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.
The conspiracy theorist/far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, is able to get Trump to fire experienced, nonpartisan national security officials she deems disloyal to MAGA. The perfect face of MAGA, this portrait was published by the New York Times the other day, as part of an editorial about the damage Trump and his myrmidons have done in the first hundred days.
Also in the New York Times, among a full spectrum of legal experts weighing in on Trump’s enactment of Project 2025:
The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration. — Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School [1]
[1] Wikipedia: A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies and opposed to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which the Common Good has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement“, or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens”.[11][12][13]
Trump is a childishly self-centered person who can’t be wrong. In order to prove that he was right all along about his dystopian hellscape of a desperate, abused, ripped off, violent, ugly, unfair, criminally infested shithole America, he’s brought that vision about by his own, and the Charles Koch network’s, determined willfulness to destroy essential government programs and angrily divide the masses in the recently great nation they are determined to continue to loot, immiserate and poison with impunity. The winner of Trump v. US, according to Koch’s handpicked majority, gone wild.
Here’s a snapshot of one tiny corner of the hideous picture the enraged, insane, medium IQ master of chaos and destruction is painting right now:
As the Times op-ed editor ended his piece defending publishing the satire:
Larry David, in a provocation of his own, is arguing that during a single dinner or a private meeting, anyone can be human, and it means nothing in the end about what that person is capable of.
I love that while MAGA Pete Hegseth was standing in front of his kids angrily defending himself, (right sideburn down past the bottom of his ear, the other cut short), for at best sloppiness with national security (under normal circumstances violations of the Espionage Act) he had a moment of real human emotion. Listen to how his voice goes up after he delivers the word “disgruntled” to describe his three top advisors that he fired and blamed for being “leakers”. He sings those words in a high-pitched, childish tone, wonderful to hear from our Christian white nationalist Secretary of Defense. If you’re Putin, that is.
I understand now why my sister, as a girl, was always terrified of “scary clowns.”
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.
The last time a US president endorsed crossing over to the “dark side” to torture terrorism suspects, during Dick Cheney’s time in office, we sent these poor devils (most of them not even charged with any crime) to secret dark sites to be tortured. Calling someone a terrorist is like calling them a pedophile, when someone is accused of either of those things many people recoil at the accusation and don’t really care about proof or what is done to them. To be fair, Obama also ordered the execution, by drone, of an American citizen who’d fled to Yemen, and, several days later, the “accidental” killing of his teenaged son. Neither American was charged with any crime, though they were tried in the agitated court of public opinion and Obama’s spokesmen were despicably coy at press conferences when asked about the extrajudicial killings.
Now we have an administration as close to Hitler’s as possible, modeled on the Führer’s government by American fascist thought leaders on the cusp of realizing lifelong dreams of unlimited power. Personal loyalty to the Leader is seemingly the only qualification for a cabinet position, or any government job, actually. The military has been purged of all generals and other leaders who will not take this oath to a man, rather than to the rule of law; an unqualified, but fiercely loyal, seeming idiot put in charge of the Department of Defense. Inspectors general have been illegally removed across government agencies so there is no oversight of waste, corruption or abuse. Unqualified wealthy donors with glaring conflicts of interest and stunning lack of expertise have been confirmed for cabinet positions on straight party line votes by a supine, razor thin MAGA majority in Congress. Here’s one better, the unvetted racist madman ultra mega-megadonor/government contractor who heads a phantom agency charged with cutting enough money from government to fund generous new tax breaks for the super-wealthy. An actual Nazi.
Now America’s strongman is defying the Supreme Court whose 6-3 radical right judicial fraternity majority he appointed half of. In a 9-0 shadow docket opinion they gave the district judge, whose ruling they affirmed — the man illegally rendered to El Salvador must be returned to the US — a warning about showing respect and deference to the president who appointed a third of them. With this warning about the district court judge’s need to show “deference” in hand, Trump’s DOJ is telling the lower court judge, whose ruling was affirmed 9-0, to go fuck herself.
Here is a succinct account of why Abrego Garcia is in a supermax El Salvador prison for terrorists and the consequences, for the rest of us, of a Hitler wannabe telling a federal judge, acting in accordance with a ruling of the Federalist Society Six (joined by the constitution obeying minority), to fuck off.
When Dick Cheney had terrorism suspects grabbed at airports, off the street, he did so secretly. He sent them to secret torture sites in Poland, Egypt, Asia, places we will never know about. The “genius” of Trump is that he commits his crimes in public, brazenly, secure in his knowledge that millions of angry, screwed Americans love that he does all his violence publicly, without the need to pander to public opinion. It helps that Trump is a psychopath, because he feels neither empathy nor regret. He does not hesitate to throw even his most loyal sycophants into the meat grinder, if it is ever to his advantage. It is always to his advantage to cause pain to someone, it is the only way he can feel whole.
Our hope at the moment resides in us, all of us. Trump’s larger plan is to keep turning up the heat, economically, culturally, politically, and by illegally deporting innocent people to indefinite imprisonment in foreign dictatorships, without a whiff of due process of law, then telling the courts to fuck off, until there is a massive protest he can turn violent as a pretext for invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act. His April 20th [1] wet dream is martial law that will allow his fully loyal military to turn their guns on disloyal American citizens, particularly colored, gay, progressive, justice-minded ones. That’s the dream of every fascist, rule by terror and death to all terrorists, and pedophiles, as well as opposition leaders, dissenters, protesters, intellectuals, readers of banned books, providers of abortions to raped girls, etc. Their right to treat others as they see fit, kidnap, torture, send to a gulag, or privatized concentration camp, to defenestrate, poison or strangle them, is essential to their power and control, the only things that make a “strongman” feel safe.
Trump’s role model, Vladimir Putin, had the man who oversaw the archive of Soviet War Crimes during World War Two arrested on charges that he was a pedophile who had raped his own daughter. The man was imprisoned, the trial delayed, the Soviet War Crimes archive shut down, the records presumably destroyed (the better to rewrite history on the eve of an invasion of Ukraine with war crimes as a major strategic plan). In the end, even in Putin’s Russia, the man charged with pedophilia was found innocent of the charges. In the end, Putin got what he needed, the purge of archives documenting the same crimes his army was committing in Ukraine. Making MAGA great again!
[1] Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. His 50th birthday in 1939 was celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany, featuring grand parades and lavish festivities.Trump plans the same celebration, complete with military parades, for his 79th birthday in two months. Remember, he’s a young 79, two and a half, to be precise.
gratuitousblahg 