Another merry medley of madness.
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The first thing to remember as we honor those who gave their lives for this country is that our Mad King has expressed contempt for them.
Such as this odious comment Donald Trump made back in 2015, referring to John McCain who was shot down over North Vietnam:
He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.
Not a war hero? McCain was held captive for five and a half years, two of which were spent in solitary confinement. When his plane crashed, he was grievously injured, yet the North Vietnamese immediately tortured him, and did so on a regular basis. Later, when they discovered his father was an admiral, they gave him medical treatment and, for propaganda purposes, offered him early release. McCain turned it down unless every man taken before him was also released. Then the torture started up again.
Even Marco Rubio sensed something was wrong with Trump’s remark, and tweeted: “America’s POWs deserve much better than to have their service questioned by the offensive rantings of Donald Trump.” (Of course, back then Rubio was running against Trump. And now that Trump has given him an important position, sycophancy reigns supreme.)
More recently, when CNN asked former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to confirm stories circulating in October of 2023 about Trump’s attitude toward soldiers, he gave this summary:
A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.”
A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.”
A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign.
And rants that our most precious heroes, who gave their lives in America’s defense, are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
Also, despite tough talk and plans for a military parade for his birthday, Donald Trump and his father Fred did everything they could to help him avoid military service.
A foot doctor in Queens, NY, who rented his office from Fred, provided Donald with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels — which apparently didn’t bother this patient before, despite all his athletic activities. Not until he faced induction into the military. The daughters of the doctor told The New York Times that their father “often told the story of coming to the aid of a young Mr. Trump during the Vietnam War as a favor to his father.” One daughter said the implication was that Trump “did not have a disqualifying foot ailment,” and she wasn’t even sure the doctor ever examined him.
This is important because, if you look at the social media posts of Trump’s most avid supporters, many of them proudly state their own service or connection to the military.
Take this person:
Diane finds Trump a figure worthy of adulation and constant promotion to others.
Yet not only does Trump disparage our military and military service, he also doesn’t think much of another fighting force now heroically endeavoring to save their country — Ukraine — from a vicious assault ordered by Trump’s international buddy, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So, please, let’s not be taken in by Trump when he makes obligatory Memorial Day statements about fallen soldiers.
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Has anyone noticed the rich irony of our president having a love fest with the Saudis — the same people who were likely behind 9/11 attacks?
On the other hand, Trump has foreign scholars roughly abducted off the streets of America and thrown into hell holes, or deported, because they dare criticize Israel, or express sympathy for Gazans. (For some examples, go here, here, here, here.)
And this aspect of the situation is downright surreal: Two men — directly connected to the 9/11 terrorists and the Saudi royal family — are living apparently normal lives under the royal nose of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump “likes a lot.”
One of them is Esam Ghazzawi, the patriarch of the rich Saudi family that — just before the 9/11 attacks — suddenly left their home in Florida, seemingly into thin air. With mail on the table, toiletries still in place, a refrigerator full of food, the pool running with toys in it, multiple expensive cars, etc., all left behind.
Phone records and surveillance videos of their gated community showed frequent contact with the hijackers, including lead hijacker Muhammad Atta. As I reported in a 2011 WhoWhatWhy exclusive, Ghazzawi worked for the Saudi royal family.
Today, he is home in Saudi Arabia — not in jail — living a lavishly rich life, out in the open. You can visit his website, esamghazzawi.com.
The other man, Omar al-Bayoumi, apparently a key figure in the attacks, was also never charged with a crime and is back home in Arabia. After the attacks, British police found in his apartment a sketch of an airplane next to a mathematical formula for calculating the rate at which a plane needs to descend to hit a target on the horizon, and a video he took apparently casing possible targets in Washington, DC. Al-Bayoumi also helped two of the hijackers get settled in San Diego. All circumstantial evidence of course, but surely a bit more alarming than a social media post sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians.
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Another pungent irony: Trump recently expedited the acceptance of 59 white “refugees” from South Africa. One of them, Charl Kleinhaus, posted this on X:
Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.
Kleinhaus probably need not worry about the DHS. He said he came here for “safety reasons.” Trump explained, “White farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.” (Never mind that the land belonged to Black Africans in the first place.)
Simple farmers? I don’t know about the rest of them, but Kleinhaus says he used to be a co-owner of a mining company in South Africa.
On Wednesday, in a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Trump repeated a libel on South Africa — that the country is tolerating a “genocide” against white farmers. To make his point, he held up a picture that he said showed victims being buried.
Yet on Friday, Reuters reported that Trump’s “proof” was actually a still from a video report by the wire agency about a conflict in an entirely different country, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trump and Elon Musk have been pushing the false story for months. Back in February, a South African court dismissed claims of a white genocide in the country as “clearly imagined” and “not real,” but the Trumpites have shamefully and shamelessly kept pushing it out to their ill-informed base.
For his part, Musk’s AI chatbot, called Grok, promoted the falsehood until his AI company admitted it wasn’t true and was the result of an “unauthorized code change” of its program — and said the rather huge mistake is under investigation.
Meanwhile, in the area of welcoming white South Africans and giving them opportunities, consider the repeated gifts to Musk (born 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa) from Trump and Middle Eastern dictators (as if he needs them).
Gulf Deal-Making Spree Also Benefited Elon Musk and His Family: The world’s richest man inked new deals as he tagged along on President Trump’s tour of the Gulf.
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The news that Joe Biden faces a fast-moving cancer was, as one might expect, greeted in Trumpland not with sympathy but… suspicion.
Donald Trump Jr., ever the helpful genius, asked on his dad’s Truth Social platform,
What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer [of Joe Biden] or is this yet another coverup???
Apparently, DJT Jr. assumed that, with the title “Dr.” Jill Biden must be a practicing oncologist, personally examining her husband, not a PhD in education.
While the scholarship deficit of Mini-Me Trump underlines the critical importance of improving education in America, the Trump administration keeps pressing to entirely eliminate the US Department of Education — and the funding of a great deal of potentially life-saving medical research, including cancer research.
Presumably, all this thrills Diane Jackson and other “Constitution conservative patriots” and makes all those sacrifices of lives that much more worthwhile.
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Trump’s supporters think police should be allowed to do their jobs any old way — unless it’s MAGA vs. the police on the Capitol grounds.
In this area, Trump is doing his part, eliminating government-supported efforts to reform police practices. His Justice Department is terminating oversight of police departments that have engaged in controversial shootings of civilians, plus ending investigations of other departments with troubling records.
While setting cops free of accountability for their actions, Trump also wants to eliminate citizens’ protections from federal surveillance and other overreach, which is striking given the whole anti-government-snooping stance of the Trump campaign. Trump fired three members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, seemingly for no reason except they had been chosen by Democrats. This past week, a district court judge in Washington, DC, ruled that Trump had broken the law in canning the three and ordered that two of them, who had filed suit, be reinstated.
The board, which looks at how counterterrorism measures are carried out and how their misuse might harm the public, now has only a single member, not enough for a quorum, and is therefore unable to get anything done. Its staff had been working on important things such as how face scanners (notably inaccurate in tagging “dangerous” individuals) are used at airports.
(For more on growing risks to our liberties on arrival, see this.)
Again, one must pause to consider the irony that we are subject to all these stringent measures because of the 9/11 attacks while Trump whoops it up and cashes in with the Saudis.
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Besides getting rid of people whose job is to guard our basic civil liberties, Trump is firing members of two agencies tasked with protecting our rights as workers: the Merit Systems Protection Board, which settles workplace disputes for government employees, and the National Labor Relations Board, serving workers in the private sector. Judges have for now blocked Trump’s efforts to remove members of these boards without cause, but that’s just for now.
And all this could spread to the most sensitive government agencies, like the National Transportation Safety Board and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose actions, or failure to act, can put millions of people in jeopardy of their lives.
To be sure, we’ve seen some pushback against Trump’s grabs for quasi-dictatorial powers, notably from the more principled law firms and the more honorable and courageous judges (including some appointed by Republican presidents, even one or two named to the courts by Trump). But it’s all too apparent that the rate at which Trump is arbitrarily removing people from historically independent government agencies will far outpace the ability of the judicial system to keep up.
What we haven’t seen yet — and need — is a kind of national statement of purpose on this matter and an agreed-upon strategy and coordination to respond to Trump’s dangerous and unlawful moves. Why not a confederation of those in the legal community — attorneys, scholars, retired judges, etc. — coming together with a unified public response?
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Meanwhile, Trump continues to show what “efficient, effective” government looks like by appointing people along the lines of David Richardson. He became acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Trump fired the previous head (whom he had also appointed) for daring to opine that FEMA should not be shut down.
In a leaked transcript of an internal FEMA document, Richardson tells staff that many functions of FEMA should be transferred to states. Which is a truly bad idea, because a major reason for having a federal disaster-response entity is that by continual activity in aiding Americans everywhere, it gets crucial experience in how to carry out this often life-and-death task. Not to mention that many emergencies — like floods, wildfires, and hurricanes — don’t respect state lines. Leaving FEMA’s work to individual states is incredibly risky and, well, stupid.
And just in time for another predicted whopper hurricane season!
This Richardson is some sharp fellow. He told FEMA workers that he had recently learned from his girlfriend that “Texas is bigger than Spain.” He continued, “I didn’t know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up (sic).”
No word yet on whether the brainy Richardson will replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio once Trump inevitably tires of the latter, his super sycophancy notwithstanding.
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The public hears little about any of this, pays less attention — and, of course, Trump’s die-hard base is totally tuned out. Instead, MAGA — which evolved in part from the GOP’s long-standing drumbeat of a righteous battle for morality, family, and traditional values — remains obsessed with the idea that Democrats are debasing standards.
Yet we consistently see examples of hypocrisy from leading lights like fundamentalist preachers and congressional firebrands such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO), with their dramatic personal scandals.
The latest of these is South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace. In a legal case deposition, a former aide to the congresswoman said the MAGA star intended to use nude photos she found on her boyfriend’s phone to blackmail him to turn over two properties to her. The aide also said Mace was completely obsessed with sex, and talked about it continually.
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Another part of the MAGA base, of course, is made of greedy Crypto Bros. Crypto strikes me as without a good basis (or foundation in good) — and a danger to the historic government role of issuing and stabilizing currencies — and even Trump once thought it was baloney. That is, until he found that he could raise vast sums of real money from crypto wannabes — and make a bundle by issuing his own crypto, which is now getting snapped up by people angling to get favors from him.
I saw the other day that some crypto investor kidnapped another crypto guy visiting from Italy, and held and tortured him for three weeks in a luxury townhouse. My editors told me not to mention that because what does that prove? My super-smart nephew, who grew up in Silicon Valley, thinks it’s emblematic of the moral desert of which crypto is but one manifestation. (Since it’s salacious, Fox News, among others, did cover it.)
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Moving to another weird corner of Trumpland, we have our perennial favorite, RFK Jr. In a little-noticed development, Bobby’s own recent vice presidential running mate has taken to social media to warn that, “It has been clear in recent conversations that [RFK Jr] is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump).” Nicole Shanahan says her erstwhile buddy is doing things diametrically opposed to what he’d promised, including hiring a totally unqualified surgeon general and her twin sibling.
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Meanwhile, in a move surely bringing good cheer to the hearts of many of Trump’s supporters, his good friend Kanye West’s pro-Hitler song, banned on multiple social media platforms, has been streamed millions of times thanks to… Elon Musk (him again!) and his X.
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You may have heard that Trump just told Apple it should make its iPhones in the US. MAGA folk are surely clamoring to get off their couches and stop fulminating round the clock about Libs — and start assembling complex circuit boards in basement clean rooms.
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And, of course, Trump’s celebrity supporters just keep showing their principles and mettle. Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse (yes that is actually the name), per People magazine, reportedly shut down temporarily when ICE started raiding similar establishments in Nashville, apparently to protect KRBAHTRNRS’s undocumented immigrant staff. No word on how Kid — a huge Trump supporter — feels about this.
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And now for something completely different. Here’s a (partial?) list of countries that have rejected the far Right at the ballot box since Trump’s re-election: Canada, Germany, Australia, Romania, and Poland. Global observers have attributed these results to widespread revulsion at the MAGA-fication of the United States of America. Well, bring on more revulsion!
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And, finally, this upbeat report: Although DOGE and the larger Trump enterprise are working overtime to dismiss leading researchers and defund or otherwise head off critical research into cures for cancer, Parkinsonism, ALS, etc. — we may now have a dependable cure for baldness!
Good thing, considering all the hair-raising news to come.
Meantime, enjoy the holiday!
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