Blink, Blink 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱  

😉😉:  Maybe it was Monday’s 950-point Dow Jones Industrial Average drop.  Maybe it was the articles pointing out that the April drop in the DJIA was the worst April performance since 1932 when we were in the midst of the Depression while the broader S&P 500 plunge was the worst performance for any president since records began in 1928. Maybe it was that the already dangerously shaky debt markets were getting worse. Maybe it was that the IMF has lowered its forecast of US’s 2025 growth rate from 2.7% to 1.8%.  Maybe it was the market’s growing belief that Trump was about to make good on his threats to oust Federal Bank Chair Jerome Powell, a fear bolstered by his ever- grinning economic advisor Kevin Haslett who said Trump was studying (like Trump ever studies?) whether to fire Powell.  Maybe it was the increasing number of polls reporting how dissatisfied Americans are with the way he’s been handling the economy.  Maybe it was because Treasury Secretary Bessent hid his favorite golf clubs or maybe it was because Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was holding his tubes of orange make-up hostage.  Whatever the reason, the mercurial Trump has blinked 😉😉,  at least for now.  Late yesterday, Trump said that “he has no intention of firing Powell” while also saying that the tariffs he’s imposed on China are too high and will come down substantially, what CNN called a “u turn” in this China tariff war.  As a result of his blink, the stock markets rallied yesterday, and futures are up this morning.  Indices are still way down from where they were at the end of the not so sleepy guy’s presidency but maybe, at least for now, the precipitous slide, is over.  Maybe. But don’t get too excited, a lot of damage has been done, and it will take more than one day’s worth of comments and tariff promises to undo.  Some of that damage has been done by Doge guy Elon who says his days in government are numbered. He was always planning to step away in May because of the legal limitation on how long he could stick around without going through a Senate confirmation so while it’s nice that he says he’s going, many of his Dogs will remain embedded in government, glomming on to all our personal data, and Musk’s government contracts will continue to grow together with his influence so while he might be less public he’ll still have lots of influence because that’s what one gets for $250 million.

Cabinet Chronicles:  The stories about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continue to multiply. Those Houthi attack details that he shared on his personal phone with his wife, brother, personal lawyer, and a few other bro besties, were cut and pasted directly from an official channel, secure communication from US Central Command head Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla minutes before US fighter jets took off for strikes against the Iranian-backed Houthis. So, despite Hegseth’s claims that they weren’t actual attack plans they were. When former Senate leader Mitch McConnell voted against Hegseth’s confirmation, he explained his decision by saying that “Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests…. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been." McConnell’s concerns, likely shared by many of the Republican lemmings who voted for him anyway, were spot on, and McConnell didn’t even go into Hegseth’s personal failings, like his history of drinking excessively and his “alleged” abuse of women.  Yesterday, in an appearance on Fox, his prior employer, a strangely amped up Hegseth denied he’d done anything inappropriate and blamed the radical left-wing media as well as deep state players at the Pentagon, the people he’d actually hired, for the reports about his Signal bro chat and chaos at the Pentagon. Trump’s very complicit press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed those excuses later in the day and indication that at least for now Trump is standing with Hegseth.  However, NPR reports that the White House is currently considering possible replacements so who knows because while Trump 1.0 would have dumped Hegseth by now,  Trump 2.0 is far more reckless. Trump is also all in on Cosplay Kristi, his DHS Secretary, whose Gucci pocketbook was stolen over the weekend. Really, who among us doesn’t carry $3,000 in cash, our passport and all our other forms of ID, blank checks, and pharmaceuticals, together all the make-up needed to hide blotches and other imperfections during appearances at El Salvador gulags?  Somehow or other Noem’s Secret Service entourage missed the theft though it was caught on a surveillance camera. What are the odds that if, likely when, caught the bag snatcher will experience the fate of at least two of the migrants that the INS has grabbed, not the ones being held in Louisiana or El Salvador, but the ones who have been so thoroughly “disappeared” that no one in government will admit to knowing where they are now.  We are entering Argentina “Dirty War” territory. Turning to Marco Rubio and his State Department, yesterday his official plans for the reorganization and downsizing of the State Department were sent to Congress for their “review.”  The good news is that they aren’t as draconian as the draft that was earlier leaked, the not so good news is that they do eliminate a whole bunch of humanitarian related functions maybe because we are now delegating a lot of that to the Chinese. And one more thing, nepo RFK’s FDA has suspended their milk quality testing program, something about firing too many of the people who do that sort of thing but maybe also because as a raw milk enthusiast RFK thinks pathogen induced diarrhea and 🤮is a good thing?  We’re also no longer checking for cyclosporine or bird flu and are hiding E Coli outbreaks.       

 #BringThemAllHomeNow