TACO Time Again🐔 🌮😱 ✡️🌻😱 🌮 🐔

🌮 🐔:  Trump chickened 🐔 out again. He spent the weekend attacking and un-endorsing Marjorie Taylor Greene, threatening to do the same to anyone else who votes for the release of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files while directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an investigation into President Clinton, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers all of whom were mentioned in the Epstein estate emails though none were mentioned in the context of sexcapades.  Then late on Sunday, Trump pulled a TACO, telling House Republicans to vote in support of the Epstein file release.  Quite a turnaround given his insistence that the Epstein affair is a hoax perpetrated by his Democratic enemies, those people he called ”Radical Left Lunatics” in his social media post where he directed House Republicans to support the file release.  Trump really hasn’t changed his mind, he still fears the files so diversions like war with Venezuela and the “testing” of nukes lie ahead but with the House vote expected to take place on Tuesday more or less a fait accompli and the growing likelihood that a “jailbreak” was about to happen meaning that upwards of one hundred House Republicans are likely to join all Democrats in voting for the file release, he felt cornered.  A few cautions, if Trump really wanted to facilitate the file release, he could just direct Pam Bondi to do it, he doesn’t need the House and then the Senate, which still hasn’t committed to act, to vote on the files. Also, his direction to the House includes a caveat for Bondi to release what she deems appropriate and while that could just mean making sure that victims’ names are redacted, it could also be a veiled direction to pull a Rosemary Woods as in the Nixon secretary who erased 18 minutes of implicating tapes. And who doesn’t believe that Trump intends to pardon Bondi, as well as the rest of the miscreants in his administration before he leaves office, if he ever leaves.  On the subject of pardons, Trump issued a few more to some more undeserving people this weekend including a January 6^th rioter whose trove of unlicensed guns led to his rearrest and another who is a known fraudster.  Also, because he always attacks others for doing what he does, his staff had him re-execute some of his earlier pardons because they were initially signed using an autopen, the device that he asserts disqualifies all of Biden’s executive orders and pardons.

🌮 🐔 🌮:  Trump didn’t just TACO on the Epstein tapes, he also pulled another tariff TACO.  Though he still insists that he’s brought the price of groceries down to levels never before seen he hasn’t and he knows it as do consumers who know when they have to cut back and/or purchase lower quality meat or just settle for more beans so on Friday he signed an executive order retroactively lowering tariffs on beef, tomatoes, coffee and bananas, as well as some other agricultural imports.  That’s progress in the right direction, but tariffs on lots of other products, including the components needed for housing construction remain.  Additionally cutting tariffs now won’t immediately translate into price reductions to consumers so those holiday meals will still cost more than they did last year.  Also, some of those tariffs were beyond nonsensical to begin with because tariffs were never going to lead to US grown bananas or more US coffee.  Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Treasury Secretary Bessent who knows better, spent part of his weekend sticking with the assertion that tariffs don’t increase consumers prices which begs the question why did tariff aficionado Trump decide he needed to lower them to get prices down?  Bessent also blamed higher meat prices on “illegal” migrants crossing the border with herds of their diseased cattle. Funny how even Fox doesn’t have video of that happening.  As to undocumented people, calling her newest invasion/round-up in Charlotte, North Carolina Charlotte’s Web, Kristi Noem had her INS troops invade another Democratic enclave this weekend because having them parachute into Chicago wasn’t enough. How cute to name the rounding up of brown people after a children’s book but maybe just a bit better than Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth’s naming choices. His NSFW choices include Operation Southern Spear, Operation Rough Rider, and Operation Midnight Hammer.  I guess we now know what he watches in his hotel rooms. Turning back to Ice Barbie Kristi, according to ProPublica, she spent more than $200 million on a television ad campaign intended to scare away undocumented workers.  A large part of that ad work was awarded, non-competitively, to a firm with close ties to a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides, not that you’d know that by looking at public documents since the firm’s name is intentionally obfuscated.  Noem is another one who is relying on getting a Trump pardon or a Thousand Year Reich.

More 💩:  Trump’s redistricting directives aren’t working as planned.  Since California’s voter approved redistricting has more or less neutralized his Texas seat pick-up, he now has the DOJ suing the Golden State.  Of course, he has no problem with Texas’ redistricting even though it was done without voter sign off.  His attempt to pick up a seat in Utah has been thrown off course by a state court’s ruling that rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map, instead approving an alternative map that creates a new, likely Democratic-leaning district. Not a lot of joy out of Indiana either where despite his intense lobbying Republican state legislators have so far refused to move forward with his plan to eliminate Democratic seats.  No surprise that Trump isn’t taking their decision lying down, he’s now calling for the ousting of the Indiana Republicans who are stymying his plans.  Though Trump pardoned those who participated in the various fake elector schemes, it’s unlikely that his pardons affect state prosecutions which is a bit of a problem for those being prosecuted in Georgia where a replacement for Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis has been appointed and in Nevada where the fake elector cases has been “revived” by the court.    

Parting Message:  Don’t buy into Margie Q being reformed.  Though she does deserve credit for standing by Epstein’s victims, she’s already trying to get back into Trump’s good graces by saying that she still adores him just disagrees on the Epstein front.  Also, when asked this weekend, she refused to criticize Tucker Carlson for hosting white supremacist/anti-Semite Nick Fuentes saying that Fuentes and presumably Carlson are entitled to air their opinions because after all what’s a little Holocaust denial and hate speech among MAGA friends.  Again, anti-Semitism is a both sides problem.