Crazy Meet Emotional😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Memorial Day Memories:  To commemorate the Memorial Day holiday Trump posted one of his depressingly bizarre long Truth Social posts calling his opponents “scum” with “warped radical left-wing minds” while labeling the judges who have ruled against him “USA haters” and “monsters” who “suffer from an ideology that is sick and very dangerous.” Donning his MAGA red campaign hat, he warned a confused audience of West Point graduates that a lot of “trophy wives don’t work out too well,” and then told them that he couldn’t stick with the tradition of greeting each of them individually because he had to deal with China and Russia, code for my tee time beckons.  He also spoke at Arlington where with his current trophy wife MIA, after laying the traditional wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he went political, saying that he was fixing the republic “after the long and hard four years we went through.” Later in the day he expressed excitement about his upcoming June 14^th military parade.  Estimated to cost between $25 and $45 million, the parade will celebrate both the Army’s 250^th anniversary and the dear leader’s 79^th birthday. Nothing says Trump better than spending tens of millions on a birthday celebration after passing a budget that cuts hundreds of millions of dollars from health care and food for the needy and hungry. As to that budget, while it’s made it through the House, it’s not clear what it will look like once it comes out of the Senate. With no Democratic support, it will need almost all of the Republicans onboard and at least for now concerned about it further exploding the deficit Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson want more cuts while Missouri’s Josh Hawley isn’t happy about the cuts to Medicaid   They’re just the ones speaking out, it’s likely that a few more including Maine’s Susan Collins are also twisting pearls concerned over how the Medicaid cuts will bankrupt the rural hospitals that her state relies on.  As noted last week, don’t spend that increased SALT deduction yet because by the time the bill makes it out of the Senate, that low hanging fruit is likely to be gone. Another thing to watch, the 1000 plus page House budget includes a provision that weakens judicial independence by allowing the federal government to defy court contempt orders with impunity. Clearly the intent of that provision is to facilitate Trump’s deportation orders, due process be damned. Since the Senate budget is being passed through reconciliation, the process that allows budget bills to be passed with only a majority rather than a 60- vote supermajority, provisions that have nothing to do with funding are theoretically prohibited.  In all likelihood the Senate parliamentarian will rule against the curb on Judicial power, but Republicans have been known to ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling and dear leader Trump and his Veep JD keep telling us that judges or at least the ones that rule against them, are sick and hate America.

Tariffs, Tariffs, Harvard:  Tariffs have reentered the dialogue.  Really, they never went away but for a while they were getting less press but then on Friday, fresh off his House Big Beautiful Budget win, Trump threatened to roll out his 50% tariffs on products from the European Community (EU) on June 1 only to announce on Sunday that he’s delaying those tariffs until July 9 pending negotiations.  As CNBC put it this morning “investors should “buckle up” for more volatility as the potential for a trade war has not completely dissipated.”  It’s not just tariffs, over the weekend Trump also ramped up his war against Harvard, obviously angry that so far, the courts won’t sign off on his efforts to banish the university’s foreign students, Trump said he wants to redirect $3 billion of Harvard’s grants to trade schools.  Funding trade schools wouldn’t be a bad thing however don’t count on that happening but the defunding of Harvard, that’s clearly something Trump is focused on doing. Just a reminder, if the Trump administration really cared about eradicating anti-Semitism, the purported reason for going after Harvard, it wouldn’t keep on hiring anti-Semites, people like Paul Ingrassia who  currently serves as the White House liaison to DHS and who as NPR detailed has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting anti-Semitism like Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, and others who have called Jews a “plague of locusts.”  Also, there’s Rachel Cauley who serves as Communications Director for the OMB but previously handled media requests for a Hitler friendly white supremacist organization and Ed Martin who like Cauley championed Nazi sympathizer,  January 6 insurrectionist, Timothy Hale Cusanelli calling him an “extraordinary man.”  Though Martin has been replaced by former and maybe future Fox commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro as the acting US Attorney for Washington DC, he is still at the DOJ, now heading the Weaponization Committee because doesn’t every DOJ have a weaponization committee?       

Fog:  Remember how Trump was going to end the Ukraine war on day one of his administration.  Well. it turns out that diplomacy is complicated especially when the guy on the other side of the table is former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.  Over the weekend after Vlad escalated his drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, Trump said that that Putin has gone “absolutely crazy.” The Kremlin countered by saying that Trump appears to be suffering from “emotional overload.” Two things can be true, though wily, focused, and evil are probably more appropriate descriptors of Putin than crazy, and crazy seems more apt than emotionally overloaded for the orange guy. Though Trump keeps talking about ramping up sanctions to punish Putin so far, he hasn’t because he still dreams of Trump branded hotels in Russia and maybe also that much maligned and denied pee tape is real? As to the Middle East, supposedly progress is being made by Steve “Dora the Explorer” Witkoff in his nuke negotiations with Iran but maybe not or maybe just what Obama negotiated back when his team was in charge.  On the Gaza front, Hamas appears to be doing a Lucy with the football thing, moving the goal posts while Israel keeps bombing.  We keep hearing that a hostage/ceasefire deal has been agreed to only to hear that it hasn’t been. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow