Goldfinger 🤮 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤮 🤡 

Midas Moment:  Yesterday during one of his made for reality TV cabinet meetings Trump riffed that because no gold paint could adequately achieve the gilded look he wanted, he was considering having gold leaf applied to the ceiling of his conference room.  Naturally, all the fawning members of his cabinet, shook their heads in agreement, awed by his brilliant decorating acumen.  Trump also snidely brushed off a few questions from the press, appearing really disgusted that one of them had the gall to ask him about the Jeffrey Epstein files. Those are the files that he had repeatedly promised to release upon taking office and that his Attorney General Pam Bondi once said were on her desk undergoing final review but that she and the Kash Patel/Dan Bongino led FBI now say do not exist but if they do they contain nothing worthwhile, most certainly not a list of Epstein’s clients, none of which could possibly have the initials DJT. Conspiracist/power broker Laura Loomer is not happy because she like a number of other MAGAs like Tucker Carlson really want those files released.  For his part, Elon now claims that Steve Bannon is among those named in the mysteriously disappeared files.  Keeping with the nothing to see here theme of the morning, Trump was also dismissive of a question about who at the Pentagon had made the decision to pause military aid to Ukraine. Trump who mused about Putin not being the nice guy he pretends to be, has turned the Ukraine arms spigot back on, at least to a drip, and will now allow some of the anti-missile weaponry that was previously promised and is sitting in Poland awaiting his final approval to be sent Ukraine’s way. Though Trump refused to confirm it, it appears the decision to halt the shipments was made by a fellow named Elbridge Colby, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s policy chief.  Apparently that decision wasn’t shared with Trump before it was implemented.  Then again, maybe it was shared, but got lost among the inadequate gold paint samples because with this nefarious 🤡 car you never know who’s speaking truth and who’s just ducking responsibility.  Anyway, Trump is now focused on more important matters; he’s musing about taking over the day-to-day management of the District of Columbia while also suggesting that if Big Apple voters elect “Marxist” Zohran Mamdani as their mayor in November, he’ll have no choice but to take over NYC too. The global intifada socialist guy or the Mango Maniac, New Yorkers have so much to look forward to.  No one should take Mango Midas’ threat lightly given that a heavily armed contingent of Homeland Security “soldiers,” including a few on horseback, were deployed in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park this week intimidating camp children and anyone else still out about in the heavily immigrant area. Trump is also fully back in tariff mode. He’s sent form letters to dozens of allies, promising to “tax” then.  Among the recipients of his missives is our Southeast Asia ally South Korea. We have a free trade agreement with South Korea, but for Trump that’s just an inconvenient detail to be ignored. And of course, despite Trump’s insistence otherwise, tariffs are paid by US importers who then pass them on to US consumers so they are regressive taxes on all of us, including those who will soon be losing their health care and food supplements.  Anyway, Trump’s got another tariff deadline, in response to being called a TACO again, he insists it’s for real and the markets, particularly the bond markets aren’t happy because while tariffs are bigly bad, uncertainty is worse.

Musk Madness:  Musk spent $277 million helping to elect Trump and then doubled down by DOGE-ing the government, badly according to Trump who says he would have Doged better and given yesterday’s SCOTUS decision that he can fire lots more government employees he probably will. Furious that what he got for those efforts was a big ugly spending bill that defunds clean energy, pushes coal and other fossil fuels while taking away tax credits for electric vehicles and adding to the deficit he so abhors, Musk has now pivoted to creating a third political party. It’s not clear that Musk’s third-party plans will go far but money speaks and despite Tesla’s diminishing sales he still has scads of it and may soon have even more given reports that his valuable SpaceX company is in talks to raise more money so the usual suspects, including erstwhile presidential candidate Andrew Yang, appear interested in signing on. Yang may want to reconsider tying his fortune to Musk because though Musk may no longer be on the MAGA train, as evidenced by the hateful messages coming out of his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok which is incorporated into X (Twitter), he’s still all-in on hate. In response to Musk’s concern that the prior version of Grok had grown too politically correct, a retooled or as they say in AI land retrained, version was released into X over the weekend. The new version praised Hitler and shared anti-Semitic tropes, blaming people with Ashkenazic sounding names for “cheering tragedies or pushing anti-white narratives” and claiming that Jews control the government. On Tuesday evening in response to alarm from some users, X’s Grok account posted: “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.” Even later on Tuesday evening Grok appeared to stop posting altogether.  Apparently, while you can take a bigot out of Trump’s orbit, you can’t take his bigotry out of his soul. Anyone still on the Musk bandwagon should jump off ASAP.

Fog: Bibi Netanyahu visited Trump again, still no Gaza deal, still no hostage release but Bibi probably accrued some more Trump points by bringing along a letter nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. Ugh.     

#BringThemAllHomeNow