Bring in More Clowns 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

🤡 🤡 🤡: Despite the rumors, Trump is not appointing Arizona’s Kari Lake, the election denier who still hasn’t admitted that she lost both her gubernatorial and Senate races, to serve as Ambassador to Mexico.  Instead, he has nominated Ron Johnson a former Green Beret and CIA official who previously served as his Ambassador to El Salvador. This Ron Johnson is not the 🤡ish Ron Johnson who in addition to being the Republican Senator from Wisconsin played a role in the fake election saga. While Kari is out, or at the very least hasn’t yet secured a position, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who until very recently was son Don Junior’s fiancée is in. Last night Trump announced that Kimmy is his choice to serve as Ambassador to Greece.  Don Jr has been seen out and about in Palm Beach with a new and younger socialite paramour so Guilfoyle’s appointment may be Trump’s way of placating her while getting her as far away as possible.  No comment yet from officials in Greece about how they feel about being a fiancée dumping ground, or how they feel about the fact that Kim, the former Mrs. Gavin Newsom, was reportedly fired from her one-time position as a Fox host for sexually harassing her assistant, another one of those who Fox silenced with an NDA. Oh, to be a fly on the wall the next time Prime Minister Kiriakos Mitsotakis has a tete a tete with his French counterpart Emanuel Macron who will soon be hosting Jared Kushner’s father, who was once jailed for setting his brother-in-law up with a prostitute to hide his financial crimes.  In other ambassadorial news, Trump announced that he’s nominating his fundraiser and his and Jeffrey Epstein’s billionaire friend Tom Barrack to serve as Ambassador to Turkey.  Unlike Jared’s dad, Barrack hasn’t served jail time, but he was once indicted, though acquitted, for serving as an unregistered agent for the United Arab Emirates.  He also has lots of other business dealings in the Middle East that could but probably won’t complicate his confirmation because it’s not like Trump or his MAGA enablers are sticklers for ethics rules.  Proof of that disdain is that Trump has Elon Musk, a bigly beneficiary of government aid, devising a slash and burn plan to make the government more efficient, a plan sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy believes should include “scrutinizing” the loan to Tesla competitor Rivian while leaving money awarded to Musk’s businesses untouched. Trump has also announced that he plans to replace Lena Khan, the current chair of the Federal Trade Commission.  Khan who has taken her job a bit too seriously for many by blocking some big mergers and by suing Amazon and Facebook parent Meta will be replaced by the way more “big” corporation friendly Andrew Ferguson who will not need to be confirmed because he is already an FTC commissioner.  Rounding out recent announcements Trump has nominated: Harmeet Dhillon who mostly opposes civil rights to head up the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division; losing 2022 Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, who like United Health Care CEO shooter Luigi Mangione admires the writings of Unabomber murderer Ted Kaczynski who killed his victims by mailing them packages of explosives, to head up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and he announced that Alina Habba, his favorite incompetent lawyer will be counsel to the President. Unrelated, but worth noting that unlike Mangione’s family, Kaczynski’s brother called authorities after he realized his brother was the Unabomber because he didn’t to put anyone else at risk.  He then donated the reward money he received to his brother’s victims.   

Sane Washing 🤡 🤡: The sane washing of Trump’s other really bad nominees continues.  It’s not clear to me why the right-wing Heritage Fund is so invested in Defense pick Pete Hegseth, but they are.  They plan to spend $1 million to lobby Senators to support his nomination. That said, Hegseth is still not a shoe in for confirmation, though he might manage to make it to the top of the Pentagon, which is both nuts, offensive, and dangerous for the country. It would also be dangerous for Trump to have Tulsi Gabbard who gets most of her news from Russian media and maybe some from Vlad himself distilling his intelligence reports, but she remains in the mix.  So does RFK Jr, who has reached out to Mark McAfee, the Fresno, California raw milk purveyor who has been at the center of several bird flu related product recalls. RFK Jr, a raw milk advocate who apparently hasn’t met an E. coli bacterium that he doesn’t think should be spread far and wide, wants McAfee to become an advisor to the FDA on raw milk policy and standards development. That’s loony but maybe not as out there as Trump telling NBC’s Kristen Welker that he wants RFK to examine the already thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism. To repeat, those theories and the retracted study that propagated them have been debunked but sure let’s waste more money on them instead of on trying to figure out actual causes and treatments.  RFK’s anti-vaccine position and probably also his raw milk fascination likely explain why more than 75 Nobel laureates are urging the Senate to reject the “unqualified” RFK’s nomination, not that Trump or his MAGA crowd will ever be persuaded by actual award-winning scientists after all a whole bunch of his nominees, including Mehmet Oz, Kash Patel who is still in the mix but shouldn’t be, Mike Huckabee, and Surgeon General nominee Janette Nesheiwat are still raking in cash pushing miracle cures and dubious supplements.  While the current Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has declared gun violence a national emergency, Nesheiwat who at the age of 13 accidentally set off the handgun that killed her father, is not expected to embrace a similar gun violence message because NRA.

#BringThemAllHomeNow, journalist Austin Tice, who may or may not be still alive somewhere in Syria, too.