Trump’s effort to squeeze the Ukrainians to get dirt on his likely opponent in 2020, the cause of his first impeachment, was just the best-documented instance of a form of corruption that characterized his entire foreign policy.
Of Donald Trump:
[H]e’d have to don climbing gear and an oxygen mask to rise high enough to see a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.
Uncertainty is exactly what Trump relishes about his tariff powers. Everyone is at the mercy of his announcements, which can change at any time, so business executives and foreign leaders have to hang on his every word and constantly come to him begging for relief. If he provided “clarity” by committing to a specific and unchanging tariff policy, he’d be giving up both leverage and attention, two of the things he likes most.
When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did something it had never done before and has not done since: It invoked Article 5, the collective-defense provision at the core of the alliance. With Manhattan burning and the Pentagon in ruins, thousands of Americans dead, and the future uncertain, our allies came to our aid.
And that included our nearest ally, Canada.
Canada did not send a bloodied and wounded United States thoughts and prayers via social media: When it came time to go after Osama bin Laden et al. in Afghanistan, more than 40,000 members of the Canadian armed forces served in what was not, narrowly speaking, a Canadian cause. And 159 Canadian soldiers died there.
That may not seem like a very large number, but it is 159 more than the Trump family has sent to fight for the American cause in the century and a half since that family’s first draft-dodging ancestor fled military service in Germany. Frederick Trump, the horse-butchering Yukon pimp who brought the Trump family to the United States, had no plans to stay in the country long term, but was expelled ignominiously from his homeland for his cowardly evasion of military service. During the Trump family’s time in the United States, Americans have fought in conflicts ranging from the Spanish-American War to the two world wars to Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Iraq. None of Trump’s ancestors served in any of those conflicts, and none of his progeny has, either. The president has occasionally, however, taken the time to sneer at figures such as John McCain, whose service was—whatever you think of his politics—genuinely heroic.
…
Donald Trump has his name on the front of The Art of the Deal. John F. Kennedy’s name is on Profiles in Courage. Both men used ghostwriters, but we may take these works as testament to their priorities.
From father to son to father to son, the Trumps have been a line of small, oafish, grasping, chiseling, dishonest, dishonorable, cowardly, conniving, dim-witted, donkey-souled plotters and plodders, and no sensible country would trade the lot of them for one of the 159 Canadians who died in Afghanistan ….
There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets a gun. He thinks his awesome gun is great for everything, home defense, opening beer bottles, whatever. When Marge says she doesn’t want a weapon in the house, Homer replies. “A gun is not a weapon, Marge, it’s a tool. Like a butcher knife or a harpoon, or … or an alligator. You just need more education on the subject.”
How Homer thinks about guns is not all that dissimilar to how Donald Trump thinks about tariffs. Or if you want an even more dated pop culture reference, the Trump administration talks about tariffs the way Chevy Chase did in the old Saturday Night Live parody commercial for “New Shimmer”: It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
[T]he Department of Justice pardon attorney was fired apparently for declining to agree that a “personal relationship with President Trump” was a “sufficient basis” on which to restore gun rights to a domestic abuser.
Bob Bauer, Corruption and the Maximalist Theory of Presidential Power
… Truth matters.
Here it is: We have a sociopathic president in total command of a cult-like party; a Congress that, as long as the GOP controls it, is a rubber-stamp version of the Russian Duma under Putin; a court balanced precariously between a modest defense of the unitary executive and an Alito wing bent on empowering an American Caesar; and a Justice Department openly planning persecution of the president’s political opponents.
Well, it’s hard to top this for sheer credulity:
The progressive left has been for open borders and closed debate. The Trump administration flips these positions. Border enforcement was a day-one priority. A January 20th Executive Order signed by Trump includes this statement: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
R.R. Reno. Mafia Don’s boyz call it “terrorism” when they want to censor speech..
I will concede that Trump and his pathetic throne-sniffers are less likely to censor me than a progressive Democrat regime would have been, but your mileage will vary very much if you’re far to my left.
Seen by my wife on the web: Canada must feel like it’s living upstairs from a meth lab.
“I wish I was one of Elon Musk’s kids so I’d never have to look at him again.” (Not my coinage)
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (or so I’m told; I haven’t read it)
Trump is the chump antithesis. The chump antidote. A walking, talking, golden-lidded canister of Chump Be Gone.
To make that sale, he exaggerates wildly, lies promiscuously and elevates conspiracy theories ….
Frank Bruni, on a persistent thread in Trump’s rhetoric
Trump is clinically incapable of understanding any system of mutuality, because he cannot tolerate being anyone’s equal.
Andrew Sullivan, Requiem for the West
The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.
Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Going Back
Recommended: a modern David.
It’s pretty short. If you think comparisons of Trump to Hitler are over-the-top, how about a comparison of him — four years before he descended the Golden Escalator — to Satan?
And then there’s First Things, cravenly removing the comparison sometime after Trump ascended to the throne and Rusty Reno decided that collabortion has its advantages.
The U.S. Attorney for D.C. described himself and his colleagues as “President Trump’s lawyers” Monday in a post about the Associated Press’s legal case against the Trump administration over access to White House events. The attorney, who is a federal prosecutor and not Trump’s personal attorney, said “As President Trump’s lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first.” We’re old enough to remember a time (2024) when conservatives criticized progressive prosecutors for putting politics ahead of getting violent criminals off the streets.
It is obvious that Musk and his disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers simply do not know what they are doing: For example, they ordered the dismissal of a bunch of federal employees who were “on probation” because they seem to have thought that this probationary condition was disciplinary rather than a formality related to those employees being new hires. Employees with stellar evaluations were fired in emails that cited their supposed performance problems. In one case a reader passed along, an administrator promoted to a manager position because of his excellent work in a subordinate role was dismissed because he was “on probation” in his new role. Many similar situations have been reported. Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and most of us will forever be ignorant about most subjects—economists call this “rational ignorance,” which reflects the fact that there is not much reason to learn a great deal about things that do not matter much to you in the near term or foreseeable future and about which you do not have, and never will have, much control or influence. Ignorance can be rational—arrogance rarely is.
Musk and his army of angry nerds have a duty—a professional and patriotic obligation—to be less stupid than they have been. They are creating chaos and damaging worthwhile government programs while simultaneously complicating and pre-discrediting future reform efforts—the ones that will, one hopes, be led and executed by people who can bother to do a little bit of the homework before they start running amok like a bunch of psilocybin-addled maniacs while being led by an actual psilocybin-addled maniac.
A friend of mine, on hearing the misunderstanding on probationary employees mused that maybe they misunderstand asylum seekers as well.
Stephen Miller Uses Sock Puppets To Explain Constitution To White House Press Corps | Babylon Bee
If the Bee meant to put down the press, they missed half the story: I have watched Stephen Miller at work a few times, and I haven’t seen such condescension and heard such hectoring since Al Gore sneered at the electorate in the 2000 election.
Patel’s confirmation brought all of this home for me because, of the four survivors among the Febrile Five, he’s the truest gangster of the bunch. Hegseth is dissolute; Kennedy is nuts; Gabbard is a Russia simp. But Patel is a capo at heart, caretaker of the family’s enemies list and the sort of enforcer whose loyalty is so absolute that he’s trusted to do the boss’ dirtiest work. Putting him in charge of the FBI is tantamount to greenlighting the bureau’s transformation into a secret-police force for the White House. One person on Patel’s “enemies list” is reportedly so frightened by how he might abuse state power to target them that they’ve already moved their family to a secret location.
I get fidgety when critics insist on interpreting Trump’s behavior in terms of deliberate strategy. He’s not a historian, lord knows. He’s not even an ideologue: Insofar as he appears to be following some script, I suspect he’s simply intuiting how the “scenes” should logically proceed as one goes about trying to consolidate power. He’s a Caesar by instinct, not by tutelage.
What he really is at heart, though, is a sh-tposter.
That’s the second way to understand his first month. Forget the authoritarian playbook: Day by day we’re finding out what it would look like if we handed the federal government over to the same slimy alt-right blowhards who have colonized Twitter and let them have their run of the place.
“If Barack Obama or any other prominent black participant in the big leagues of American politics had 13 CHILDREN OUT OF WEDLOCK with 4 DIFFERENT WOMEN, it would be all anyone could ever talk about. Most conservatives seem not even to know this about Musk,” - Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Via Andrew Sullivan
“It’s interesting that the biggest actual fraud DOGE has stumbled upon is that of people (likely illegal immigrants) using someone else’s SSN to pay $8.5 billion INTO Social Security,” - Stuart Buck. Musk remains oblivious.
Yup. That’s right. Illegal immigrants using the Social Security Numbers of dead people so their employers can deposit their Social Security contributions and the employer match for benefits they’ll never collect.
View the archives
