Kill Bill 3 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

The Abominable Bill:  Elon Musk is trying very hard to kill Trump’s not so beautiful bill.  Yesterday he continued attacking it on X, tweeting “KILL the BILL. Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok!”  He’s not wrong about the bill, though his solution includes making more cuts to social programs and all those other things that keep the government running and people safe rather than raising taxes or just letting some or all of the Trump 1.0 tax cuts expire. Naturally, much of Musk’s criticism is personal. He’s angry about the elimination of EV (electric vehicle) incentives; that the FAA won’t be using his Starlink in its updated control systems; that Trump pulled the nomination of his man Jared Isaacman to serve as the head of NASA; and that Trump refused to override the 130 day limitation for special government employees because despite the party line that he needed to get back to focusing on his businesses, Musk wanted to stay on at DOGE.  Trump didn’t expect Musk to publicly display his fury because he thought those humongous campaign contributions were just a gift with no strings attached, kind of like the $400 million plane that no one should believe is a bribe. Though a number of Senate and House Republicans are doing their best to tap dance around Musk’s criticisms because offending the guy with the bulging purse is never a good idea, some are using Musk’s slams to bolster their efforts to push for changes, mostly more cuts in the House bill but also some add backs like the funding of some of the projects that Biden strategically placed in red states.  Whatever emerges from the Senate will be different than the House bill.  That’s a problem for Mike Johnson because he had to placate his right-wing budget hawks while also satisfying his swing district members who demanded the increase in the SALT cap in exchange for their votes.  That SALT cap, together with Trump’s elimination of taxes on overtime and tips are among the items that are likely to be watered down or eliminated in whatever emerges from the Senate. A further complication are the conclusions of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (the CBO).  The CBO estimates that as it stands, the bill will cause 11 million people to lose health insurance, mostly due to the cuts in Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and that it balloons the deficit by $2.4 trillion over ten years, probably more but they are giving Trump some credit for tariffs.  That’s a problem for Republicans who’ve been claiming that only lazy bums will lose their health insurance while also asserting that the bill won’t grow the deficit so, naturally, they’re now attacking the biased “socialists” at the CBO.  The fun and games have just begun.  There will be more Elon tweet attacks and many more Trump eruptions as well as lots of arm twisting before it ends, assuming it does end because though the odds are that a tax bill will pass largely because Trump and the Republicans need to pass something there is also a chance that it gets broken into two pieces.

Shiny Objects:  To distract from the tax bill mess, Trump lobbed a few shiny objects into the air yesterday.  He had Linda McMahon’s Education Department, the department he’s trying to eliminate, notify the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the entity responsible for accrediting Columbia University, that Columbia has failed to meet the standards for accreditation, asserting Columbia is violating federal antidiscrimination laws.  Essentially, Trump is trying to intimidate the accrediting institution into pulling Columbia’s accreditation which would make it impossible for Columbia’s students to receive federal financial aid including Pell Grants. Then late last night Trump signed a proclamation suspending visas for Harvard’s new international students. Trump wants us to think that these actions are to punish Columbia and Harvard for allowing anti-Semitism to flourish on their campuses.  Don’t be fooled, the guy who dines with and promotes white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and according to wife one Ivana slept with a copy of Mein Kampf near his bed, cares little about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism on and off college campus is a real problem, the universities have screwed up big time, but Trump is using the oldest hate of all to promote his interests, not to protect Jews. If anything, he’s putting a big target on every Jewish person’s back. It’s not just Jews, late last night Trump issued an executive order restricting the entry of nationals from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. People from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela will face a partial restriction. The orange TACO guy is hoping that today’s news cycle will focus on his newest travel ban, his war on “elitist” educators, and his newest assertion that Sleepy Joe’s pardons were invalid because he was sleepy, rather than Musk’s tweet attacks and the state of his ugly bill.

Fog: Yesterday, Trump had a wonderful “hour plus” phone call with his sometimes BFF Vladimir Putin.  The White House no longer releases transcripts of anything Trump says, especially his calls with foreign leaders, but after the call Trump posted on social media that they “discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides…..”It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace.”  Oh and “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.” Trump failed to say that he told Putin that further escalation needed to stop, nor did he suggest that he threatened Putin with more sanctions likely because he didn’t. To summarize, Putin bombed Ukrainian civilian targets, Ukraine responded by attacking unmanned war planes, and Trump pretty much yawned when Putin said he’d now attack more civilian targets.  In other news it looks more and more likely that Trump is negotiating a deal with Iran that looks just like the Obama one he walked away from and there’s no progress out of Gaza except that Israel has retrieved the bodies of Judi Weinstein and Gadi Haggai two of the hostages who died during the October 7 massacre. Sadly, the live hostages remain in Hamas’ hands.

And:  Thank you to the reader who pointed out that I mistakenly wrote that Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was the Governor of Alabama. Alabama has lots of problems, Huckabee Sanders is not one of them. 😊  

#BringThemAllHomeNow