Earworms 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Ukraine 🌻🌻:  A number of pundits reported that though Trump’s staff and advisors tried to spin Trump’s cockamamie summit with Putin as a diplomatic triumph, most of them emerged “ashen and “wide eyed” from the meeting which goes a long way to explaining why the who’s who of European leaders dropped everything to attend Trump’s follow-on meeting with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy who wore a more polished than usual get up to placate people who care about such things.  The Europeans’ collective appearance combined with a whole lot of cajoling and golf bonding appears to have righted the Ukraine ship, at least for now, mostly moving Trump, cankles and all,  back to pushing for a ceasefire as well as some security assurances for Ukraine.  However, as indicated Trump’s bizarre caught on a hot mic comment to France’s Macron that Putin “wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand that…. As crazy as it sounds," it probably won’t take much more than a midnight call from Vlad to get Trump to alter his position because as he noted, the idea of Putin wanting to keep him happy is crazy especially when you consider that Putin is still dropping lethal bombs and taking out residential buildings and shows little interest in moving off his demands for even more of Ukraine than he’s managed to occupy.  As to Zelenskyy, he’s right to question Trump’s support and Putin’s intentions because back in 1994, in what’s referred to as the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave its nuclear arsenal to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, UK, France, and China and we know how that turned out. 

Midterm Madness: During their weekend meet-up, perhaps during their unprecedented one-on-one in Trump’s armored “beast,” Putin whispered some sweet nothings into Trump’s ear, maybe even implanting an earworm, telling him that he too believed that the 2020 election really was rigged and that voting machines and mail-in voting were to blame.  Then on Monday Newsmax revealed that it had agreed to pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems, the company that received a $787 million settlement from the much larger Fox, to settle its defamation lawsuit over Newsmax’ airing of false claims that the 2020 election was rigged by its voting machines. So, naturally with Putin’s remarks looping through his brain, and Newsmax coughing up cash Trump, took to his Truth Social bully pulpit to announce his intention to sign an executive order “to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots” while ending the use of “Very Expensive and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” Elections are run by states so it’s not clear that he can do either.  It’s also not clear that a lot of Republican officials would want him to do so since many of those using mail-in ballots are the same Republican voters they encouraged to vote by mail. Notably, Trump is one of those Republicans who has a history of voting by mail. The more likely takeaways from Trump’s most recent madness is that he’s still and always will be smarting from his 2020 loss to Biden, he’s doing all he can to divert from the Epstein affair, and he’s scared shxtless about the midterms, doing all he can to disrupt and cheat his way through what he fears, without his interference, will be a loss of the House and maybe even of a few critical Senate seats 🙏 🙏.  One person who knows a lot about his desperation is Democratic Texas Representative Nicole Collier who has been forced to stay and sleep on the floor of the Texas House over her refusal to sign an agreement allowing a Texas Department of Public Safety official to shadow her to make sure she appears back in the House on command for the redistricting/gerrymandering vote. As to the Epstein affair, former AG Bill Barr testified this week, nice but kind of pointless because though he was running the DOJ when Epstein died, he wasn’t around when Epstein committed all his sex crimes.  Supposedly, the DOJ will start to release its millions of pages of files, not to be confused with the much thinner, less revealing Grand Jury testimony which a judge has ruled against releasing, by the end of the week, assuming the pages don’t get eaten by a pack of Siberian Huskies or shipped off to Moscow.  Also, in case you missed it the current MAGA position is that slavery wasn’t really all that bad which is the reason that Trump has commanded the Smithsonian to alter its exhibits.  And up is down and left is right.

Human Resources:  Dan Bongino, the podcaster who threatened to resign from his position as Deputy Director of the FBI over the Epstein affair hasn’t resigned but he may have just been shunted off to the side because yesterday the White House announced the appointment of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as Deputy Director of the FBI. That’s two people doing the job of one person, something that seems to violate that rationale behind all that DOGE stuff.  Also, DNI Tulsi Gabbard who Hillary Clinton warned was a favorite of the Russians, revoked the security clearances of 37 professionals yesterday, some of whom still work in government and most of whom have had something to do with Russia.  Could it be that the earworm that Putin stuck in Trump’s ear directed him to do more than just get rid of mail-in ballots and ballot counting machines?    

Fog:  Lots of talk but still no agreement on a Gaza ceasefire.  Supposedly Hamas has agreed to release some but not all of the hostages, but Israel is threatening to take over Gaza City if they aren’t all released. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow