Bigly Bombs🔥🔥😱 ✡️🌻😱🔥🔥 

War Drums:  Trump has a history of bailing out of G7 meetings early.  During Trump 1.0, he bailed early to meet with his pen pal North Korea strong man Kim Jong un.  It’s not entirely clear why he skedaddled out of this week’s Canada meeting early. It may have been because he needed to be back at the White House to address the escalating war between Iran and Israel.  It could have been because he didn’t want to be in attendance when Ukraine President Zelenskyy arrived.  Or maybe it was just because he’d been banished to the kid’s table when none of the adults wanted to eat with him.  In any case, with little to show on the tariff front, on his way home a petulant Trump slammed our ally, or one time ally, France’s Emanuel Macron for saying that he’d left Canada to work on a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, saying Macron ”always gets it wrong.”  What is clear is that presidenting is hard, even harder when you’ve surrounded yourself with a bunch of numbskulls.  Trump is now confronting an existential crisis advised by the likes of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with “friends” Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon breathing down his neck. Yesterday, Trump dissed Gabbard, questioning her earlier congressional testimony where she said that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, saying that he “didn’t care what she had to say.” Whether Iran is, or was, close to having a nuclear arsenal or not, Gabbard’s recent firing of the security analysts who said that we aren’t at war with Venezuela as well as her habit of repeating Putin talking points makes her advice questionable. As to Hegseth, who was chosen despite his flawed personal history because Trump liked how he looked on Fox, he’s got his own set of problems, not just his Signal calls and lack of experience but his inability to find anyone willing to work with him at the Pentagon. The Iran nuclear problem has been festering for years. The Obama era JCPOA nuclear deal that Trump pulled us from was flawed, it left Iran’s missile capability intact and it didn’t address Iran’s funding of surrogates like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, while only delaying the fruition of the Ayatollah’s nuclear ambitions, essentially pushing the Iran problem forward rather than solving it all together, but it was better than nothing. Trump’s decision to pull the US from the deal made it easier for Iran to move forward faster and his appointment of real estate buddy Steven Witkoff to negotiate a new deal while comical was idiotic so now the music has stopped, Trump’s the one who is left dealing with the radioactive hot potato. To finish off or come close to finishing off Iran’s nuke production capability, Israel’s persistent and difficult to manage Netanyahu who warts and all, has outlasted many US presidents, needs our big “bunker busting” bombs and presumably also needs access to the planes and maybe also the pilots that would deliver those bombs. Tough decision, even tougher when the advisors you’ve surrounded yourself with were chosen for all the wrong reasons. Trump wanted this job, he picked his team, and now. like it or not the decision rests with him. This morning, despite Trump’s threatening call for Iran to capitulate or else, Ayatollah Khamenei said that’s not gonna happen.

The Usual Suspects? Over the weekend Trump said that he wouldn’t be rounding up “good” but undocumented agricultural and leisure industry workers. Unfortunately, pressured by Stephen “Goebbels” Miller, the TACO president has changed his mind, so those migrants are once again fair game.  Apparently, so are Democratic politicians and “liberal” judges.  Yesterday, Brad Lander, NYC’s Comptroller who is also one of the city’s many mayoral candidates in its screwball election, was manhandled and arrested by some ICE agents.  His “crime” accompanying and then linking arms with someone INS was trying to detain at an immigration court, one of the places that INS hangs out to pluck the easy to nab migrants showing up for their hearings. Lander was held for a few hours but was released and at least for now the charges against him have been dropped largely because Governor Kathy Hochul intervened. However, the person he was trying to protect has been taken off to a jail somewhere.  Add Lander to a list that already includes California Senator Alex Padilla,  NJ Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan. To state the obvious, politicians and judges aren’t supposed to be arrested in democratic countries.  Neither are sitting US Senators supposed to make light of murder, but for some unfathomable reason Utah Senator Mike Lee has descended so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that he’s been doing just that.  Even after it was revealed that the Minnesota murderer who stalked, shot, killed, and injured several politicians and their family members was a Republican who’d voted for Trump, Lee kept pushing the lie that the murderer was a “Marxist,” MAGA speak for all Democrats, while also attacking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who Trump says he won’t commiserate with because “he’s a mess” and it “would be a waste of time.” Lee has finally taken down his social media posts, not because he gets how hurtful and inappropriate they were but because both of Minnesota’s Senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who were on the assassin’s “hit list” spoke with him and then went public with their disgust.  Lee has always been very conservative, but there was a time when he was viewed as a “normal” Republican. Makes you think that spreading conspiracy theories, lacking empathy, and being super MAGA is now normal?  In other MAGA news, Kristi Noem was rushed to a hospital yesterday after having an allergic reaction.  The jokes write themselves but in the interest of civility I’ll abstain.  And lastly, Malta born Sergio Gor, the director of the presidential personnel office, who was instrumental in getting Elon Musk’s preferred NASA nominee removed over his contributions to Democratic candidates, hasn’t filled out his own disclosure form.  What is he hding?              

The BUB:  The Senate version of the Big Ugly Bill appears to be even worse and more expensive than the House version.  While it slows down the defunding of Biden’s climate related projects, among other things the Senate version takes a bigger bite out of Medicaid, lowers the SALT deduction back to $10,000, and raises the debt limit by $1 trillion more than the House version. The Medicaid cuts target a tax mechanism that help hospitals, particularly those in rural areas, stay afloat while also disproportionately hurting the 41 states that have signed on to the Medicaid expansion, a backdoor way of chipping away at Obamacare.  Majority Leader John Thune insists that the bill does not increase the deficit even though the Congressional Budget Office says that it does, bigly.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow