Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It might take less time to drive (and cost less)

The headline at CNN describes “worsening lines” at U.S. airports: “Travelers continue to see hourslong security lines as TSA officers work without pay amid the ongoing partial government shutdown.”

CNN’s blurb-fest:

Where things stand

• At the airports: Some airports are again seeing agonizing security wait times due to callouts from Transportation Security Administration officers who haven’t been paid since mid-February, although other airports are experiencing improvements. In Houston, travelers have been warned they could be waiting for more than four hours, but in Atlanta, today’s lines pale in comparison to yesterday’s.

Amidst the chaos, Donald Trump stands firm until he doesn’t (USA Today):

President Donald Trump isn’t yielding. Instead, he upended sensitive negotiations among lawmakers over the weekend, bucking Senate Republicans and aides by tying the shutdown fight to a voting restrictions bill that has little chance of surviving Congress.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, spoke to Trump on March 22, according to a person familiar with the conversation, to discuss a deal floated by White House staffers to potentially bring the funding crisis to an end before Congress is supposed to leave for a two-week Easter recess.

As part of the proposed compromise, which has support among key Senate Republicans, lawmakers could vote to sustain the rest of the department, including the Transportation Security Administration, while postponing a vote on ICE funding.

Dear Leader said no to pushing through funding under the reconciliation process. He wants his War on Voting.

The Guardian explains how long lines at airports are about Donald Trump making voting harder:

Congress has yet to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security for this fiscal year. Democrats blocked funding the department, demanding that ICE agents be held accountable for acts of violence in the course of their enforcement operations, including the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats have also demanded policy reforms, including an end to masked operations and warrantless entry of buildings. Republicans voted against legislation that would have funded the salaries of TSA agents and the US Coast Guard while leaving other parts of the department shut down.

Many TSA security screeners have refused to work while unpaid.

Meanwhile, the US Senate has been debating the merits of the Save America act, which would impose changes to voter registration rules on states that its opponents – including all Senate Democrats at the moment – say would infringe on the right to vote for many Americans. The bill does not have enough support to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Nonetheless, debate stretched through the weekend.

Donald Trump has threatened to refuse to sign any legislation that passes until the Save America act passes.

“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” the US president wrote on Sunday in a Truth Social post. Trump is demanding an end to the filibuster, if necessary to pass the bill.

Will he or won’t he TACO? Your wait at the airport depends on it.

FWIW, Sen. Chuck Schumer explains today in The New York Times that what Trump really wants to save is his presidency from the 2026 midterms.

“Republicans like to pretend that the SAVE Act is a voter ID bill,” he begins. But it’s more. “Though on the surface it appears to be one, something far more insidious lies beneath: a system for purging eligible voters from the electorate — voters who are disproportionately likely to vote against Republicans. In the bill, voter ID comes into play only at the very end of a process designed to systematically disenfranchise Americans.” He itemizes.

What’s important to know, Schumer writes, is who Trump’s victims are (gift link):

The burdens of the SAVE Act would fall most heavily on the socioeconomically disadvantaged, the working class and voters of color. They would fall on Americans who cannot spend hours navigating bureaucratic obstacles, on older people who depend on voting by mail, on those without passports, on rural communities far from election offices. In other words: millions of everyday Americans.

Including Republican voters so long as the GOP thinks more Democratic voters get disenfranchised, as I’ve pointed out before.

For that, you wait. And wait. And wait.

Has anyone checked?

Sleepless in the White House posted about ICE and the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” Act (SAVE) early this morning without mentioning the latter by name. In what Daily Beast oversells as a “frantic early-morning” rant, Donald Trump smushed together two of his favorite grievances in one 1:48 a.m. ET Truth Social post:

“Democrats are desperate to keep illegals, no matter how bad or dangerous they may be, in the Country. They want them to VOTE! That’s why they are fighting so hard to neutralize ICE. We will fight them all the way, and WIN!

By “we,” Trump means someone else.

“Pull yourself together. We have work to do. And by ‘we,’ I mean you,” Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) tells sleepy assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Which is how Trump operates.

Trump told a roundtable in Memphis, Tennessee that Republicans should work through the Easter recess to pass SAVE for him.

“You don’t have to take a fast vote. Don’t worry about ⁠Easter, going home. In fact, make this one for Jesus,” Trump said. He’ll be golfing, cheating at it, and shouting at clouds.

In Memphis, Trump struggled to keep his eyes open, Daily Beast reports, “occasionally jerking his head around as he appeared to drift off, while MAGA acolytes took turns giving him ‘Dear Leader-style’ compliments.”

This is a man who does not use email and puts nothing in writing other than his sharpied signatures. But he’ll issue directives to underlings at all hours for all to see via Truth Social, or at events far from Washington, D.C., and expect others to jump. Or maybe bomb Iranian power plants or invade Cuba.

Yes, noncitizen voting is extremely rare, Daily Beast acknowledges. And yes, SAVE has virtually no path forward where the House bill sits in the U.S. Senate. And, by the way, Trump has a war he started with Iran and can’t seem to finish on his plate when he’s not obsessing over his gilded ballroom and gutting the Kennedy Center. But what keeps him up at night is losing control of Congress in the fall elections.

Daily Beast remarks on SAVE:

Critics have raised concerns that Trump’s push for stricter voter ID rules in a country where nearly half of residents do not own passports could be an attempt to meddle in the 2026 midterms, where Republicans are widely expected to suffer heavy losses.

In whatever way he fails, Trump makes sure someone else pays the price. It’s one of his few talents.

It’s not too late to remind any Republican representing you in the Senate not to save SAVE.

Dan Pfeiffer thinks the Democrats have the upper hand on the TSA situation:

1. Voters Are Likely to Blame Republicans, Not Democrats

Most shutdowns are high-profile affairs that dominate political coverage, with intense focus on the stakes and the human cost.

Not this one.

It’s one department, much of which is already funded, and it’s unfolding in the middle of a war. Most Americans have been going about their daily lives largely unaware of the shutdown — until they get to the airport.

And even then, it’s not obvious to travelers that the lines are the result of a government shutdown.

And even if people in line figure out that a shutdown is the cause, I don’t think they’ll automatically blame Democrats. They’re much more likely to blame Republicans.

We saw this pattern in the last shutdown: all of the polling showed that a plurality of voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, even though Democrats had initiated the shutdown and were very public about their reasons for doing so.

This reflexive tendency to blame Trump and Republicans stems from two things. First, Republicans control everything. When something isn’t working, voters hold the party in power responsible for fixing it. Second, Trump’s personal brand is such that whenever there’s a dispute or a crisis, most people’s default assumption is that he’s the one being unreasonable. The majority of voters presume he is at fault.

The key point for Democrats: as more people pay attention to the shutdown, the political pressure should fall on Republicans, not Democrats.

2. Democrats Have the Better Argument

The Democratic case is two-fold. First, they are demanding commonsense reforms to ICE following the killing of two American citizens and countless other examples of dangerous and illegal behavior by the agency.

That argument has real purchase. Americans are deeply unhappy with ICE and Trump’s broader approach to immigration enforcement. A Marist/NPR poll from February found that 60% of Americans disapprove of ICE, 65% believe ICE has gone too far, and 62% think ICE is making Americans less safe.

And immigration is no longer a political asset for Trump. According to Nate Silver’s model, Trump is nearly ten points underwater on the issue.

This is why Trump’s idea to send ICE agents to help TSA is a potential political disaster for Republicans.

The second part of the Democratic argument may be even stronger. Republicans are the ones blocking TSA funding. Democrats want to fund TSA and the rest of DHS now, while negotiations on ICE reform continue. Republicans have voted down bills to fund TSA alone at least half a dozen times.

Last night, Trump made the Republicans’ position even weaker by saying that he wouldn’t sign a bill funding DHS unless Congress passed the politically toxic SAVE Act.

That’s a powerful political and rhetorical position: Democrats want to pay TSA workers and fix a broken agency. Republicans are saying no.

They need to make sure that the public understands that and it won’t be easy. The right wing noise machine is shouting to the rooftops that the Democrats are at fault. Some are even saying that this show ICE are really the good guys just helping out in a crisis. (See? They aren’t even wearing masks now that Trump asked them not to!)

I don’t think most people will buy it but you can’t take anything for granted. The Democrats have to find a way to penetrate the cacophony. I’m not sure what it takes but I would guess that as the lines get longer and people get more and more impatient they are going to be looking for the explanation and the Democrats have to be everywhere, in national and local media, social media, mailings, outreach of every kind. They need to own that narrative. I don’t know if they can do it.

The Supremes heard a case today about whether or not elections officials can count ballots that have been postmarked on or before election day but arrive later. It went about as you might have expected, via TPM:

Voting by mail has become a contentious, political issue in the last several years, primarily fueled by President Donald Trump claiming falsely that it helped his shadowy enemies steal the election from him in 2020. Faced with the inconvenient reality that voting by mail is not actually rife with fraud, many of the conservative justices had to content themselves with increasingly hallucinatory what-ifs. An inordinate amount of time on Monday centered on the possibility of voters “retracting” their votes, a complicated and rare procedure. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas obsessed over the granularities of having a neighbor or relative drop off a voter’s ballot in their stead. 

Many on the right sounded Trumpian in their feigned concern about voting fraud. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh fretted over the chance that late arriving ballots would prompt cries of fraud, creating a “perception” that lawful elections might appear rigged. As has become rote for the Court’s conservatives, in the absence of any actual evidence of voter fraud, they fell back on the impossible-to-substantiate risk that people might think something fishy is going on. 

These rabbit holes, which tripped up Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, distracted from the meat of Monday’s attempt by the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration to make voting by mail harder to do because Democratic voters have used it more in recent history. 

The GOP had long been a prime proponent of mail-in voting even as they were rending their garments over non-existent voter fraud long before Trump. This particular innovation is all Trump.

But it’s not the only one, it sounds like Alito is all in on Trump’s inane contention that all voting must be on election day (and probably that only votes counted on election day can count.)

“We have lots of phrases that involve two words, the second of which is ‘day,’” began the Princeton and Yale-educated Justice Samual Alito. “Labor Day, Memorial Day, George Washington’s birthday, Independence Day, birthday and Election Day,” he continued, “birthday” apparently so compelling as to warrant double-dipping.

“They’re all particular days — so if we start with that, if I have nothing more to look at than the phrase ‘Election Day,’ I think this is the day in which everything is going to take place,” he concluded. 

Why they think all this is only going to hurt Democrats I’ll never understand.

This is the real kicker:

While the Roberts Court attacking voting rights has long been a dog bites man story, the action it’s at least seriously contemplating is extreme: ripping up a routine, widely practiced state policy on the grounds that Congress actually meant federal law to forbid it, but it just randomly hasn’t come up until now. 

And the Court is considering doing this months before the midterm elections, a seemingly clear violation of the Purcell principle: the idea that courts shouldn’t change how elections work too close to them, so as to not confuse voters. But the Court has become comfortable applying the rule sparingly, only when people likely to vote Republican are at risk.

Good luck with making a rule that the law only applies to Democrats. But if anyone can do it, this conservative majority can. They are rank partisans and increasingly aren’t even trying to hide it.

The Guardian reports:

When Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr stood up at the press conference in September to tout leucovorin, a vitamin B derivative, as a treatment for autism, some neurodevelopmental doctors were shocked – and they braced themselves. There was little evidence to suggest the folinic acid helps with autism, yet there was an immediate flood of parents calling and scheduling visits to talk about the medication.

“The average parent who maybe wasn’t getting the right information said, ‘Well, to be good parents, we need to try this,’” said William Graf, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. Outpatient leucovorin prescriptions for children ages five to 17 in the US rose by 71% in the weeks following the announcement, new research shows.

But on 10 March, the FDA approved leucovorin only for cerebral folate deficiency, in an apparent walk-back from officials’ statements about autism. The treatment seems to help treat “developmental delays with autistic features”, Marty Makary, commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said in a statement – a reference to the ways cerebral folate deficiency, a very rare condition, can appear similar to autism.

Only months ago at the September press conference, Makary was much more explicit about folinic acid as the first FDA-recognized treatment for autism.

“Hundreds of thousands of kids, in my opinion, will benefit,” he said, stating that being autistic “may be entirely preventable”. The drug “may help 50 to 60% of kids with autism”, Makary claimed on C-SPAN. He also said on Becker’s Healthcare Podcast that “in the right population of children with autism, two-thirds of kids can see a clinical improvement and some a dramatic improvement in their autism symptoms”.

Other officials also spoke to the potential benefits of leucovorin for autism.

“This gives hope to the many parents with autistic children that it may be possible to improve their lives,” Trump said. Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said it was “an exciting therapy that may benefit large numbers of children who suffer from autism”.

All the specialists wondered if this meant that families should try it? Should they put their kid through a spinal tap to see if they had a deficiency? There was no information on dosage since there hadn’t been any kind of clinical trial.

Dr. Graf said “This is not a panacea. This is not a wonder drug that was out there but no one knew about it. It was just propagated from a government that, at the same time, doesn’t want to fund ACA, isn’t supporting research and is vaccine hesitant.” With the FDA approving the drug only for folate deficiency, “it’s almost like they’re backtracking now, they’re trying to get out of it”, Graf said.

The biggest study on leucovorin for autism – which only followed 77 children – was retracted in January after re-analyses of the data failed to find the same results. The only other studies have faced criticism for small sample sizes and improper blinding. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in October that it does not recommend leucovorin for autistic children because of limited evidence.

You literally can’t believe anything the United States government says right now. And it’s going to take years to rebuild whatever trust there was before. Millions of families were given false hope by this and that’s just cruel.

Meanwhile, they’re blocking the most promising medical breakthrough in many moons, mRna research, because of some voodoo bullshit from the right wing fever swamps that has no scientific basis. More people will die needlessly.

Wake me up when this is over…

He doesn’t believe this is true having persuaded himself that his popularity among self-described MAGA cultists is all that matters. They are his army.

This is not really unusual among despots. If they have control of state violence and the backing of a brainwashed extremist faction they believe they can control their entire society. And they can, at least for a time. That’s where we are today.

Trump has the brain and temperament of a 12 year old bully who is too clever by half when he does things like sending ICE into the airports to force the Democrats to say uncle when the American people start getting their heads bashed in. I guess that could work. But really, it’s just a troll:

Does he think that only Democrats use the airports? Or is it that he believes the MAGA faithful, which he believes is the “silent majority” will stand up for ICE and be grateful when they start knocking heads? Who knows?

By the way, here’s an example of how it’s going to go from last night:

Greetings from SFO airport where ICE is working diligently to speed the line up. pic.twitter.com/r3Fft5Lv9V

— Certified Hoodie Thief 🏁 Ms 1/11 🎂 (@KryssyLaReina) March 23, 2026

I’m unclear if that was part of this new deployment or something else. But it’s a good illustration of what we might see going forward if he keeps this up.

Trump on airports: "I want to thank ICE because they stepped in so strongly. They'll do great. And if that's not enough, we'll bring in the the National Guard." pic.twitter.com/p32xKTXjIt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

By the way, at the event he was headed for this is what he’s been doing:

Trump is out pic.twitter.com/a7HaBIv8nQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

The Times of Israel reports that Israel is learning the pitfalls of following the MAGA edict to “trust the plan” when it comes to Trump. There is none:

Trump and his advisers — especially top envoy Steve Witkoff — might occasionally have said things that confused Israel and even undermined its interests, but they trusted that he was a president who could distinguish good from evil, and was not about to be pushed around by Iran and friends.

Trump’s decision to unleash an all-out bombing campaign against Iran alongside Israel seemed to confirm the wisdom of putting trust in the US leader. Sure, Trump might have engaged in direct talks with Iran, but, they reasoned, he saw right through their attempts to prevaricate and delay and embarked on a war that could damage him politically because he knew it was right.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly acts like he fully trusts Trump. In a press conference last week, he lauded “the wisdom and the courage of President Trump’s decision, and his leadership, and the fact that we’re working together.”

[…]

After delivering a seemingly unequivocal deadline to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, Trump seems to have equivocated. In a bombshell announcement Monday, Trump revealed that his administration has been engaged in “productive” talks with Iran regarding a “complete and total resolution” of hostilities, leading him to postpone his pledge to bomb Iran’s energy sites. He followed that up by claiming that the US had effectively achieved “regime change” in Iran because so many of its leaders are dead. Israelis who had trusted the plan now fear there is no plan and wonder if Trump can still be trusted.

It seems that Jerusalem was caught off guard by the announcement from the mercurial president. As of 4:30 p.m. Israel time, hours after Trump dropped his bombshell, Netanyahu and his office had yet to formulate a public reaction. Just the day before, the IDF said Israel expects to fight for “several more weeks” to achieve its goals in Iran, indicating that even if it knew the US was talking to Iran, it did not think the negotiations would go anywhere. “This was always a possibility,” said Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren.

There are precedents over the past year for Trump accepting a hasty deal that solves nothing in order to extricate himself from a situation, even if it leaves others in the lurch.In May, Trump came to a surprise deal with the Houthis in Yemen that simply returned the situation in the Red Sea to the status quo before the seven-week-long bombing campaign. The agreement ended attacks on US vessels, but allowed the Houthis to keep shooting at Israel and others using the waterway.

Israeli officials told Hebrew media outlets at the time that Washington did not give Jerusalem advance notice of the announcement, and that Israel was surprised by it. That deal, not surprisingly, was negotiated by Witkoff and brokered by Oman.

At the end of the 12-day June war, Israel promised to “forcefully strike the heart of Tehran” in reaction to an attack that broke the fresh ceasefire. Trump’s response was to berate Israel and publicly force it to turn its planes around.

Lie down with dogs…

I suspect that Bibi has already gotten much of what he wanted. And the war will continue until Israel wants it to end and the U.S. will be part of it. The dynamic is set.

Trump can TACO about this and declare victory but it’s not going to be the end of it. Maybe the markets will continue to reward him which seems to be the only thing that matters but in the end we’re all just passengers on the crazy train and we have to hope it doesn’t crash before we can get rid of him.

Note the misspellings. My God.

Iran denies talks. At this point I think we’re better off trusting their word. Check this out:

Trump: "Look at the way Iran attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding them. That was not supposed to– nobody was even thinking about it." pic.twitter.com/5wZsxU0CLn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

Only every war planner for the past 50 years. He’s just openly admitting that the U.S. was completely unprepared.

Q: Iran's foreign ministry says you're not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations to end the war

TRUMP: Well, they're gonna have to get themselves better public relations people. We've had very strong talks. Mr Witkoff and Kushner had them. They went… pic.twitter.com/zzwlv4aBL5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

“…. they went perfectly.”

Q: Who is Steve Witkoff speaking with in Iran?

TRUMP: A top person

Q: Who is it?

TRUMP: I can't. I don't want them to be killed pic.twitter.com/lKPy8hdyPL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

Bullshit.

COLLINS: You said there's many points of agreement with Iran. Can you give us a few?

TRUMP: Like 15 points

COLLINS: That Iran has said yes to?

TRUMP: They're not gonna have a nuclear weapon. That's number 1, 2, and 3

COLLINS: They've said yes to that?

TRUMP: They agreed to… pic.twitter.com/NHeYyJvRQS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

Q: Has Iran agreed to no enrichment whatsoever, even for civilian purposes?

TRUMP: They have pic.twitter.com/08v4LPWKIA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

I’m sure he’s talking about the deal that was on the table before he decided to blow everything up. There is no way this is true today. In fact there have almost certainly been no talks at all with anyone with actual power.

COLLINS: Who's gonna be in control of the Strait of Hormuz? Who's gonna be in control of that?

TRUMP: Uhhhh it'll be jointly controlled

COLLINS: By who?

TRUMP: Maybe me. Maybe me. Me and the next ayatollah, whoever that is. There will also be a serious form of regime change.… pic.twitter.com/Q8GcuVixfx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

“… like Venezuela.” Except there was no regime change in Venezuela.

Trump is dancing as fast as he can to TACO on Iran. And since he’s such a destructive lunatic we have to let him do it because otherwise he’ll blow up the world. Unfortunately Iran is in an entirely different situation with the U.S. and Israel prepared to dominate them militarily for the foreseeable future and they may not be willing to let this crazy old freak pretend he’s “won” as some kind of binky soother.

How long can we accept this kind of reality bending gibberish from the most powerful man in the world? He obviously can’t meet the fate of his role model Caligula but there has to be some kind of breaking point. He’s taken us to war for no reason now. How much worse does it have to get?

MAGA is at war with conservatism

Over the course of the Trump era it has become harder year after year to sympathize with neighbors and family who gave themselves over to Trump and his MAGA movement. After biting his tender-hearted rescuer, the snake in Trump’s favorite poem says, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” Trump, a master of projection, is the talking snake in that scenario, but critics of the MAGA cult might say the same to its members. You knew what you were signing onto.

Peter Wehner writes at The Atlantic that in 2016 he was a lifelong Republican. He’d served in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. But he saw Trump for what he is, a “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness.” Trump’s nomination as GOP candidate for president would reshape and redfine not just the GOP but conservatism itself.

“The impulses now on display within MAGA existed long before [Trump] entered politics. But those impulses were, for the most part, confined to the fringes,” Wehner explains. “Republican presidents and other political leaders did what they could to keep it that way.”

That’s not quite true. The Southern Strategy Lee Attwater confessed to promoting was built on feeding racist impulses he knew lay barely below the surface of southern conservatives and others. The GOP dog-whistled racist messages to keep conservative base voters on simmer, but not boil, for decades. Trump, not one for restraining his own impulses, turned up the gas.

But from the moment Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, he sought to cultivate and encourage the ugliest passions within the GOP, dousing the embers of hate with kerosene. Among Trump’s most consequential legacies has been his deformation of the temperament and disposition of virtually the entire Republican Party. It has been a remarkable shift to observe: The very qualities that early on made Republicans, including evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, uneasy about Trump are those they have since come to accept and embrace. He rewired their moral circuitry.

I feel sorry for Wehner. He laments the loss of manners among those who once were proud conservatives. Yes, those manners often concealed the same impulses the Southern Strategy sought to inflame among the plebs. But they were a leash of sorts that Trump removed and burned.

MAGA is not just antithetical to conservatism; it is at war with it.

It’s important to acknowledge that many rank-and-file MAGA voters haven’t knowingly rejected the conservatism I’m describing; they voted for Trump and attached themselves to the MAGA movement for a variety of reasons, including economic dislocation and feelings of cultural displacement. But it long ago became clear what they signed up for. At the core of the MAGA project and Trumpism is disruption and destruction, the delegitimization and razing of institutions, and the brutalization of opponents. Its leader, the president, abuses power, hurts the innocent, and mocks the dead before their families have even begun to grieve.

Those watching the news over the weekend know where Wehner is going next. Trump has deformed genteel conservatism into something uglier than Wehner could have imagined:

The MAGA ethic celebrates dehumanization. It is lawless, crude, and combative. Its entire ecosystem—social media, podcasts, and talk radio—is committed to spreading lies and conspiracy theories, to stoking rage and resentment. The disciples of the MAGA movement define themselves by what they hate much more than by what they love. They pursue culture wars with revolutionary zeal even as they vandalize our civic culture.

Former GOP consultant, Rick Wilson, pronounced his verdict with less flourish: “Everything Trump Touches Dies.“

For all that, over the weekend, my friend Anderson Clayton, the 28-year-old who chairs the North Carolina Democratic Party, spoke on the Bulwark Focus Group about not writing off such people.

“We need to have more people in politics who like genuinely want to understand other people,” Clayton said, “because I think a lot of the time empathy is something that we lack so much.”

“I hear it now in our party. Even for folks that have voted for Donald Trump three times over again, folks that are like, I would never talk to those voters in my life. And I’m, I’d pull up a chair and have a conversation with them any day in my life.” She wants them to know that someone they think probably hates them “never will.”

There are more Wehners out there than we suspect. They know they’ve been sold out.

Over two decades ago in North Carolina, Democrats were 48 percent of registered voters, Republicans were 34 percent and independents were an afterhought at 18 percent. Today, the mix is 39 percent independents, with Ds and Rs tied at 30 percent. Forty-five percent of Americans consider themselves independents. I have yet to see evidence that the national Democratic Party is coming to terms with that slide and asking what it’s doing wrong and what it might do better. They’d rather raise more money to do more of the same. I’d rather have more young Claytons.

MAGAs ought to be wearing black hats

So much chaos. You’ll get tired of chaos.

That was not exactly the twice-impeached, convicted felon’s sales pitch to voters in 2024. But it’s what the increasingly addled, 79-year-old Donald Trump has delivered. Buyer’s remorse will soon be as much an epidemic as measles and spiking gas prices.

But if you filled your tanks over the weekend ahead of Trump’s threatened attacks on Iranian power plants (potential war crimes under the Law of Armed Conflict), your timing may have been off. Trump now says they may be postponed (The Wall Street Journal):

Oil prices dropped Monday and stock futures soared after President Trump said the U.S. will postpone further strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure for five days, citing productive talks between the two countries.

Brent crude futures were down 7% to around $104 a barrel after initially dipping below $100 for the first time in days after the announcement.

Etc., etc.

In other chaos news, Trump is still eyeing overturning the Cuban government before he’s finished with Iran. (It was like that with Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush II, wasn’t it?) He’s eyeing erecting hotels on foreign versions of Boardwalk and Park Place (The Atlantic):

The Trump administration is squeezing Cuba to a breaking point—and is seemingly willing to engage in a high-seas stand-off that has pronounced Cold War echoes. Donald Trump’s goal appears to be to install more amenable leadership in Havana. Last week, he told reporters at the White House that he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking Cuba,” adding: “Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it.”

Trump is already talking to wealthy Republican donors with Cuban heritage about stepping in to monetize Cuba for him:

“Regime change is lined up,” one administration official told us. But Trump-style regime change is unlikely to be the democratic uprising that many Cuban exiles have longed for. Venezuela again is expected to be the model. The administration found that its short-term goals of ousting a repressive dictator and opening opportunities for U.S. companies was best met by empowering Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who proved more willing to engage with Washington. Much of the Caracas regime remains in place.

One person familiar with the planning (they plan?) tells The Atlantic, “We want these hostile regimes out of our hemisphere, and we’re going to set up the business community, because we don’t believe in diplomacy.”

So another hostile takeover at gunpoint it is. The only things Trump’s desperados are missing are horses and MAGA cowboy hats in black.

But why stop there? More chaos: The Trump administration is planning to send ICE to “assist” TSA agents at American airports this morning.

“I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!” Trump said on Saturday.

President Donald Trump’s decision to order federal immigration agents to U.S. airports to help with security during a budget impasse is drawing concerns that their presence may escalate tensions among air travelers frustrated over hourslong waits and screeners angry about missed paychecks.

Trump made clear on Sunday that he was going ahead with the plan to have immigration enforcement officers assist the Transportation Security Administration by guarding exit lanes or checking passenger IDs unless Democrats agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats are demanding major changes to federal immigration operations and showing no sign of backing down.

Hundreds of thousands of homeland security workers, including from the TSA, U.S. Secret Service and Coast Guard, have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew DHS funding last month.

As Digby observed last week, “Let Americans from all over the country see what it’s like to live in Trump’s Golden Age. They’re gonna love it.”

Finally from The American Prospect, as if it’s not enough that diesel prices exceeding $5 per gallon will drive up (no pun intended) the price of goods across the country:

“… the Trump administration banned roughly 200,000 truck-driving-certified immigrants from any further truck driving. The new rule from the Department of Transportation forbids refugees, asylum seekers, or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses, and forbids those who currently hold such licenses from renewing them.”

Harold Meyerson writes:

You may think that taking certified truck drivers, who’ve all been granted federal work permits, off the roads—in an industry that has 94 percent yearly turnover—may not serve the common good particularly well. You may also think that it is a gratuitous crime to harm the fortunes of those drivers and their families, not to mention an act of malignant folly to jack up the prices of the goods that will come late or go undelivered without immigrant drivers to take them to their destinations. If so, you’d be right.

If that’s too much chaos for one Monday morning, climb back into bed and pull the sheets over your head if you have that flexibility.

Americans used to think of ourselves as the good guys in the white hats. We (at least in theory) valued decency and respected the rule of law. But like sacrificing your life for a higher purpose than profit, under the Trump regime that’s for suckers and losers.