Dangerous Subservience 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Three Times the Charm: Trump said the quiet part out loud on Sunday. He’s not joking about running for a third term, he’s serious about it because despite the 22^nd Amendment prohibition against a two-term president running for a third term, he thinks there are “ways” that he can. All the legitimate legal pundits and even some questionable ones say otherwise, there’s no way he can run again, but those are largely the same lawyers who insisted that even the current Supreme Court wouldn’t grant him broad immunity and we know how that turned out.  Besides, Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been in power for 15 years and Vladimir Putin even longer. Nauseous yet 🤮? Even if Trump can’t legitimately run again, he does have the ability to muck up the election process, that’s the point of his executive actions, the ones that make it more difficult for people to vote by “targeting” non-existent voter fraud, insisting on difficult to obtain IDs, and making vote by mail options more difficult.  While those changes wouldn’t make his coveted third term legal, they would enshrine rules that heavily favor the MAGA crowd.  Still, the biggest worry is that he’ll just declare martial law and cancel the elections, and you know he’s going to try. In addition to musing about his third term, Trump also repeated his love for tariffs, saying that he really doesn’t care if his newest ones on foreign made cars which are due to go into effect imminently, raise prices by around $10,000.  That kind of thinking explains why inflation is trending up again while the equity markets continue to decline. He remains stuck in the past, those good old days when Black people and women knew their place. 

Make America Red and Blotchy Again:  Speaking of the past, that’s where we are heading on the infectious disease front as well.  There are now more than 400 reported cases of measles and that’s likely an undercount given how many cases go unreported. ProPublica reports that leaders at the CDC, or what’s left of it because RFK is firing tens of thousands of people including a bunch responsible for vaccines, ordered staff not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccinations are lagging. The agency planned to emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated, but since RFK disdains vaccines, they weren’t allowed to because telling parents to give their unvaccinated children Vitamin A is still RFK’s preferred advice so what if it doesn’t prevent or cure measles but in large doses damages the liver. On Friday, the FDA’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure but didn’t go out quietly.  He said that RFK’s aggressive anti vaccine stance was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public, adding “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies…..This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”  That next pandemic, and there will be one, is going to be a doozy.  

Only the Best?  Usha and JD went to Greenland to push Trump’s Make Greenland American campaign.  Neither they nor their message were received well.  In fact, no one wanted to be seen with them, so they went only to the very icy US base.  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth now has his brother working as a “liaison” and chief Pentagon advisor, no appropriate experience but then again Hegseth has little to none either.  Also, Hegseth has been bringing his wife to top secret meetings, again he shouldn’t but who’s going to tell him?  Maybe both family members are his designated sober buddies. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who like Hegseth still has his job even though he really shouldn’t, has no idea how journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s contact information made it into his address book.  He admits he made a mistake by adding Goldberg to the infamous Signalgate chat but asserts that Goldberg space lasered that contact information into his address book because he never ever met the guy, ever. Goldberg’s response was terse, he’s says that they’ve spoken, they’ve met, and that’s how Waltz had his contact details. Trump pardoned car industry scammer Trevor Milton, acknowledging he did so because Milton is a supporter who wrote him checks.  Also, AG Pam Bondi’s brother Brad represents Milton.  It was fairly clear from Trump’s statement that he has no idea what Milton did but since Pam told him to issue the pardon, he did.  Elon Musk’s doge dogs plan to rewrite all of the Social Security Administration’s code in a few months.  Updating the code is a good idea but their timetable isn’t just unrealistic, it’s insane and irresponsible.  We’re talking a multi-year project that should require lots and lots of testing before the new code is incorporated into the system.  Remember what happened to Twitter/X when he took over, it crashed a lot but since it’s comparatively small and isn’t the backbone of a payment system that supports 72 million Americans it was fun to mock but didn’t matter.  Law firm, Skadden Arps has joined Paul Weiss on the dark side, but Wilmer Hale and Jenner & Block have joined Perkins Coie in pushing back against Trump’s retribution and at least so far judges are ruling in their favor.  And who knew that an autism tattoo would be grounds for deportation to an El Salvador hell hole?  It shouldn’t be but apparently it was and now there’s a young man, who loves and supports his autistic brother who is stuck in hell as a result but not to worry because Kristi Noem and her $50,000 Rolex got a good photo op.  On the subject of photo ops, there have been far too many videos of the INS scooping up visa and Green card holders for speaking their minds.  Like or hate their messages, we’re all better off when officials follow legal procedures.         

April Fools’ Day:  Keep an eye on the Wisconsin court election where liberal candidate Susan Crawford is up against MAGA-conservative Brad Schimel.  Schimel has gotten boatloads of money from Elon Musk who has also promised to write $1 million checks to two of the people who show up at his weekend rally.  Musk walked back the terms of his “bribe” to evade state legal prohibitions but he still offered the money.  Also, keep an eye on the special House elections in Florida.  Odds are the Republican candidates will win, but the margin of their victories will tell us a lot about how people feel about more measles, costlier cars, less health care, watching their friends lose their jobs, and Social Security uncertainty.

#BringThemAllHomeNow