, his not forcing himself into a packed restaurant apparent proof of a rare moral rectitude.
But as I reread, the humor in her labored attempts to dredge up proof of the curmudgeonly justice’s humanity — his devotion to the Phillies does much of the heavy lifting — curdled into something much darker.
Hemingway seeds her book with the omnipresent threat of leftist violence from its opening pages, where her treatment of anti-Kavanaugh protesters (with no mention of why they were protesting his nomination) puts them on par with the January 6 insurrectionists.
“One woman scaled the gigantic statue Contemplation of Justice on the left side of the main steps and perched, first raised, on the marble lap of the seated female figure. The activist later justified her lawbreaking by declaring, ‘This is our court, these are our steps, these are our institutions!’” she writes.
That harrowing anecdote, page 3, is around where her examples of left-wing violence untether from reality completely.
Right. A woman scaling a statue and claiming the court belongs to the people is far worse than beating up police, and storming the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, not to mention the chanting of “hang Mike Pence” with a gallows conveniently assembled outside on the lawn. Certainly the fact that the president of the United States invited them to do it no big deal compared to the alleged leftist violence that has Republicans terrified of being dragged from their beds and lynched on the spot.
Riga totally gets it:
Paeans to Alito’s brilliance and humility can only produce so much juice; this book, like the MAGA movement, needs at least the threat of violence to justify its sense of being under siege.
In her telling, the still mysterious leak of Alito’s Dobbs opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, is less a shocking piercing of the Court’s well-insulated bubble and more an open declaration of war on the conservative justices.
“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome,” she writes, straight-faced.
Fergawdsakes. Get over yourself Mollie.
She actually goes on to name the liberal clerks she suspects are the ones who leaked it. Nice.
Alito is a far right ideologues badly infected with Fox New brain rot, barely able to contain himself. His wife can’t. To paint him as the middle of the road, dispassionate jurist battling the forces of far-left extremism is kind of hilarious. But it’s a perfect example of how they think.
Gee, I wonder how they got themselves into this dilemma? Oliver Darcy reports:
Journalists across Washington are trying to determine how to respond if Donald Trump derides the press at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Status has learned. “There are lots of discussions about it,” one high-profile Washington journalist told me Thursday. “If he starts attacking us, I think it is a fair question as to what the appropriate response is. Obviously some people will want to walk out, but the question about such a thing is: does that not give him exactly what he wants, making us the opposition, not the Fourth Estate? Making us the story instead of the journalists covering the story? And, suggesting that we can dish it out but we can’t take it? And so I don’t think there is any easy answer.”
Of course, that’s precisely right. There is no great answer for how to respond in such a scenario—which is why some journalists have said it is better to skip the event entirely, given the WHCA’s decision to invite Trump. Perhaps outlets like MS NOW will give their talent more leeway in how they respond. And, with thousands of journalists in the room, my guess is there could be some audible boos or voicing of disagreement with any attacks. In any case, most journalists will not want to make themselves the story, putting them in an awkward position as the cameras pan. But trying to laugh it off risks projecting the wrong optics, too. So what is the right response?
► Related:The NYTexplained why it has for years opted against attending the annual dinner: “We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on.”
This was when I knew the event had jumped the shark. It was 2002:
I only wish he had broken out into a rousing rendition of “War Pigs.” It would have been so apropos for 2002.
The only one of these things that’s been truly worthwhile was this one:
What the SPLC has to do with the 2020 election is anyone’s guess but for some reason his scattered mind rushes to any excuse to remind people of his devastating, humiliating loss. He’s obsessed with it to such a degree that it’s warped whatever small piece is sanity was left and eats away at him like a parasite devouring him from within.
But sure, he’s fine. That kind of statement from the president of the United States is no reason to worry that we might be in some kind of existential danger. Carry on.
Trump is about to hit REM on camera during an Oval Office event. It's just incredible. pic.twitter.com/h0BwcHLURJ
Reporter: Is the government going to buy a stake in Spirit Airlines?
Trump: They were going to merge with People Express or one of them and Obama decided it was a bad idea. How did that work out? I think we just buy it. And when the price of oil goes down, we’ll sell it for a… pic.twitter.com/dYKc6NhLjc
Win McCormack at The New Republic contemplates what makes bullies like Donald Trump cave. It may be, he considers, Trump’s saving grace:
My principal concern right now is the midterm elections, and whether our system of democracy will continue to prevail or be seriously compromised or even snuffed out completely by Trump. I didn’t mention above my conviction that Trump is, above all, a destroyer, and his goal, consciously or unconsciously, is to destroy every good aspect of the American project, top to bottom, in every field of endeavor and accomplishment. But I also didn’t mention what I consider his saving grace, though that might not be the right term for it. I refer to the all-important fact that he is, I believe, quintessentially a coward, with a host of fears that run very deep and haunt him. He can be brutal, but only when it is easy and safe to be brutal—when he thinks the field before him is wide open to such behavior.
What concerns me is not just what Trump will do in the days leading up to and after the November election, but how his ride-or-die supporters will react to Dear Leader and MAGA Republicans gettting body-slammed by voters and facing in a Democrat-controlled Congress honest-to-god, rigorous investigations of adminstration perfidy (fingers crossed). They are painfully aware of how bad the economy is. They know his promise to lower prices “starting on Day One” was a fraud. He’s irrational besides, writes McCormack.
The tariff issue, on which The Donald still refuses to acknowledge that tariffs are paid by the receiver of foreign goods rather than the sender, is one example of the actual operation of his befuddled mind.
His supporters are paying the price for it.
For the first time in 16 years, today's Fox News survey has Democrats holding a four-point advantage over Republicans on the economy, @ForecasterEnten reports. pic.twitter.com/7fX5pznuWl
Trump has betrayed them on keeping America out of foreign wars. The Iran war has driven up the cost of everything. They know it every time they fill up or buy groceries. Any reminder drives some of them ape-shit.
Ten days ago I recounted the reaction of one driver to a roadside message: PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION. The driver of a work truck doing about 35 mph, popped open his door and stepped out onto the running board of the vehicle he was driving to scream at Sign Guy. He risked his life, the life of his passenger, and the lives of surrounding motorists in the process. He was that out of control.
Everyone feels like the wheels are coming off the country. So the point of such a message is not to goad MAGAs (a minority here; the county went 61-37 for Kamala Harris in 2024). It is to acknowledge commuters’ struggles, to help them feel seen. But it’s also a Rorschach ink blot that an unbalanced handful perceive as a poke in the eye.
This week features a sign inspired by the cookie aisle at the grocery store (image above): $4 OREOS IN 2024 NOW COST OVER $6. * It’s a product everyone knows, fondly remembers from childhood, and buys for their kids. It’s not an economic abstraction. It’s personal. And in Trump’s economy, it’s become unaffordable. The entire cookie aisle on Sunday was lined with sale stickers. No one’s buying. Guess why.
A driver this week was so incensed at being reminded that $4 OREOS IN 2024 NOW COST OVER $6 that he exited and initiated a physical altercation that ended with the intervention of pedestrians. I asked if he really wanted to explain to a judge that he assaulted a senior citizen over the price of Oreos. But they are that crazy.
It will get worse before it gets better, others have said before me. But if they’re this crazy now, the worse the economy gets for them and for Trump through the summer, and the worse prospects look for Republicans heading into November, they’ll feel even more like cornered animals. Buckle up.
On advice of friends, Sign Guy ordered a body camera.
Update: Photos by Julie Harrison
* One woman threw her hands wide behind her windshield and said (I could read her lips), “I know, right!?”
Michelle Goldberg considers the press that Tucker Carlson is getting this week over his admission(?) that he’d “be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.”
Carlson went on, speaking to his brother, Buckley: “You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’. “
That’s the exchange that drew all the headlines. But the brothers Carlson were not done. They went on to construct a conspiracy theory for explaining where Trump went wrong.
I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.
Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
So is his brother Tucker’s career. Trump is on his way out. So Tucker Carlson is putting some daylight between himself and Trump without putting daylight between himself and the MAGA audience that keeps him living the celebrity lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed. Tucker will need them to keep buying what he’s selling in a post-Trump America. Knowing they’ll choose a TV huckster rather than a competent lawmaker, perhaps as some speculate, he even sees an opening to run for president himself. This isn’t Carlson’s come-to-Jesus moment some are celebrating. It’s positioning.
Goldberg lets the hot air out of the Carlsons’ ass-covering, “the Jews made Trump do it” theory. The plain truth is, Goldberg explains, Trump has “never been better than this, and he didn’t need to be manipulated to make everything in America worse.”
Nor did Tucker Carlson, as Jon Stewart pointed out on CNN’s “Crossfire” 20 years ago.
Rolling Stone reminds its readers that Carlson’s performative career has always involved presenting one face to the right wing media-consuming public while keeping his real opinions to himself:
In private text messages to his colleagues at Fox News — which were only revealed after the network was sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems — Carlson referred to the president as a “demonic” around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote at the time. “I can’t handle much more of this.”
And yet within a year, he was campaigning for Trump’s reelection and floating conspiracy theories that the Jan.6 attack on the capitol was simply the work of “tourists.”
If Carlson had reservations about the president — and we know he did — he pushed them down and did what he swore he would never again do after being burned by the Iraq war. He once again set aside his own concerns, his disdain, and his supposed principles, in service of the right-wing movement du jour. Carlson likely did so believing that even though he despised the president, the ends would justify the means, and he could use his platform and connections to influence outcomes and check the excesses of the man he once called the “single most repulsive person on the planet.”
Carlson’s admission that he had fallen for the charlatan figurehead of this movement should not be mistaken for an act of true contrition. His break with the president comes after years of documented disgust of Trump, and at a moment where a public rebuke of the president comes with no severe political cost. The Iran war is unpopular, Trump’s approval is at a historic low, and his conservative allies are becoming increasingly comfortable breaking with him on an issue-by-issue basis — or entirely.
Before I’ll credit him with conversion, I’ll wait until Tucker Carlson apologizes for being Tucker Carlson.
This time Trump has a blank check and it’s a recipe for disaster. Trump wants the government to buy the most detested, failing airline in the country and I have to say, it makes sense for him. After all, he is the most detested failing president.
IF DONALD TRUMP HAS HIS WAY, America’s Worst Airline™ might soon become our national flagship carrier. Yes, I’m talking about Spirit Airlines.
The ultra-low-cost carrier is going bust. It’s been in trouble for a while: It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last summer, for the second time in less than a year, and is now facing the prospect of liquidation. That’s largely because it cannot survive the sky-high1 jet-fuel prices caused by Trump’s Iran war, which is expected to raise Spirit’s costs by an estimated $360 million this year. You can’t sell enough $40 fares to fill that hole in the balance sheet.
One solution Trump is considering? A bailout, on the taxpayer’s dime.
The Trump administration is considering dumping $500 million in taxpayer money into the struggling airline. In exchange, the government would receive warrants allowing it to take up to a 90 percent stake in the company.
“We’re thinking about doing it. Helping them out, meaning bailing them out. Or buying it. I think we just buy it,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday evening. “We’d be getting it virtually debt-free. They have some good aircraft, some good assets, and when the price of oil goes down, we’d sell it for a profit. I’d love to be able to save those jobs. I’d love to be able to save an airline. I like having a lot of airlines so it’s competitive. . . . If we could get it for the right price, I’d do it.”
He wants to save these jobs but presided over the biggest job loss of federal employees in history and laughed about it.
His last foray into this went belly up but this time he has the full faith and credit of the United States behind it. Just watch. He will rename it Trump Air.
By the way:
[C]onsider that Trump actually tried to run an airline before. It was called Trump Shuttle, and it was a spectacular failure, lasting a whopping three years without ever turning a profit. That may have had something to do with his jets, which were decked out with gold-colored bathroom fixtures.
But what finally put Trump Shuttle under was—drum roll, please—high jet-fuel prices, caused by a war in the Middle East.But sure, let’s put another failing airline3 under his purview, or better yet the purview of his Department of Transportation. It’s not like there are any problems over there.4
Is there anything in his life that isn’t a do-over????
The Trump administration saw yet another high-profile departure Wednesday, with Navy Secretary John Phelan heading to the exits. Senate Republicans are bracing for even more.
President Donald Trump’s recent administration shakeup — the sacking of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi as well as this week’s departure of Lori Chavez-DeRemer — has created openings for a slew of potential confirmations, and GOP senators are contemplating who might be next and how quickly Trump should make any further changes.
No Republicans are publicly urging any particular oustings. But privately GOP senators believe Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel could be at risk of leaving — voluntarily or not.
“He’s in a bad mood,” one GOP senator said about Trump. “He’s preparing to really let a lot of them go.”
So, situation normal.
Norm Eisen, former White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform, as well as former and board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), is exactly the kind of American Donald Trump hates: someone with ethics. Especially since Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump went after Eisen on Truth Social Wednesday night.
He IS in a mood, isn’t he? I’d missed this (Newsweek):
President Donald Trump has called for Fox News host Jessica Tarlov to be taken off the air, calling her “one of the least attractive and talented people” on television.
Writing on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said: “Her voice is so grating and terrible, I had to ‘turn her off!’”
Yes, but does Trump run out of the room when he hears her voice like my spouse does with his?
Tarlov, a former Democratic Party strategist and co-host of Fox News’ The Five, said on Thursday that Trump now had a “35 percent approval rating in most polls,” adding that “no Americans wanted the tariffs, they didn’t want the war in Iran, and they don’t want the ballroom.”
That explains his dumping on Tarlov. Eisen told Jennifer Rubin the Department of Justice should be renamed the Department of Trump.
The NY Times Tom Edsall published a column this week (gift link)called ‘Easily the Worst President in U.S. History.’ You know who he’s talking about.
He leads with this:
The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp. It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.
One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:
We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.
Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.
Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.
“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”
There are thousands of stories like that out there, most of which we will never hear about. But that’s just the introduction to Edsall’s list of grotesque failures, corruption, incompetence and malevolence. A few short excerpts:
“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”
The numbers are mind-boggling. The other day a whistleblower said that when the DOGE boys finally asked for a briefing on what USAID actually did (after they’d already cut it) they were surprised because they’d understand that is was just a ‘woke” slush fund. Oh well. Too bad.
There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”
And the hastening of climate change could eventually kill billions of people on this planet. They don’t care. Trump said, “we’re going back to fossil fuel, we have to be smart.”
Oh and he’s also on track to completely cripple the medical research sector of the United States:
It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”
It goes on and on and it’s particularly useful since Edsall’s columns are usually just he said/she said accounts by various experts on a certain topic. This is just a long and detailed list of the horrors the Trump administration is inflicting on the American people.
Read the whole thing and keep it bookmarked. I’m sure we could add new examples every day for the next 3 years. It will certainly help to have a Congress as a backstop and the courts will be able to stop some of this at least temporarily. But Trump will still be president until January 2029 and he can continue to do immense damage all by himself.
It seems like all I’m writing about these days is corruption but it’s such a huge story and covered in such scattershot fashion by the MSM, I feel as if it’s important. Here’s another one.
The Trump administration has agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle claims from 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page that the FBI and Justice Department illegally entangled him in court-ordered surveillance, according to a court filing and a person familiar with the deal.
Page sued the federal government — along with top FBI and Justice Department officials — in 2020, saying they abused their foreign intelligence surveillance authorities after his travel to Russia drew the eye of the FBI and fueled investigations of then-candidate Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. The allegations also provoked Trump’s attacks on the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies, saying they cut corners and broke rules in a single-minded effort to tie him to Russia and damage his presidency.
Solicitor General John Sauer revealed the settlement Wednesday in a filing with the Supreme Court, where Page had pressed his case after losing fights in federal district and appeals courts.
This is a very clever ploy. Sure the government, lose in court and then have Trump’s DOJ “settle” with millions of dollars. Sweet little payoff scam.
And Trump s deploying this for himself as well, having sued the government for a leak of his tax information (despite the fact that every other president has released those voluntarily.) He’ll be approving the “settlement” himself, of course. He personally runs the DOJ and they all admit it:
Lawyers for Donald Trump and the Internal Revenue Service are in talks to settle the U.S. president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the tax collection agency for leaking his tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020.
In a Friday filing in Miami federal court, the lawyers asked a judge to put the case on hold for 90 days “while the parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.” A pause “could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently,” they added.
[…]
Trump and the other plaintiffs said the leaks caused them financial harm and public embarrassment, and tarnished their reputations and public standing.
Prosecutors charged Littlejohn in 2023 with leaking tax records of Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans to the media, saying he was motivated by a political agenda. Littlejohn later pleaded guilty to improper disclosures, and a judge sentenced him to five years in prison.
Any payout in Trump’s lawsuit would likely involve taxpayer dollars. Trump has said he would donate money collected from the case to charity.
“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information” to the Times, ProPublica and other “left-wing news outlets,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
Think about that. The president and his spawn are claiming that releasing their tax returns caused them “financial harm and public embarrassment.” Shouldn’t the president be so above board that nothing in his taxes could cause him financial harm and embarrassment? Shouldn’t he be an open book?
I’ll be very curious to see which “charity” he gives the money too. Not that it matters. There is no reason for the taxpayers to be on the hook for any of these suits and the nakedly trollish nature of it all should have the American public in total revolt. It appears there needs to be some changes in the law around all of this.
Apparently, we can no longer have even the slightest trust in our leaders that they have enough character not to steal the country blind and say “waddaya gonna do about it?”
Remember, when the NY Times asked why he was ignoring all the ethical norms he (pretended to) follow in the first term, his answer was, “because I found out nobody cared.”
Back when Donald Trump was just a New York tabloid fixture and reality show host, his signature tag line was typically rude and nasty: “You’re fired!” During his first campaign, he loved to yell it out on stage at his rallies with a snarling expression, which made the crowds go wild. Even when he ascended to the White House, he deployed the expression liberally, often aiming it at his staff and Cabinet members. His administration was known for its massive turnover, breaking records for a president’s first term.
According to a Brookings Institute study, when he left office in 2021, Trump’s “A Team” turnover was 92%, a figure that did not include Cabinet secretaries. Even more startling was the turnover there. Most members of his Cabinet were forced out under pressure — fired, in other words — or else they resigned in protest. A similar analysis by the New York Times found that of 21 top White House and Cabinet positions going back to 1992, “nine had turned over at least once during the Trump administration, compared with three at the same point of the Clinton administration, two under President Barack Obama and one under President George W. Bush.”
As it happens, Trump is known to be a coward when it comes to bringing the hammer down himself, so he often tasks others to do his dirty work. The most famous example of this involves Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, who learned he was fired by a presidential tweet in the middle of a trip to Africa. The story goes that when Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, called Tillerson to warn the tweet was coming, the secretary was on the john.
Incidents like this were commonplace during the president’s first term, and now, with a series of three Cabinet firings or forced resignations in six weeks — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5, Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2 and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on April 20 — it appears he may be returning to his old ways.
Trump entered office in 2017 unschooled in the ways of Washington, and he knew nothing about how the presidency worked. He expected that members of his staff and Cabinet would be as fawning and obsequious as his employees at the Trump Organization. Instead he found they considered themselves professionals, with a responsibility to give the president their best advice. He soon disabused them of such a notion.
This is not to say that there weren’t some people who deserved to be fired. Trump’s first national security adviser, Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was found to be chatting with the Russian ambassador on a back channel during the transition, and then lied about it to the FBI. But Trump has harbored regrets about firing Flynn, so much that he recently signed off on a Justice Department settlement of over a million dollars to compensate the former adviser for his trouble — even though he had pleaded guilty and was let off the hook with a presidential pardon. Flynn has stayed loyal to Trump, and the president is rewarding him handsomely.
Then there were people like Tom Price, Trump’s first secretary of health and human services. He was forced to resign because he was traveling around on private jets at taxpayer expense, which seems like a joke today. (Who in the second Trump administration isn’t doing that? Trump himself has accepted a luxury 747 as a gift from a foreign country.) There were alleged domestic abusers forced to resign, and lawyers, ethics advisers and other staffers who disagreed on policy, many of whom Trump just decided he didn’t like. They left under a cloud — each one a scandal for at least one news cycle.
The main lesson Trump appears to have taken from his first term was to only hire staff who would never dare to cross him or tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. All you have to do is witness the displays of sycophancy by his appointees during his televised Cabinet meetings to understand the dynamics within his second administration. And until recently, Trump has refused to fire any of them — no matter what they’ve done.
But something has changed in recent weeks. Noem, who presided over the president’s unpopular mass deportation policy, was forced out amid allegations of grifting, self-dealing and carrying on an affair with her top lieutenant Corey Lewandowski. Bondi was fired for botching the Epstein files and failing to effectively prosecute the people on Trump’s lengthy enemies list. And on Monday, Chavez-DeRemer reportedly resigned due to charges of abuse of power, drinking on the job and sexual misconduct charges involving her father and her husband
As the president’s approval ratings have plunged into the low to mid-30s amid rising inflation, the spectacle of his immigration policy and his inexplicable decision to go to war with Iran, Trump appears to be looking for scapegoats — and ways to distract the media and the public. It’s a mark of a presidency on the brink, teetering due to a chaotic and vacillating policy agenda, poor management and outright incompetence.
And if rumors are to be believed, more firings could be in the offing.
The prediction markets have Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the top of the list. She’s working overtime to appease Trump by apparently spending her time creating “evidence” that the Russia investigation, his first impeachment and the 2020 election were all Democratic Party/Deep State conspiracies. Trump needs that to soothe him as he faces even more exposure as a failure in this second term. Whether it will be enough to spare her is an open question. She is, after all, a woman — just like Chavez-DeRemer, Bondi and Noem.
Whatever the case, more scapegoats are almost certainly on the way. If there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he will never blame himself.
