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Last week I wrote about how chaos is the core Trump game. 

Well, this week he didn’t disappoint on that front. You surely have your favorite examples, but his daily barrage of disorienting, destabilizing, and distracting news includes: 

The possibility of the US military invading Mexico, of course without Mexico’s permission, to take on the drug cartels. The term “WTF” seems so yesterday.

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Dumping the IRS director he himself originally selected (despite, or perhaps because, the man had “little background in tax policy beyond promoting a fraud-riddled tax credit”) after just two months in office. Trump has banished him as US ambassador… to Iceland. 

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Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cancelled $500 million in contracts for developing mRNA vaccines — the kind that, a product of Trump’s own “Warp Speed” vaccine development program, saved millions of lives during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Not everyone appreciates that fact. One man, possibly inspired by the kind of “science” Kennedy promotes, fired dozens of long-gun rounds at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). 

He believed the COVID-19 vaccine made him suicidal, whereas it might be that listening to Kennedy and his alt-health cohort is what made him crazy. 

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Trump just signed an executive order that gives his political appointees power over all federal grants, putting MAGA ideologues who lack expertise in charge of billions of dollars of funding for research and science, including by FEMA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, etc. 

The scientific community is up in arms over this latest politicization of a traditionally politically neutral function. They’ve already seen more than enough to know what people like Kristi Noem — with her lack of intellect, values, conscience, even common sense — would do with the power and control Trump just handed them.

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Politicizing science is a big deal but it’s the kind of thing that devastates quietly and doesn’t yield many “visuals.” Trump likes visuals, and what better visual than feds clearing out homeless folks from our nation’s capital, slapping the cuffs on “criminals” and hauling them off to jail? 

It’s common “knowledge” in MAGAworld that Washington is overrun with criminals, coddled by its LUNATIC LEFT MAYOR and other elected leaders. (Actually, violent crime is way down in DC, as crime in general is nationally, but why let facts get in the way of a good power grab and photo-op?) 

As a de facto segregated city with a majority Black population kept conveniently away from the marble halls, what better place than Washington for white supremacy to make its stand and relitigate the Civil War? 

And Trump will have the help of even more visuals — he has ordered the reinstallation of previously removed Confederate statues.

The FBI, DEA, and ICE are already trawling the capital’s streets, with the National Guard on its way now, as a newly occupied Washington joins the previously occupied Los Angeles. Of course, no one’s been rioting in Washington (not since January 6, 2021, that is). 

The proximal cause for the militarization of our capital seems to have been the carjacking (quickly foiled by local DC police) of DOGE (remember DOGE?) staffer Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. That and a few homeless tents that marred the view from the president’s limo as he was driven from the planned construction site of his 90,000-square-foot ballroom to his golf course.

The real cause? Pretty easy to guess: yet more distraction — from Epstein, the terrible jobs report, and various other calamities — coupled with Trump’s ever-expanding will to power, an itch that it seems every dictator must always be scratching.

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Chaos is coming for us all. 

Even a Trump superfan found out that flattery, normally a major currency with Trump, will get you nowhere — if you’re not a big donor. The creator of a chain of “Trump Burger” locations who overstayed his visa was deported to Lebanon. 

Chaos certainly is coming for the rest of us in the form of a potentially crashed economy. As this article notes, Trump’s removal of a fair and accurate head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — to make way for a cheerleader who will know that keeping their job depends on offering rosy, BS scenarios — threatens the entire economy by undermining confidence in it: View this story in your browser, and please share with your friends.

Related: Donald Trump Only Likes Winning Numbers;  A Tale of Two Numbers

And chaos is coming as a blitzkrieg against anyone who ever challenged Trump. Back in the day, he somehow managed to keep a small army of attorneys busy despite not paying legal bills. Now he has the collective might of the US Justice Department and an ideologically aligned judiciary to help him settle scores. 

The latest target: New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the boldest in pursuing Trump for real, evidence-verified wrongdoing. She won her office’s civil fraud case against Trump for inflating his net worth and that of his real estate properties, which led to Trump being penalized for over half a billion dollars including interest. (Trump appealed the judgment and posted a $175 million bond.) 

So now Trump is having her investigated for supposedly violating his civil rights while pursuing her case against him. He’s also having her own real estate dealings investigated. Another such target of the real estate leg of Trump’s retribution tour: Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

And speaking of revenge, Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), has been accused of threatening “revenge porn” against the reigning Miss USA. She claims Mills threatened to share online sexually explicit photos and videos of her. 

In the past, I’ve noted that MAGA The Movement is rife with hypocrisy and self-interest. It wants to make America “great again,” wants criminals prosecuted, wants “family values” — but it is chock-a-block with deviants and aggressors violating every standard they pretend to champion.

Epstein, the Connection that Won’t Go Away

I looked into Jeffrey Epstein many years ago and have always believed, based on the pattern of facts, that there was much more to the story. Right after Epstein’s death in 2019, I spoke with his brother, who shared that he didn’t believe that Epstein had killed himself, finding it out of character. And recently Epstein’s lawyer, David Schoen, said he didn’t believe it either because, among other things, Epstein expressed optimism about his case being resolvable.

Now comes more. 

In an interview with the UK’s Telegraph, Epstein’s chef and driver in France, Valdson Cotrin, who remains loyal to his late boss, said that he, too, did not believe Epstein killed himself. 

Equally tantalizing, Cotrin said Epstein told him he had been offered a job by Donald Trump in his first administration in 2016, but that Epstein had turned it down. 

Wait — what? It sounds crazy, but what doesn’t in this case?  

Of course, given Trump’s seemingly total impunity, even if he had appointed Epstein to a position in his administration (Chief of Protocol? Health and Human Services? Treasury?), would his supporters have minded? 

Can Cotrin be believed? I think so. Cotrin said that in the past he had not spoken out because he feared for his life, and added, “What about Virginia [Giuffre] Roberts? I’m scared after what happened to her.”

Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell, perhaps the only person alive who knows the precise nature of the Epstein-Trump relationship — quietly settled into a cushy minimum security prison in Texas. She was moved there after being “interviewed” by Trump’s former lawyer turned deputy attorney general at the maximum security Florida lockup where she had previously been held. Trump said he knew nothing about it. 

What Does the Israeli Public Know About Gaza? 

Not long after Israel began its brute force attacks on Gaza in response to the savage Hamas incursion of October 2023, I began to wonder what the average Israeli knew about the situation on the ground — and whether they knew that it was average, innocent Gazans, not necessarily Hamas warriors, bearing the brunt. 

I began querying knowledgeable media observers in Israel, and they told me the Israeli media was not covering the carnage in the 25-mile-long enclave — despite Israeli soldiers posting about their more egregious activities on social media. The main exception being the liberal paper Haaretz, which has consistently done what it can to get the truth out. 

At first I was surprised to learn that Israelis generally aren’t hearing what we in the US are. I say “surprised” because I know that Israel has plenty of very good journalists. But then I remembered that this media failing is actually the historical norm when it comes to coverage of wars involving your own country’s military. 

German media failed to show what was happening to the country’s citizens under Hitler’s Nazi Party. US media for years produced sanitized daily accounts of the war in Vietnam, with the actual horrors largely invisible to the US public. 

I lived in the Balkans after the 1990s genocide in former Yugoslavia, and each component of the fractured homeland consistently produced reportage that justified its local government’s position, while convincing the public that their once-friendly neighbors were now their mortal enemies.  

And the US media again rallied around its government’s phony claims in the early 2000s that Saddam Hussein had developed “weapons of mass destruction.” 

When my own reporting showed that George W. Bush was cooking up a false basis for an invasion, I couldn’t find anyone to publish that.

Legacy media overall have always had a problem breaking away from the establishment narrative and covering bad behavior by its own government and military.

(It’s one reason I founded WhoWhatWhy — because telling the public the truth, regardless of how disturbing, is essential to society.) 

Everything has been made much worse by our increasing propensity to get our news on social media. Algorithms shape what we see, hear, and even think — feeding us what the profit-first people who control the algorithm think we want. Since that content is designed to reinforce our worldview, we’re less likely to question or engage critically with the facts. 

The Israeli public and major TV channels are turning critical of the Netanyahu Government, as mass protests grow. In Tel Aviv, weekly rallies at Kaplan Street and Habima Square now draw tens of thousands — some topping 100,000.

US media have been very slow to acknowledge the problem the Israelis have had with information access, but a recent Washington Post article does so. There’s also a sense that foreign media have failed to acknowledge the enormity of the original precipitating event on October 7, or the trauma Israelis still feel, and how this makes it hard for the traumatized public to condemn the mass starvation and death in Gaza — though we are just beginning to see limited protests in Israel over it.

According to the Post: 

[M]any Israelis, who are still grappling with the visual archive of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants live-streamed thousands of hours of body-camera footage as they rampaged through southern Israel, remain skeptical of media reports coming out of Gaza. Some also distrust international media, accusing some outlets of downplaying coverage of the hostages.

As a result, few Israelis “make the effort to leave their feed, their bubble, whatever social media platform, and get to whatever other place to see what is happening” in Gaza, said Oren Persico, a reporter for the Seventh Eye, an investigative magazine focused on Israeli media and freedom of speech.

“The algorithm knows already what you want to see.”  

To be fair, a high percentage of Americans, too, are in an algorithmic bubble — and we don’t yet see effective, sustained mass protests here against the human devastation going on.