Bad Santa? 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🎆 🎇

🎅🎄: Trump began his Mar a Lago Christmas festivities with some of his not so traditional calls to children, telling the kids who he had earlier warned would have to live with fewer pencils and dolls that getting coal in their stockings would be a good thing and that it was important that we “make sure that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.”.  He then spent the wee hours of Christmas Eve posting frantically on Truth Social.  Among his 100 posts were quite a few that repeated that the election had been stolen in 2020.  He called the Democratic Party a criminal organization and all of its member scum.  He applauded Press Secretary Karoline “lips” Leavitt’s handling of the “fake news” while calling for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to be deported.  He followed a post about the religious meaning of the holiday with one that said “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT.”  Ironically, he was one of those who loved Epstein and dropped him when he grew too HOT.  He also called for the DOJ to go after all the Democrats who had any association with Epstein, preferably while ignoring all the evidence of his friendship with the pedophile.  In one of his final X-Mas posts he said: “Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!” Sadly, we’ve gotten used to Trump’s demented messaging.  We shouldn’t, because they are both evil and bonkers.  He goes further off the rails every day, and lest we forget, he’s not quite one year into this term and he controls the nukes.

Spreading Good Will?  While Trump didn’t drop any nukes this weekend, he did continue threatening Venezuela while blowing a few more “drug” boats and their crews out of the water and “diverting” more oil tankers.  He also bombed ISIS targets in Nigeria and in Syria, all the things that Nobel Peace prize seekers generally don’t do, but most certainly avoid doing over the Christmas holidays.  Via the NY Times, we learned a bit more about Trump’s Venezuela strategy. In summary, Trump has sidelined a lot of experts and is instead relying on the advice of Pete Hegseth, the one-time Fox weekend anchor whose chief qualification for his Secretary of War position is how he looks on camera and that he'll tell Trump whatever he wants to hear; Stephen Miller, a guy so totally blinded by his hate of immigrants that he doesn’t realize that creating more turmoil within Venezuela will result in more refugees seeking asylum; a weak and complicit Department of Justice whose Attorney General Pam Bondi is more than willing to opine that extrajudicial killings and war without authorization are okay even when they aren’t; and Secretary of State/presidential aspirant Marco Rubio, the man of many jobs who was supposed to be the adult in the room but whose advice is driven by long term personal and politically convenient animus against Cuba and Venezuela. Those advisors combined with Trump’s coveting of Venezuela’s oil and mineral reserves, have us pushing for regime change and teetering on the precipice of war. As to war, Trump who didn’t manage to resolve the Ukraine-Russia war on day one is still trying, that’s not a bad thing, it’s just that his motives and capabilities are questionable. Yesterday, after having what he described as a very good phone call with his peace seeking buddy Putin who despite bombing the bejesus out of Kyiv on Christmas weekend insists that he wants only the best for Ukraine, Trump met with Ukraine President Zelenskyy at Mar a Lago.  Trump keeps insisting that peace is near, Putin keeps bombing and insisting that peace will only happen when he gets all the land he wants, and Zelenskyy, he’s trying to hold on. The Ukraine leader is clearly aware that Trump’s motivations are less than pure, that the orange king is heavily influenced by his calls with Putin which conveniently seem to take place moments before his visits and calls with him and that Trump sees everything through a cracked and distorted Nobel Peace Prize lens.  Trump says the talks were productive but that negotiations are complicated and uttered something about going to Ukraine to convince its people to vote to give up the land they’ve been fighting to keep.  The pundits say that peace is not at hand, that there are no agreements on security guarantees and no Western partners, the US included, willing to pledge anything strong enough to deter Russia and convince Ukraine to concede land, soldiers, or anything else. Zelenskyy looks war weary and exhausted.  Worth noting, now both of Nappy Trump’s hands are sporting concealer.  

More💩: It turns out that what we suspected all along is true.  Elon Musk’s DOGE didn’t result in cost savings.  Federal expenditures went up, not down.  The contracts that DOGE supposedly cut, were either cut before Trump became president or were never actually cut.  Musk and DOGE engaged in lots of deception, claiming those fictional budget cuts either because they made lots of errors or because they were intentionally lying to us. Though those DOGE cuts did have a negative impact on crucial foreign health care aid, the NY Times reports that the cuts “amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.” On a human-resources note, Press Secretary Leavitt announced her pregnancy, she’s due in May.  Lara Trump assures all of us that Leavitt won’t miss a beat and will be back at work within days of delivery.  She noted that Leavitt returned less than a week after she had her first child.  It’s far from clear why Lara thinks that Leavitt returning moments after delivery would be a good thing for Leavitt, her baby, or us.  Late on Friday, the DOJ announced that they had just learned that there were about 1 million more Epstein files in the hands of the SDNY.  That means that the drip, drip of Epstein news will continue over an even more protracted period of time because the Justice Department has to subject those found files to more redacting of all things Trump and highlighting of all things related to Democrats and other Trump enemies.  The White House is not happy with the way that Pam Bondi has handled the Epstein files debacle. Trump’s solution is to move messaging about the files away from the DOJ to the White House’s communication team which means that there will be lots of name calling and nastiness directed at any member of the press who asks any questions about Trump’s ties to Epstein and Maxwell. And lastly, if you missed the 60 Minutes episode on the migrants shipped to CECOT, the truly deplorable gulag in El Salvador, no worries.  The segment, worth a watch, is all over the Internet, thanks to our Canadian neighbors because CBS failed to message its Canadian affiliates in a timely manner that it had been “cancelled.”  Oh Canada.