When Your Friends Are Sex Offenders....... 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Money, Money,💰: Trump’s super PAC has raised $200 million for the midterms, a huge amount for a term limited president. This week Trump also announced plans to add a 90,000 square foot ball room with room for 650 revelers to the East Wing of the White House which he says will be funded by donors, including himself, not that he ever really makes good on his💰commitments.  A paranoid person might conclude that he’s paving the way to stick around past 2028, term limits be damned.  That ball room, like the Qatari plane that has now been formally gifted won’t be ready for a while, and the MAGA mega ballroom will be causing a whole lot of construction disruption even forcing the “temporary” move of Melania’s office, hardly worth the pain for a shorter stay except for the Melania part because it’s not like she spends much time at the White House anyway. As to the $200 million, Trump has already dedicated some of his haul towards making Republican thorn in his side Thomas Massie’s life miserable and at least for now the only thing holding him back from doing the same to Maine’s Susan Collins are warnings that a replacement candidate to her right would find winning in Maine near impossible. Trump won’t be able to take the ballroom with him, but should he ever leave it looks like, he’ll be able to take the plane, and Trump being Trump, don’t be surprised if he gets funding for its maintenance and fuel written into his separation agreement, assuming he ever needs one. Also on the money front, a Senate committee on Wednesday approved legislation that would bar members of Congress, the president and the vice president from trading stocks, after Missouri’s Josh Hawley, its Republican sponsor, changed the bill to ensure that a divestment requirement included in the measure would not apply to Trump. Hawley was the only Republican to support the bill and, despite being its sponsor, he carved out Trump and Veep Vance after Trump publicly called him a pawn and a second- tier senator for having the nerve to do anything that could impact his personal enrichment.

Redistricting:  Another indication that Trump is all in on sticking around, or at least, making sure that his final two years in office are less painful than the two that resulted with two impeachments, is his push for redistricting, a devious method of insuring continued Republican control of the House to counter the expectation that the party will lose the House in 2026 because the party in power usually loses seats and because Trump’s policies, particularly the cuts in health care, are proving to be very unpopular. Texas Republicans are moving forward with a new map that eliminates five Democratic seats by scrunching as many Democrats into as few districts as possible.  It’s not just, Texas, Republicans are also considering redistricting in Missouri, Florida, Indian, and Ohio where Jim “Gym” Jordan’s district is already one of the most peculiar looking gerrymandered districts in the country.  In response Democrats are looking into countering in California, New York, Maryland, Illinois and New Jerey.  To state the obvious, this isn’t how democracies are supposed to work. As to those impeachments, maybe they didn’t really happen.  Or at least that’s what the Smithsonian now wants us to believe,  the museum has “temporarily” removed reference to Trump’s two impeachments from their impeachment exhibit.  Rewriting history is one of those things that countries do as they move towards becoming autocracies. Renaming national treasures too, so don’t be surprised when the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts becomes the Donald and Melania wrestling hall.     

Epstein, Epstein:  Not much new to report on the Epstein front this morning except that, as expected, Virginia Giuffre’s family is horrified by Trump’s remarks that she was stolen from his “world class” Mar a Lago spa by that Epstein guy who he hardly knew.  They see those remarks as an admission that Trump, who two years prior to the snatch admired Epstein’s preference for young “women,” knew what Epstein and his procurer/co-conspirator Maxwell planned to do with her. They were also likely less than impressed by former linebacker/registered sex offender Lawrence Taylor’s presence at Trump’s ceremonial announcement that he’s bringing back the Presidential Fitness Test, for us not him because cankles. It’s fair to assume at this point that by including Taylor who committed statutory rape when he had sex with an underage girl, Trump is trolling us and/or that he has no friends who aren’t sex offenders.   

Tariffs, Tariffs, WTF:  The equity markets which have been amazingly resilient, assuming you are comfortable ignoring the 11% drop in the value of the dollar, are expected to be skittish this morning.  That’s because last night Trump went all in on tariffs in a big way, announcing plans to set new tariff rates, ranging from 10 to 41 percent, for imports from a wide range of countries. The new tariffs are scheduled to commence at 12:01 a.m. on August 7, except for the 35% tariffs on Canada which are set to go into effect immediately, something to do with all that fentanyl which doesn’t come in from our northern neighbor, but that Trump keeps using as a justification for his irrational punishment. The 🍊 😜 🤴 really has it out for Canada, either because he’s still trying to force them into becoming our 51^st state, presumably one without voting powers or electoral college votes, or because he’s still mad at former Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau who depending on the day, he may not remember is no longer in power. The separated Trudeau, who was last seen hanging out with the newly single Katy Perry seems unperturbed, but current Prime Minister Mark Carney seems rightfully stressed.   

Fog:  Add Canada to the growing list of countries planning to recognize Palestine as a country to punish Israel and Netanyahu.  Also, Slovenia, a country of about 2 million people, which exports less than $25 million of military equipment announced that it will ban sales to Israel.  That’s more symbolic than anything else but also a sentiment supported in one form or another by 27 Democratic Senators. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Everything Envoy Witkoff are off to Gaza today to check out the humanitarian crisis, the one that curiously impacts everyone in Gaza except for members of Hamas.  In other news, yesterday members of the Arab League unanimously called for Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all hostages and end its rule of the Gaza Strip, conditions that they said could help the establishment of a Palestinian state. Good luck with that.

#BringThemAllHomeNow