Gimme, Gimme 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱✈️ 

👀👀: Trump spent yesterday basking in the glow of his Saudi admirers.  Okay, they’re not really his admirers, but they know that treating him like fellow royalty pays in bigly dividends so Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), of bone cutter fame, greeted him at the Riyadh airport and then rolled out a custom-built McDonalds truck to meet his dietary needs. Afterall, what’s the point of Trump taking two different cholesterol drugs everyday if he doesn’t get to eat his favorite fat laden happy meal wherever he goes?  Trump, who had only the best things to say about MBS, expressed jealousy-tinged admiration for the way that the prince gets to squelch his critics, and by squelch think chopped-up Washington Post Journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump announced that Saudi Arabia will be making a $142 billion purchase of US military equipment while also investing $600 billion in the US.  The orange one has a history of exaggerating sales and investment figures so it’s not likely that either will come to pass at that magnitude though some money has already made its way into the Trump family coffers.  Though the Saudi’s sovereign wealth is huge, its assets under management equal $925 billion, so it is unlikely to put such a large percentage into the US. That said Trump’s announcement made for a good sound bite.  In exchange for the Saudi “largesse” Trump announced that he will move to normalize relations and lift sanctions on the new government in Syria to give the country "a chance at peace." This morning, he met with new Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former, or maybe just pretending to be former al-Qaeda rebel leader.  Next up he’ll be going to Qatar, the country that plans to gift him the $400 million gilded 747 which he equated to a golf gimme, as in if someone offers you a gift or allows you to skip a putt you take it. The plane that will require hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even a billion dollars, of retrofitting before it can be added to the Air Force One fleet. All that retrofitting will likely take a few years and might even require Boeing to redirect some of the specialists currently working on the two planes Trump ordered during Trump One, delaying their delivery even more. The bottom line is that despite Trump’s posts denying that the Qatar plane won’t be available for his use after he leaves office, there’s little question that it will be which is why he wants it so much.  The optics 👀👀 of the Qatar ✈️ are so bad that even a number of Republicans politicians including Senators Rand Paul, John Thune, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz, who noted that the Qataris host and support US hating terrorists like Hamas are questioning it, well questioning it for now.  In addition to Laura Loomer, the naysayer list includes MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro and the NY Post’s Editorial Board.  Naturally, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who not so coincidentally previously earned $115,000 per month as a lobbyist for Qatar, is totally copacetic with Trump accepting the ✈️ because what’s an emoluments violation among friends?

Optical Delusions:  The optics of the plane gift sucks to put it mildly but then again so does flying in 59 white South African Afrikaner farmers to save them from “genocide” on the same day that the administration terminated temporary protected status for the Afghans who supported our troops.  Despite cosplay Kirsti Noem’s assertion that the Taliban are so much nicer these days, the Afghans are not going to be welcomed home with open arms. To be clear, white immigrants are okay, especially those from Elon Musk’s home country, Black and/or Muslim ones not so much. Musk’s position, that Trump who complained during Trump One about so few Scandinavians immigrating to the US, is that the Afrikaners are victims of genocide.  South Africa has problems that shouldn’t be dismissed but given that 72% of its farming and agriculture land remains in the hands of the white minority which represents only 7.3% of the population, genocide is not one of them. That’s the position of the Episcopalian church which announced that helping Afrikaner refugees over others is unfathomable to them. Yesterday, the church announced that it is ending its nearly 40-year refugee resettlement partnership with the US government.  They did that after refusing a Trump administration request to help resettle the Afrikaners.  Flying former hostage Edan Alexander, the Israeli who was released as part of a deal arranged by Trump and Qatar, to Doha to greet and kiss Trump and the Qatari Emir’s rings would have been optically awful too.  We will be spared that sight, since despite early reports that at Trump’s insistence Edan would be flown to Qatar, his family announced that the 21-year-old, who spent 584 days in captivity, requires immediate medical attention because of course he does. He’ll be going to the hospital instead but will fly to the White House at a later date to feed Trump’s ego and presumably to ask for help freeing the rest of the hostages. And lastly, a federal judge in Pennsylvania is okay with the Alien Enemies Act being used to deport the alleged Tren de Aragua members.  Her decision affects only her area of Pennsylvania, at least for now.  

Cabinetry:  We probably shouldn’t be all that surprised that the Health Secretary with a wormhole in his brain who is also a former heroin addict with an affinity for bear and shark carcasses and who has probably had hepatitis and a few bouts of giardia, thought that swimming in Maryland’s sewage contaminated Rock Creek was a good way to spend Mother’s Day.  However, what’s with bringing the grandchildren along?  Anyone else subjecting their young ones to a disease cocktail would risk a visit from child services, and where are their parents in all this? No comment of course from EPA head Lee Zeldin who given his recent pro-pollution actions probably is all in on sewage infested waters, though I suspect he’s way too smart to swim or let his kids swim in giardia infested creeks. Polluted water swimmer RFK’s plans to fire almost all of the workers at NIOSH responsible for miner’s lung disease related issues have been undone.  The workers have been hired back because apparently firing people based in red states like West Virginia isn’t as easy as firing people based in Maryland. Since there’s a video for everything, there’s one of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asking Congress for funding to hire more FAA staff.  That’s a bit inconvenient for current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy who keeps trying to blame current flight controller staffing shortages on Pete.  He’d be better off working to fix the staffing and technology problems but blaming others is so Trumpian.  Remember all those pointless infrastructure weeks he held during Trump One?   As to infrastructure, the House budget going to the Senate for reconciliation negotiations undoes a lot of Biden’s climate related projects because cleaning up the environment and making for a better future is no longer acceptable.   That’s a problem for some Republican Senators whose states benefit from those funds.  The House budget would also kick somewhere between 8 and 13 million people off of Medicaid, something that also concerns some swing staters but is of less concern to those who wanted deeper budget cuts.  There’s lots of other stuff in the House deal, but since it’s not clear what will make it out of reconciliation with the Senate there’s little point in going there now.

Fog: Gaza is a sad, deteriorating mess and Hamas is still holding hostages and bodies.

#BringThemAllHomeNow