Hard to imagine why an administration stocked with glaringly unqualified attention seekers and opportunists who publicly pretend to worship the stupidest, pettiest man ever to be US president has its common sense questioned. Trump Derangement Syndrome by Deep State deep fake AI cuckbots, no doubt.
The big guy’s nominee for US Attorney for Washington, DC, Ed Martin, was not going to get out of committee, it turns out, a GOP senator finally had to put his foot down. At first Trump declared victory, announced he was going to make this loyal MAGA fighter UN ambassador (oh, wait, that was former national security advisor/Signal chatter Mike Waltz), while getting Alcatraz ready to house the sick criminals who had cynically weaponized the US government and viciously, unfairly prosecuted Trump and his loyal patriots who rightfully attacked Capitol police and sacked the US Capitol on a day of national awakening and great love. Here’s Heather Cox Richardson, with the details:
Trump announced he was moving Martin [a Missouri political operative with no experience as a prosecutor, who defended the January 6 rioters and fired the prosecutors who had worked on their cases, threatened to investigate Democrats and critics, and hosted a notorious antisemite on his podcast] into three roles that do not require Senate confirmation. He will become the new director of the Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, an associate deputy attorney general, and a pardon attorney. “In these highly important roles, Ed will make sure we finally investigate the Weaponization of our Government under the Biden Regime, and provide much needed Justice for its victims,” Trump posted on social media.
To replace Martin, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro, who is passionately loyal to him. He noted among her qualifications that she “hosted her own Fox News Show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, for ten years, and is currently Co-Host of The Five, one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America recalls that the Fox News Channel took Pirro off the air after the 2020 election because of her conspiracy-theory-filled rants. In emails turned up in the defamation suit against the Fox News Channel for pushing the lie that voting machines had tainted the election results, her executive producer called her “nuts” and a “reckless maniac,” who “should never be on live television.” That lawsuit cost the Fox News Channel $787 million. . .
The administration appears not to be able to attract the caliber of federal officials to which Americans have become accustomed.
. . . When asked yesterday why he had nominated her [a surgeon general without a medical license], Trump answered: “Because Bobby thought she was fantastic…. I don’t know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby.” Today, Casey Means’s brother Calley, a White House advisor, went after Trump ally Laura Loomer for opposing the nomination, posting on social media that he had “[j]ust received information that Laura Loomer is taking money from industry to scuttle President Trump’s agenda.” Loomer responded: “You’re so full of sh*t.”
. . . White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters today that voters elected Trump to “deport the illegals” and that “Marxist” judges frustrating that effort are attacking democracy. In fact, Trump convinced many voters that he would deport only violent criminals, and they are now aghast at the scenes unfolding as masked agents grab women and children from their cars and sweep up U.S. citizens.
In The Bulwark today, Adrian Carrasquillo explained how podcasters, sports YouTubers, and comedians, including Joe Rogan, have brought the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador onto the radar screen of Trump voters. Americans now disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies by 53% to 46%.
Miller made an even bigger power grab when he said “we’re actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus, a legal change that essentially establishes martial law by permitting the government to arrest people and hold them without charges or a trial. Legal analyst Steve Vladeck explains that Miller’s justification for such a suspension is dead wrong, and suggests Miller’s threat appears to be designed to put more pressure on the courts.
But in this chaotic administration, it seems worth asking who the “we” is in Miller’s statement. In the group chat about striking the Houthis, when administration officials were discussing—without the presence of either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president himself—what was the best course of action, it was Miller who ultimately decided to launch a strike simply by announcing what he claimed were Trump’s wishes.
That decision [man born in America, to Chinese-born parents, is a US citizen — U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark 1898] has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
With the same sick irony that had Trump’s second inauguration fall on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, Easter Sunday, this year, falls on the 136th birthday of one of Trump’s main idols, Mr. Hitler. On a personal note, two years ago today I was wheeled out of the David Koch pavilion of the #1 hospital for orthopedics fourteen years in a row, into the sunshine of a nice spring day, with a brand new titanium and chromium left knee. Presently I am unable to walk around the block with my six year-old neighbor, which I miss. Seeing the world through the eyes of a bright young kid is a wonderful thing, particularly in springtime, as is being able to walk without pain.
But enough with the personal sob stories. Today is the day that the myopic intellectuals and reactionary lawyers employed by far right billionaires submit their arguments to the Leader for why he should impose a version of martial law under the 1807 Insurrection Act so that he can use the military to end these large demonstrations by US citizens increasingly organizing against Project 2025’s determinedly fascist moves. After all, Trumpie has already used emergency war powers to arrest, detain and deport US residents for indefinite stays in a cool 43 year-old dictator’s super-max prison for “terrorists”. What war, you ask? Dubya and Cheney’s “War on Terror” authorized by Congress shortly after 9/11 under the AUMF [1], an authorization that made the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq perfectly kosher and that never expires, apparently. If the president calls it “terror”, who is Congress to question that?
As soon as he was in the Oval Office Trump issued an executive order calling for a report, within 90 days, from the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security Director, assessing the need to invoke the Insurrection Act for the “emergency” at the southern border. Today is day 90 since inauguration day. Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem will sign whatever report is put in front of them, one of the conditions for their appointment as Trump ass-lickers, the same condition accepted by everyone in MAGA.
Presumably, at some point today, probably this evening when the Leader is done cheating at golf to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, the press will announce what Hegseth, Noem, Mike Flynn, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Samuel Alito, Leonard Leo, Charles Koch et al have decided about the president’s right to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. I’m not a betting man, but it’s not hard to guess what this crew of insane, ethically compromised haters will endorse. Particularly now that public opposition to Trump’s purposefully mad leadership is mounting and even reaching some in his own party.
The likeliest outcome, it saddens me to say, is a conspiracy among these lawless maniacs, on the brink of their longtime dream of American fascism, to create a mass death event at some peaceful assembly, call it “terrorism,” blame several marginalized groups for the act they themselves organized and carried out, and bring down the curtain on American democracy once and for all with legally sanctioned state violence. State violence to repress violence they themselves provoke (and often perpetrate as an excuse for martial law) is the go to move of every dictator.
As former civil liberties advocate turned Nazi defender Alan Dershowitz said, defending Trump during his second impeachment for inciting an insurrection, that if the president truly thinks the Jews are using space lasers to unfairly destabilize his absolute rule, he has the right to do whatever he feels is necessary to stop them from using these immensely powerful imaginary weapons in a way that harms the nation. In the words of Nixon, echoed by John Roberts and the Five Moral Dwarves in the unironically captioned Trump v. US, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Happy Easter to my Christian friends and may the mercy of the Eternal be upon us all as we wait for the ABC headline.
[1] Wikipedia: The Authorization for Use of Military Force is a joint resolution of the United States Congress which became law on September 18, 2001, authorizing the use of the United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks. The authorization granted the president the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. Wikipedia
The Hitlerian behavior just doesn’t stop with these dangerous, angry morons. Trump’s enraged little Jewish Josef Goebbels, Stephen Miller, during the El Salvador dictator’s staged visit yesterday, announced in the Oval Office that “the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 … in our favor” and that “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.”
In non-MAGA world, the Supreme Court actually ruled 9-0 that the unlawfully kidnapped, rendered and indefinitely detained Abrego Garcia, must be brought back to the US to be heard, as due process requires under our constitution. Miller flat out lied, claiming the exact opposite of what the 9-0 Supreme Court ruled in their shadow docket decision. Tens of millions of credulous low-information Americans will hear Miller’s lie and believe him, because, if a man who the president trusts that much said it, it must be true. People are saying it’s true, in ways nobody has ever seen before. Unless you’ve ever read a history of the Third Reich.
It is amazing to me, and horrifying, that Trump manages to hit every single one of Hitler’s notes in this incoherent, atonal aria he is constantly improvising. When Hitler was trying out mass murder for the German people, it was Germans in mental wards he executed. These people, incurably insane, severely disabled, physically or mentally, were, according to the Führer, “useless eaters” who only consumed food healthy German warriors needed, and took shits. These useless eaters were living “lives unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben). They were unproductive, a drag on Germany’s greatness and it was a mercy to euthanize them, according to the greatest living German genius and the embodiment of the soul of Germany, at that time, Adolf Hitler.
Today, as reported by Heather Cox Richardson, it turns out Trump has plans for this same kind of person, born without a multimillion dollar inheritance — the unproductive ones. There is nothing this demented, psychopathic motherfucker is doing or saying, or having his loyal sychophants say, that is not straight out of Herr Hitler’s foul mouth. Here’s a nice bit of improv from the once and future American Leader, as Charles Koch’s network was maneuvering the justice-evading serial felon back into power, backed by the might of a billionaire funded army of true believers in American oligarchic fascism:
[Trump] continued [talking to Musk on X in 2024 about foreign leaders kicking people out of their countries to migrate in caravans to the US]: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they’re taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”
It will not stop with an innocent immigrant living legally and productively (he’s a working member of an American labor union) in Maryland who is jammed into a car by masked ICE agents and illegally disappeared into a foreign dictator’s notorious mega-prison for “terrorists.” As I mentioned yesterday, call someone a “terrorist” and you are halfway to convincing millions that the guy deserves whatever he gets. Torture is too good for Abrego Garcia, say a million ignorant voices, ten million. If a person commits a crime, they are arrested and prosecuted, and if found guilty by a jury, sentenced to some kind of punishment. If an insane dotard can declare that an innocent person, charged with no crime and rendered due to “administrative error” to an infamous prison, for indefinite detention, and refuse to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court decision stating that the rendered man must be returned to the US for a hearing, then we have our American Hitler. As stupid, vain and psychopathic as the original. And obeyed by his ambitious, loyal, ass-licking cultists, to the end.
Allison McCann, Alexandra Berzon, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported today that the administration also intends to spend as much as $45 billion over the next two years on new detention facilities for immigrants. In the last fiscal year, the total amount of federal money allocated to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was about $3.4 billion. The new facilities will be in private hands and will operate with lower standards and less oversight than current detention facilities.
Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.
The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .
. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.
Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”
A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.
In a surprise move, the DOJ is recruiting replacements for DOJ attorneys fired for disloyalty to the president and his agenda from the graduates of “Libertarian” law schools (Antonin Scalia Law School, anyone?) who believe, along with the Federalist Society, the far-right judicial fraternity they join as law students, in the right of the strong (super-wealthy) to do whatever they need to do to the weak (the other 99.5%). A good psychopath will do that.
Make no mistake, MAGA is the brand of powerful American psychopaths. The far-right, anti-fact, pro-corporate movement now called MAGA has long been engineered and funded by Charles Koch, whose father, beloved of Hitler, was a famous conspiracy theorist and psychopath. The ideology of the MAGA “movement”, presumably headed by Donald Trump, whose racist father was also a psychopath, is based on painful revenge against “takers”, everyone not born wealthy “booted and spurred” to rightfully ride the backs of their inferiors.
They’ve learned the lesson that Hitler first demonstrated in a modern mass media culture: if you keep true information from the public, and bombard terrified citizens with aggravating lies, the lies will come to be accepted, by most, as the truth. Once you’ve created a mass audience faithful to baseless lies, you’re halfway to ramping up the death camps. The lies are of a specific kind: incendiary reasons to fear and hate marginalized groups. Once you have created unreasoning hatred against, say, homosexuals, a gay hairdresser you illegally deport to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador deserves every rape and indignity he must endure, and forever is not long enough for a foreign government’s fully illumined dark-site to torture a sick individual like him.
Why the obsession, on the far right, with torture and the death penalty? Nothing moves the masses, and the political needle, like terror. These psychopaths (and sometimes, belatedly, their duped followers) know that total fear is the most effective tool any autocrat can wield. Horrific true stories of torture, terrifying random detention and death, the ability of the state to manhandle and murder anyone without due process or legal accountability, what could be better for an insane person hell-bent, literally, on controlling the world?
Why would a president who nonchalantly oversaw as many as 500,000 unnecessary American deaths during Covid-19, because of his damaging politically-motivated interference with scientists and pandemic experts, have any hesitation to let a few dozen, or a few hundred, or a hundred thousand, or a million, poor American children die of preventable disease? Or starvation? Or a million or two, or ten million, in Africa, Asia, South America? The answer is that psychopaths have neither empathy nor the capacity to feel regret. The worst of them, a very small percentage, are cunning serial killers. Most of them are just CEOs, surgeons, nightmare bosses, bullies, masterminds of MAGA’s revenge tour.
Some object to a psychiatric diagnosis like “psychopath” to describe someone like Charles Koch or Donald Trump, or most of Trump’s loyal inner circle “ring kissers”. I object to psychiatric diagnoses myself. Homosexuality was a a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis as recently as the 1970s. I am no fan of psychiatry and have no reason to trust the American Psychiatric Association, particularly after they publicly enforced their rule against a non-member and took part in a coordinated campaign to discredit a best-selling book that detailed Trump’s insane behavior, its roots and implications for his destructive presidency.
A group of psychiatrists and other experts made a thorough and convincing case, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump [1], acting on their professional duty to warn of the dangers of having someone with severe emotional disabilities as the American president. They made an excellent case. The APA then got busy shutting down the book, and silencing the case for questioning Trump as unstable, vengeful, dangerous, citing a rule it made after unfair criticism of far-right lunatic Barry Goldwater from a group of psychiatrists prior to Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. Fuck the APA and their “diagnostic manual”. It contains no definition of psychopath anyway.
Here’s what we know about psychopaths: they are manipulative, selfish, concerned with exercising power over others. They are adept liars, very charming and persuasive when needed. They have no hesitation to commit bold acts (of every conceivable kind) because they lack empathy and have no capacity to feel regret. They must take revenge whenever they feel slighted. Most psychopaths are very intelligent, some are not. Our Number One psychopath is not a smart psychopath, but it hardly matters. He has the genius army of the best of Charles Koch’s legal and intellectual network watching his back, guiding his revenge tour.
Trump had an argument with government scientists who predicted the path of a killer storm. He changed their map with a Sharpie, to prove he was right. Now he has defunded that agency, along with FEMA and any other government agency he feels was mean to him, contradicted him, made him feel like an enraged two year-old. Adults who react like enraged two-year olds, if they have the power to, will kill you if you make them feel like an enraged two year-old. That’s what psychopaths do, they are driven to take vengeance on anyone who makes them feel like the monsters they are. All in their life depends on the people around them recognizing and admiring their superiority. Anything else is grounds for the most terrifying revenge imaginable.
It is a terrible thing to be a lawyer for a crazed, antisocial serial criminal with no impulse control who is also a compulsive liar. In a court of law, where rules, facts introduced as evidence and actual laws applied to those facts decide the merits of the case, it is difficult to legally defend someone who keeps changing their lying arguments and continually implicates themselves and their accomplices with careless, incriminating public statements. If the criminal defendant is a braggart who cannot stop publicly taking credit for things that are flagrantly illegal, your nightmare as a lawyer gets worse still.
Here in the USA, the Constitution is the source of all law binding the federal government, and through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, every state government as well. No government entity in the United States may deprive a person of life, liberty or property without a notice of its intent to do so and a hearing at which the accused may be heard. This is called due process, the requirement of legal notice and an opportunity to be heard before any punishment is imposed.
The process you are due, as someone in the United States legally (or illegally, for that matter) is — you must be charged with a crime and then given the opportunity to be heard by a judge before you can be imprisoned, fined, have your property seized, be deported, etc.
The president had his myrmidons round up a few hundred seemingly random Hispanics, shave their heads, put them into orange jumpsuits and chains. They then staged a photo op, marching these supposedly dangerous criminals onto a plane to be flown to a notorious penal colony-style prison in El Salvador. They staged a photo op on the other end, of these men deported without due process, or any process at all, actually, being marched off to the overcrowded supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador.
The family of one of these men, Abrego Garcia, a legal resident married to an American citizen, raising an autistic five-old child as well as two kids from his wife’s previous relationship, made an emergency motion in federal court to have him returned to the United States. According to the testimony, Garcia has been, as most poor immigrants are, a model citizen, with protected status here because of credible threats of violence and death by gangs in El Salvador.
You may be familiar with the self-contradicting piece of doggerel offered by the Trump administration in federal court to justify its actions, what I call the Nazi line about this case. Call it the MAGA line if you like, but read a few histories of Mr. Hitler’s Germany and you will see no difference in technique. Garcia was deported due to “administrative error” the administration admits, yet, Trump’s DOJ and all of his spokesmen and surrogates insist Garcia is also a member of the violent MS-13 gang.
Important thing to remember, MAGA arguments, like Nazi arguments, do not need to make any sense in the conventional sense of the word sense. Picture the poor bastard lawyer who’s got to make this ridiculous clerical error/ but still terrorist, argument. He’s got to argue this in front of a judge not disposed to ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to approve clearly illegal actions by a flagrantly lawless government of lackeys serving a vengeful and ignorant madman.
Check out what he is forced to say, this poor bastard Trump DOJ lawyer. When I read this out loud to Seedj she said, “he’s not going to be in that job very long .” I have to give this man props for his candor.
Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.
“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”
At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”
Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.
“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.”
Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.
Truth, critical thinking and adherence to the facts matter more now than at any time in our history. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse lays out an irrefutable case for Trump’s cynical weaponization of the government against the People. The case is irrefutable, except by calling Whitehouse a hysterical, sick, dangerous, partisan lunatic, and somehow discrediting, among the lowest information Americans out there, the truthful and factually detailed report he delivers to the Senate, and to the People, in this latest installment of The Scheme.
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