Wyden: "Measles are in fact deadly and highly contagious, something that you should've learned after you lies contributed to the deaths of 83 people, mostly of them children, in a measles outbreak in Samoa." pic.twitter.com/VGzOIEdWBx
Bernie Sanders: "You're coming before this committee and you say you're pro-vaccine, and yet your organization is making money selling a child's product for to parents for $26 which casts fundamental doubt on the usefulness of vaccines." pic.twitter.com/6pZMiOlQ5I
RFK Jr: I am happy that you had a good experience on SSRIs. Other have not.
SMITH: But that would be an issue between them and their physicians and not for the future head of HHS to be putting out misinformation pic.twitter.com/2W6O5TE9Cx
Hassan: "You have clearly stated in the past that bodily autonomy is one of your core values … when was it that you decided to sell out the values you've had your whole life in order to be given power by President Trump?" pic.twitter.com/OCnwSgugfl
I have concluded that Trump is so angry about the attempts to hold him accountable for his crimes that he just wants to hurt Americans. I also think that he’s showing some serious signs of dementia now. This stuff about the “valve” and sending Elon to space is weird even for him. It’s possible that he’s just owning the libs but I have a sense that it may be more than that. Choosing a conspiracy theorist like Bobby Jr. covers all those bases. He is an insult to all Americans. If the Republicans let him go through despite knowing what a monstrous freak he is, we’re truly in Mad King territory.
Oopsie. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just tweeted this:
This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.
I assume this is them trying to be clever and moot the court injunction? Probably not a good idea to say this out loud.
* Trump OMB puts out 2 page memo freezing all grants * Chaos, panic ensues * OMB puts out 1.5 page Q&A trying to clarify. * More confusion * Congressional Republicans defend it all after Dems go off. * WH blames media for confusion * OMB puts out one line memo rescinding freeze
You have to love that she put her own pic on that…
There’s already proposed legislation to rename Dulles Airport. I assume highways, schools and post offices are already on the way. But we have to start thinking bigger. Cities? Mountains? The country itself? Let’s get serious about this.
Donald Trump has the highest approval rating of either of his presidencies right now and he’s still below or just at 50%, the lowest of any president at this point in their presidency except himself in 2017. That hasn’t stopped him and his lackeys from insisting that he has an unprecedented mandate to enact a radical agenda, based upon what they ludicrously call a landslide victory. In reality he won the popular vote by 1.5% and didn’t reach a majority and his electoral college victory was a tepid 312. Compared to real landslides such as Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 when he won 49 states by a popular vote margin of 18 points, it’s embarrassing that they even have the nerve to claim one but that’s just how they roll.
According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll “45% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance as president, down slightly from 47% in a Jan. 20-21 poll. The share who disapproved was slightly larger at 46%, an increase from 39% in the prior poll.” And regarding Trump’s early policy moves, the majority disapproves of almost all of them.
While it’s true that the one issue that gets majority support is “downsizing the federal government” it’s fair to assume that a majority do not believe that abruptly freezing the funding of important medical research, children’s health or veterans care without notice, which Trump and his Project 2025 acolytes have done in the past few days, is the way to do it.
You will note that after ending requirements that government employees report gifts and investments and renaming the Gulf Of Mexico, the most unpopular move that Trump has made is the pardons of the January 6th rioters. Only the most hardcore MAGA true believers support his actions and it tells you that Trump’s belief that America at large sees the violent actions of that day as justified is very wrong. (Even Trump’s biggest fan, S. Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said publicly that it was a mistake.)
Not that he seems the least bit concerned about that. Over the weekend Trump appeared at a rally in Las Vegas with Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers whose 18 year sentence for seditious conspiracy Trump commuted. According to a recording obtained by CBS News, he’s the guy who said “my only regret is they should have brought rifles, we should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang fu**ing Pelosi from the lamppost.” What a guy.
Trump said that all the prisoners were patriots who love their country. Meanwhile, one pardon recipient was killed by police in a shootout just days after being released, another is wanted on charges of solicitation of a minor and another is facing trial on state charges of pedophilia and possession of child pornography. It’s highly likely they will not be the last to find themselves back behind bars or worse before too long. Everyone in this country and around the world saw what those violent criminals did that day.
Trump is so driven to “prove” that everyone should believe him rather than their lying eyes that he has appointed one of the organizers of the “Stop The Steal” gathering on January 6th, a man named Ed Martin, to be the interim US Attorney for Washington DC. At a rally on January 5th, Martin spoke before the excited crowd and exhorted “die-hard true Americans” to work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.” He was at the Capitol the next but says he didn’t think anything was “out of hand.” He tweeted this as the crowd had already breached the building and was engaging in a violent battle with police:
Martin has also been a big part of the Patriot Freedom Project, advocating for the J6 defendants and holding fundraisers for them. If there is someone with a greater conflict of interest to be involved in these cases I can’t imagine who it would be. But that isn’t stopping him. Martin has instigated one of those patented Trumpy “investigation of the investigations” to review what he calls the “great failures” of the prosecutors to use a charge that was later disallowed by the Supreme Court, despite the fact that all but one of the judges that heard the cases before it landed in the high court upheld it. He has also disbanded the DOJ’s Capitol Siege Section and was the one who moved to dismiss all the pending J6 cases.
The New York Times reports that over at Main Justice, Acting Attorney General James McHenry “fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the two criminal investigations into Donald J. Trump for the special counsel Jack Smith, saying they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s agenda.” Career prosecutors are supposed to follow the rule of law without fear or favor not “faithfully implement” anyone’s political agenda but apparently those rules have changed. Trump now sees the DOJ as his personal law firm which makes sense since he’s staffing it with all of his defense lawyers from his criminal, impeachment and civil trials.
And then we have Kash Patel who will be facing his confirmation hearings this week as he prepares to take over the FBI and do without question what former FBI Directors James Comey and Christopher Wray refused to do: act as Trump’s personal henchman.
I wrote about Patel a couple of months ago when I was still in shock that he could possibly be confirmed for such an important law enforcement position. He is, as I said then, apparently driven by the same persecution complex as Trump and has developed an equal thirst for revenge. Members of the Intelligence Community have begged the Senate not to confirm him as have former Republican national security officials. Revelations are coming out daily about his malfeasance in his former positions during Trump’s first term, always because he was operating as Trump’s propaganda minister regardless of the actual job he held.
USA Today reported this week that Patel was one of the members of Trump’s inner circle most responsible for “recasting” January 6th as a patriotic protest rather than the violent insurrection we all watched in horror as it unfolded. He spread lies about the FBI instigating the riot that day and pushed the bogus Ray Epps conspiracy theory. He even produced that depraved January 6th Prison Choir rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. It’s hard to think of anyone worse to be in the role of FBI Director.
All of this is happening in the shadow of Trump’s repeated flouting of the law, from his odious Executive Order banning Birthright Citizenship to the unauthorized firing of almost all of the Independent Inspector Generals to his refusal to fund programs for which the Congress has appropriated the money, which is their job. His brazen lawlessness is already beyond most people’s expectations or even imagination and he’s just getting started.
The American people are not in favor of any of it and they are almost certainly going to like it less and less as it all unfolds. Trump’s twisted psychological need to believe that he won in a landslide and is therefore vindicated in his lies about 2020 has given him a monumental case of hubris. He’ll do a lot of damage before he’s done but he will never have the popular approbation he craves, now or in the future.
Donald Trump’s Project 2025 forces overran Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, illegally impounded $3 trillion in funds for a host of congressionally mandated spending, and “threw the nation into chaos.” Officials administering “Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, student loans, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance and Medicaid” were left wondering what hit them and whether they could continue operating Wednesday morning.
“No president in history—not even Trump in his first term—ever logged so many illegal actions in so short a time,” Timothy Noah observes. “This is not a close legal call. Trump’s previous violation of this law concerning aid to Ukraine prompted Trump’s first impeachment 11 months into his first term.”
What else would we expect from a 34-time convicted felon?
Not even the White House seemed to know what it had done with its Monday night memo to “pause” the spending. White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, 27, with Sean Spicer-esque confidence, declared, “President Trump is back, and the Golden Age of America has most definitely begun.” Leavitt made sure reporters knew who Trump meant to target with the cutoff. But asked if Trump’s hold order cut off Americans on Medicaid, Leavitt answered, “I’ll check back on that and get back to you.”
I need to be sure everybody caught this…“No more funding for illegal DEI programs… no more funding for the green new scam… no more funding for transgenderism and wokeness across our federal bureaucracy and agencies.”Trump froze federal grants & loans just to target BIPOC & marginalized groups.
How long would the cutoff be? Leavitt could only say that it was “temporary” and that Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, “told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal agencies.” So the guy directing this cataclysmic “pause” is an unconfirmed nominee who doesn’t even work for the federal government? (Later on Tuesday, a federal judge delayed the freeze until at least Feb. 3.)
They don’t care about government efficiency or saving taxpayer dollars. They are literally going to pay civil servants to QUIT THEIR JOBS! The goal is to eviscerate the government so that they can privatize everything & let corporations run rampant.
But Trump 2.0 was not done for the day. The man known for slapping gold leaf onto his properties offered civil servants of questionable loyalty a golden parachute that was neither. The message? Quit or be fired (Washington Post):
The White House’s Office of Personnel Management sent an email blast Tuesday to federal employees offering them a way to resign with pay through Sept. 30, the most sweeping effort yet by the new Trump administration to shrink the ranks of the federal workforce.
The email instructed workers to reply to the message if they want to resign and take the offer, which expires Feb. 6. According to a White House Q&A, most of the 2.3 million federal workers are eligible for the incentive, which landed as many employees were facing return-to-office mandates and threats of layoffs.
[…]
A website details the offer for federal employees. The email sent to the federal workforce said employees who choose to resign will be exempt from the return-to-office requirements until Sept. 30. An Office of Personnel Management memo issued late Tuesday said employees who do resign should “promptly have their duties re-assigned or eliminated and be placed on paid administrative leave” until the end of September, but left room for agency directors to require employees to keep working for some time.
Not being a Beltway denizen, it’s not clear to me whether Trump legally can direct funds this way. But observing the law is no longer even a hindrance to Trump. It’s not clear what this “deal” means for workers, their severance or benefits. It appears a slap-dash an effort at replacing civil servants with MAGA loyalists as the Monday memo from the acting director of OMB. This isn’t an effort to reform government so much as to occupy it.
This is grossly irresponsible reporting by the AP. What’s being offered is not a buyout. The deal is if you agree to resign in September you can continue working remotely until then. There is no buyout or severance.
What Trump is asking of career civil servants is to become collaborators in a powerless Vichy government between now and when he finally eradicates the old republic in September and consolidates control. He’s not offering an olive branch.
Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, writes that Trump is moving swiftly, as autocrats do, to disorient opponents with a flood of stunning actions. His governing principle in his second term is rooted in cruelty and loyalty:
Trump seeks to govern through cruelty and loyalty. Defending our constitutional democracy requires that we don’t look away when cruelty is visited on members of our community and that we refuse to allow our democracy to crumble into personalistic attachment to the leader. To stand up to this will require a unity of purpose so that we cannot be divided by fear and it will require that we defend the principle that no man is above the law—nor can he change the law to put himself above it. Those of us concerned about the future of our democracy need to regroup and prepare for a long hard fight. We cannot let ourselves be divided and conquered—or distracted by everything that is flooding the zone right now.
Meantime, Trump’s ICE deportations are not ethnically cleansing America fast enough to satisfy Trump.
I had a feeling that this blatantly unconstitutional power play would wake Democrats out of their stupor and it appears that it did. I watched Ruben Gallego on Chris Hayes make it clear to night that something has changed. He says that he won’t vote for Russ Vought and it sounds like they are all ready to oppose him. Whether there are any Republicans willing to join in is unknown.
Whether Vought makes it or not, it does appear that the Democrats have relinquished their insane plan to ignore Trump and focus on “kitchen table issues.”
According to Axios, “One week after the 2025 inauguration, it feels more like the winter of 2017.” Hurrah:
Democrats have flipped overnight from retreat to obstruction after Trump fired government watchdogs and froze (some) government spending.
They have no plans to stop unless or until Trump backs down.
“This is about Trumpwanting to seize control of everything,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told reporters today.
A coherent Democratic counteroffensive is starting to emerge.
Make noise: Jeffries’ messaging arm urged House Dems to hold press conferences and go live on social media. Schumer’s Dems audibled today’s press conference from Jan. 6 pardons to Trump’s spending freeze.
Block bills: Senate Dems filibustered a GOP bill sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC). Democrats were resigned yesterday that they’d be jammed on the bill. Now they know they can increase their negotiating position if they stay unified.
Protest votes: Nearly two dozen Senate Democrats voted against Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s confirmation, a day after the chamber voted unanimously to advance his nomination.
Lawsuits: A federal judge blocked Trump’s spending freeze plans this afternoon. But all day, Democrats decried Trump’s move. The lawsuit will give them time to create a narrative about the real-world impact of the cuts. Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers will be hearing from their (potentially) angry constituents.
This is what’s required. Let’s hope they stick with it.
Trump has apparently offered 8 months severance pay to 2 million federal employees. Here’s Tim Kaine urging them not to do it:
Tim Kaine tells federal employees to ignore Trump’s offer to quit w/ pay for months. “Don’t be fooled. He’s tricked hundreds of people w/ that offer. If you accept that offer & resign he’ll stiff you just like he stiffed the contractors. He doesn’t have any authority to do this.” pic.twitter.com/iQI3a8grRG
Trump pulled security from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and his assistant John Hook despite the assassination contract put out by Iran. Just another example of Trump inviting political violence against his enemies:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will announce he is “immediately pulling” retired Gen. Mark Milley’s personal security detail and security clearance, multiple senior administration officials tell Fox News.
The secretary is also directing the new acting Inspector General to conduct a review board to determine if enough evidence exists for Gen. Milley to be stripped of a star in retirement based on his actions to “undermine the chain of command” during President Donald Trump’s first term, officials say.
The Pentagon will also be removing a second portrait of Gen. Milley inside the Pentagon. This one is from the Army’s Marshall Corridor on the third floor honoring his service as chief-of-staff of the Army. Fox is told the removal of this second portrait will take place as soon as tonight. This means there will be no more portraits of Gen. Milley inside the Pentagon.
[…]
The now retired Gen. Milley and other former senior Trump aides had been assigned personal security details ever since Iran vowed revenge for the killing of Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in 2020 ordered by Trump in his first term.
Trump and his MAGA henchmen want him dead.
And remember, killing Soleimani was Trump’s decision. If there’s a better lesson in this, I don’t know what it might be. Follow his orders at your own peril. He might have your back. But he might not. King Donald might just wake up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decide that you’re out. Sometimes you can insult him ferociously, as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have done, yet still be rewarded with his favor. But he could change his mind too. (Li’l Marco should probably sleep with one eye open.)
That misogynist pig Pete Hegseth, friend of war criminals and Tito’s vodka, being in a position to demote someone like Milley is enough to make you scream.
If he manages to evade assassination over the next four years, I would hope that one of the first things a Democratic president will do is to restore his rank and hang his picture.
Former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy sent a litter to Senators about her cousin Bobby. If they care to listen there is no way they could ever even dream of putting him in charge of anything:
He is a sociopath: “he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
Sadly, I won’t be surprised if that actually cinches it for him. Republicans will love him all the more.
For over a week now, Donald Trump and the Justice Department have been flouting the law meant to shut down TikTok. The legislation was unambiguous and was passed by large, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress; it was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court less than two weeks ago. And for the most part, both Republicans and Democrats have sat quietly by as Trump has waved away their previously stated concerns, as well as the constitutional powers and institutional prerogatives of Capitol Hill.
He has also broken the law pertaining to the process for firing Inspector Generals and is ignoring the Impoundment Act by shutting down funding of programs he doesn’t like. He’s discriminating against all kinds of people.
But that’s what you get when you allow a criminal to become the most powerful man on earth and imbue him with immunity for virtually any crime he commits. He has demonstrated that he will pardon anyone who backs him if they run afoul of the law as well and having been impeached twice and saved by his GOP lackeys, he has no fear of being accused of abuse of power. He’ll never have to run again. He is completely unaccountable.
He is to all intents and purposes a dictator. Who’s going to stop him?
