The Future's So Dark, I Gotta Wear Shades

 

Look, I have to retire some time, eventually, and I'm in my 50's, so I'm not grave-dancing over here about what tomorrow is going to bring. The whole election, despite what people were saying about Trump being a felon and a sex-pest and a danger to democracy had also an undercurrent of "This is a whole damn pudding-brained sociopath who will set the country on fire for giggles," but you what? Bygones. Let's just say some people out there chalked all of that up to Trump Derangement Syndrome and didn't want to believe the motherfucker was crazy.

But here's the SOB now:

Trump: "I spoke to a lot of leaders -- European, Asian, from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said 'we're not gonna have deficits with your country' ... to me a deficit is a loss. We're gonna have surpluses or at worst we're gonna be breaking even." pic.twitter.com/xnW7jb0u3R

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2025

Is everyone starting to get it? 

The financial deficits he's talking about is just a trade deficit.  We have a trade deficit with Madagascar. They sell basically vanilla. We have bakeries and ice cream factories and whatnot. They have people who are too poor to buy US goods. That's a trade deficit. Botswana sells diamonds. Same deal--we have jewelers and people buy engagement rings and so forth. They don't have the kind of incomes to be buying a lot of US goods. 

It just is what it is. Not everyone is going to be giving us a trade surplus--to think it can be so is just crazy and what you get when you don't know geography, or how anything but particularly trade works--you trade for shit you can't make or get easily. If I'm a pumpkin farmer, I don't want someone else's pumpkins--I want something I don't have. How is this hard to get? 

A Constitutional Crisis and a Confederacy of Dumbasses

 

Huh. You know, if a general violated any international treaties and committed war crimes, a judge would very legitimately have something to say about that. A judge could certainly reject the case of an attorney general and determine that their reading of the law was wrong if it very much was. And the idea that judges can determine that an act of Congress or of the executive office was in violation of the Constitution is called "checks and balances." The old separation of powers thing where we don't want any branch of government to be really dictatorial. 

This is the "are you smarter than a fifth grader?" level of understanding how our government works.  Senators Mike Lee and Tom Cotton also played very dumb about what they should have very earnestly understood based on their own education. 

Sex, Lies and Audiotape

 

McCarthy discussed invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, but was concerned with the timeline of the process: “That takes too long.” pic.twitter.com/zKhBlO8M3L

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) May 4, 2022

I'm going to point out that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the 25th Amendment takes too long and that it was time to move on with the transition to the Biden Administration because it was actually reasonable. McCarthy definitely said reasonable things, but has an unreasonable party, so hearing him talk about how to remove Trump from office (even though he already lost the election, and that should have been enough), even while his party's members unquestionably went along with Trump's efforts to remain in office (despite having lost an election) shouldn't be lost, here.

He didn't press it in any way, of course, and this audio might be lost amid the din of the Madison Cawthorn revenge porn floating around out there. (To which I am far too nice a girl to link.)

Wha--who me? Suggest that the weakest member of the herd is being sacrificed for the larger good of the GOP to distract from any other inconvenient conversations, like the SCOTUS decision that remains to be finalized, or who knows what else? Pish and tosh! It could also be that the coke orgies are real (in the way the pee tape remains, always, real) or it could be that some guerrilla ontologist has started throwing bodies out of the plane as a demonstration of the power of Kompromat and compromise for some wholly other fascinating reason.

One doesn't really know but it feels irresponsible not to speculate. 

About Those Calls For Unity

More: "FBI received information about an identified armed group intending to travel to Washington, DC on 16 January. They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment a huge uprising will occur." #CapitolRiots #Capitol #capitolbreach @AaronKatersky https://t.co/Pz9kbEZc4N

— Josh Margolin (@JoshMargolin) January 11, 2021

You know, if the insurrection isn't over yet, it's probably a little too soon. Also, re: whether VP Pence is keen on the idea, frankly, the number of lynch mobs I need sent after my own personal ass before I decide someone is unstable is not even one.

Fouling Up Social Security

Today, Donald Trump stated that if re-elected, he'll undermine the entire financial footing of Social Security.

Our seniors and millions of Americans with disabilities are under enough stress without their hard-earned Social Security benefits in doubt. https://t.co/glUDQlcbEO

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 9, 2020

Of all the ding-bat things Trump could decide to try during a time of massive job losses, of course he'd have to throw in one that makes no real sense: a payroll tax deferral when the problem is people aren't on any damn payroll. (And the surprise-level about that should be nil--he lies about things, but he also does not understand shit about crap.) It's a fake gave-away to employers--except it will have to be paid back oh, unless Trump is re-elected when he will make it "permanent". So Social Security and Medicare will just not be funded, and that means he's basically fucking them as hard as he's fucking the post office right now.

Older people who were thinking of voting for Trump--first he wants you to die of coronavirus because he thinks he wants better economics numbers and to his clueless brain, that means business as usual, but he doesn't understand the economy is dependent on the virus actually being under control because fear of death is a pretty big factor in determining consumer habits. (I certainly wouldn't go to a restaurant if I thought my entree came with a side-order of COVID, for example.) Then he threatens your benefits, because, get this, your benefits are funded by people contributing to programs right now. And then he's also going to mess with, not just your voting by mail so you can do it safely, but things like your getting medicines by mail, or paying your bills by mail on time (incurring late fees), and other little things you might want to sit and think about.

And it's because he was too dumb to get his ass sorted about the pandemic back in February. Oh, and because he's lousy at being president, but is shit-scared that not being president will wind his ass up in prison, and there are reasons it should.

Also, in Trump's continuing plan to make executive orders that he most likely can't do and hasn't thought out and are campaign stunts and not actual things that will materialize are pretending he can stop evictions (by having different agencies look into it) and reducing the previous federal UI amount and making it dependent on what states are paying. And he's taking the money out of FEMA disaster relief and damn. That could be really bad.

Like, how is this all supposed to help? He could provide more immediate aid by directing Meadows to not fuck around and cooperate with Pelosi who already has something not-useless planned. It would show he has confidence he could sell that to the American people outside of his little club.

It just looks an awful lot like he's decided he'd rather wreck a lot of things than be remotely constructive, at a time when his being useful, or even vaguely like a leader in fact instead of play-acting as one, would be useful not just to see the country through an actual crisis, but maybe even do some magic on his poll numbers so he wouldn't have to fuck about with voter suppression. But he isn't the man for that. And it's starting to look pretty clear who should be doing the job Trump can't.

The Man Just Isn't Right

Trump sent supporters a signed stock market chart from this afternoon, screenshots of TV coverage of the stock market, and a message saying, “From opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!” From @jamiegangel: https://t.co/IYX6vZOu8O

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 14, 2020

Trump wanted to demonstrate that he could so open his mouth and not spook the markets after a disastrous show the other night. That he's smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb. And for a shining moment, the Dow figures rose. Rose! It's just after the final bell that everything got really weird and people started to realize we never left TrumpWorld. There were signs.

Like the way Trump takes no responsibility for anything, ever.

"No, I don't take responsibility at all": Trump on his botched coronavirus response https://t.co/5RxVrjFgxx

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) March 14, 2020

See, that's it, right there. That's the pull-quote for his entire Administration. He doesn't take any responsibility at all. It'll show up in his obits. It may very well be the Trump Doctrine.

Also, it turns out he more or less invented a website that will be "very quickly done, unlike others of the past" that is being worked on by Google, except what the entire fuck. Dr. Debbie Birx held up a flowchart of the process of the website that might could be eventually a thing, which looked like she had one poster-board and just remembered it was science fair day. (Or rather some WH staffer made her Vanna White that shit.)

(She deserves better than this sort of thing. But I am not the one today.)

There was so much handshaking going on, too. Which is not recommended by the CDC, especially when it seems like Trump has just been basically wandering through a miasma of infected people the last couple of weeks. Mar-a-Lago should pretty much be considered a hotspot, right now. We're up to about four known COVID-19 positives. And Trump is still gonna, like, function there this weekend. 

That's some pretty wild stuff. Also wild--Trump still doesn't really seem to want people to actually get tested for Coronavirus, because it still would look really bad. For him. He doesn't get it. 

Which is not to say I think this has anything to do with what the stock market likes (it isn't my metric or priority), but I find it amazing that, considering people are sick/dying/could go out of work/lose loved ones, he's crowing about the stock market rise as an indicator of his ratings. Because he pulled off a successful spot. And he distracted from the fact that we are way beyond containment of the corona outbreak here (because I think West Virginia* is the only state not reporting a patient, and that does not mean they haven't got one) and our strategy for mitigation and ramping up to have equipment available for treatment of the most sick among us is still sketchy, because we've lost so much time to people having to stop and get out of the clown car, and kiss Trump's ass to keep things going. 

None of this looks good, and it's because it isn't. I'm sure you've heard this from me before. 

UPDATE: I'm not trying to bust on WV or anything, but they closed schools without any tested cases. The only state that has no cases, but they did close schools. I will take no further comments on what's up with that.  These folks know that testing or not, they likely do have cases, and it's better to take action before you are just reacting to an out of control thing. I love you WV! You are doing it right!. Because what are the actual odds they really haven't a case? It's not great. 

The Cat is Exiting the Trumpworld Grab-Bag

I'm a tired blogging fool. I took today off because I was getting a new railing installed on the front steps to my house and some ugly shrubbery taken down in my front yard and it seemed like a nice time to do some outside work myself and get some sun--so in the unseasonable 90+ degree May weather, I got burned to an unpleasant two-toned ouchiness. I lowered my A/C to 75 after dinner, took a cold shower, fixed some Campari and sodas, and spread a nice ($) chamomile face cream all over myself as if it was a (cheap) body lotion, and settled down to catch up on the news.

MMWHHAHAHAHA! Weed-whacking shrubbery to death isn't half the effort keeping up with the news is, these days. Most days, at my job, I sneak in news breaks at intervals, coffee breaks and lunch. Unplugging for hours was like spinning "Feeling Lucky?" on a time machine, and disembarking to about a year and a half's worth of news.

Well, maybe not exactly. But feels like it though!

I guess the biggest thing that happened was that Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy AG that Trump and them tried to stick with being the decider in the FBI Director Comey firing, made the positive decision to appoint a special counsel, and made it former FBI Director Robert Mueller.  That was a great, solid choice. Mueller is a serious person with bipartisan respect. He seems like the man to do a great job, and I will say this--appointing Mueller was a better response to how Trump tried to play the DOJ than Rosenstein resigning. This might make Trump think about firing him, too--but that would look weird and vindictive, wouldn't it? He should think a bit longer the next time he sets about firing people.

Another odd damn thing that came out was news that the Trump transition team should have been well aware that General Flynn was under investigation before putting him on as National Security Adviser.  This kind of undercuts the rationale that Flynn was fired because of lying to Mike Pence, because Pence was in charge of transition and of all people, how wasn't he in the know, already? And it certainly true that Trump et als took their good time after Acting AG Sally Yates made her concerns known, as well. It's like the nascent Presidential team very nearly saw Flynn's foreign entanglements as not a bug--but a feature.

How did this dynamic work? Appallingly, based on the possibility that Flynn, as a known compromised NSA, stopped a raid on ISIS because Turkey preferred it be stopped.  Flynn, a known hardliner about anti-Islamic terrorism, may have put a delay on a military op against ISIS because of what it looked like to the country paying him--that was not the US?

I don't know how Flynn was fixing to serve Turkey, and the US, and maybe Russia, all at once. I especially don't know how the Trump vetting process never picked up on how conflicted this should have left their guy. But you know who I don't think has got enough focus in this--Mike Pence. VP. The guy in charge of the transition, who for whatever reason is setting up a PAC right now like he wants a lifeboat berth if the fine-tuned Titanic he's on is going down. (Would those funds be applicable to defense costs in case of impeachment, one speculates? I can't be arsed to look this up--his problem, obvs.)

In other funny news, the GOP House leadership is a regular Abbot and Costello. Ryan and McCarthy were caught making the funny about whether Trump sort of seems like he might be a paid tool of Russia, which is spending money to try and subvert other governments. I'm trying to stay neutral in my feels about this. Is the funny because they are in on what they know is true? Or is the funny because they are skeptical of what they are seeing in the news? I can't decide. What is funny to Republicans might not really be up my funny bone, you know? 

Also guilty of having a funny bone when it comes to Trump? Vladimir Putin, who is also a gifted pianist, which I did not know. He made a great funny about our potential Constitutional crisis, implying that the Trump WH team's eagerness to invite TASS and Lavrov to the Oval Office resulted in "tapes" he had access to. (You know I love you Vladi, but this is too much joking for anxious Americans--we might get skittish like a horse that is impossible to ride. Being thrown off might hurt!)

Feh. I don't believe so much in following the funny, as following the money, anyway. Poor Donald Trump--he already thinks he has been so imposed upon, even though political figures have had so much worse. Imprisonment, torture, assassination. All he's had is people being mean!

It's almost worth his being elected, to see him so whiny and pathetic. But when will his base understand how buggered he truly is? And why they should never have set their Chinese-make red trucker caps for him in the first damn place? He's thinking of putting his old campaign squad together.  He's chumming the media sharks with red meat by appointing WI Sherriff Clarke, who is basically the Worst.  But is that really going to win anyone to him? He knows how to attract his base, but he's off-putting basically everyone else. 

I think he's screwed. I could be wrong. But today's over-excited news cycle is super-negative. And I don't see how it improves.