Calling Warner Wolf 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Trump Taj Mahal: Trump’s casinos have all gone belly-up but, apparently, he still likes gambling so he went to one in the Pennsylvania Poconos last night to brag about how well the economy is doing.  The rally was because his Chief of Staff-Ice Maiden Susie Wiles, who he called Susie Trump, told him that he needs to get back on the campaign trail or face more truly dreadful, for him, not the rest of us, election results. He stuck to the script on his teleprompter for a few minutes asserting that inflation and prices are way down. Then he went rogue, attacking and blaming “autopen” Biden for everything bad, trashing Black Somali immigrants, questioning why more Scandinavians don’t move here, calling those who criticize his international jaunts stupid, bragging about the zillions of dollars of tariffs he’s collected including the $12 billion he now plans to hand to the farmers who need to be bailed out because of those tariffs, and calling affordability concerns a hoax perpetrated by evil Democrats. There was also a nonsensical riff on school children needing fewer lead pencils, a variation on girls needing less dolls. Some in the crowd bought what he was selling, no surprise because why else would they have shown up, but as evidenced by the results of two more elections, one in Miami and the other in Georgia, fewer voters are buying his shtick. With 59% of the vote, Democrat Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami. She is the first Democrat to win the city’s mayorship in 28 years. Her Republican opponent, Emilio González, was endorsed by both Trump and Ron DeSantis.  In the Athens area of Georgia, Democrat Eric Eisler eked out a victory in a special election for a state house seat. The retired Republican he replaced had previously won the seat with 60% of the vote. Maybe it was the news about those election results that spun Trump out of control, or maybe he is just in a permanent state of crazy, but last night after returning from Pennsylvania he posted a very lengthy and loonier than ever message on Truth Social in which he said no president has ever worked as hard as him, stopped as many wars, created the “Greatest Economy in the History of the Country,” and so on before launching into a diatribe about how healthy he is, how no one has taken and scored such high scores on as many medical and mental acuity tests as he has.  He then said that anyone who comments on his health, especially those NY Times reporters and editors who have are  “true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.”  Though he didn’t call for anyone at the NY Times to be shot at sunrise he did say the “horrible, biased, and untruthful” paper should cease publication. We don’t know if Dr Twitter is right about him taking medication for Alzheimer’s, but he sure seems to be exhibiting paranoia, one of the signs of the dreaded disease. And yes, he’s still president weighing in on media mergers and tossing Europe and Ukraine to the Russian bear.

Let’s Go to the Videotape: Last week Trump said that he’d be okay with the Pentagon releasing the tape of what is now known as the “double tap” incident, but what should more accurately be called evidence of the extrajudicial killing of two alleged drug runners who to the extent that they were running drugs were transporting cocaine rather than fentanyl to Suriname, a country near Venezuela, rather than the US. Having either forgotten about his earlier statement or just totally annoyed that everyone else hasn’t, he denied ever saying he’d have no problem releasing the full video,  lashing out at ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, another Black woman if anyone is counting, calling her “the most obnoxious,” and her assertion “fake news” after she asked whether his administration would commit to releasing the tape. Emboldened by Trump’s remarks, Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth now insists that the Pentagon needs more time to evaluate the “double tap” tape to ensure that it doesn’t reveal anything about our super-secret strike capability, an odd assertion from a guy who shared top secret intel on a Signal chat with a journalist, some friends, and all the foreign adversaries listening in.  The boat video isn’t the only evidence haunting members of the Trump administration; there’s also the Fox News program where Hegseth went on and on about how members of the military should never follow illegal orders as well as a brief written by Attorney General Pam Bondi in which she echoes what the six “seditionist” Democratic lawmakers said about how military officers should not follow unlawful orders.  Awkward and likely a problem if she decides to move forward with the prosecution of any of the targeted Democrats. If she does move forward maybe she can get Alina Habba to help her out.  Habba resigned from her position as New Jersey’s faux Interim US Attorney and is now serving as Bondi’s senior advisor.  At least that’s what she’s doing for now, Bondi is still trying to get the decision that left her twiddling her thumbs in NJ overturned. As to Hegseth, he may be spending more time in Washington since House legislators have stuck a provision in the defense authorization legislation that cuts his travel budget until he releases the “double tap” tape which could mean that he’ll miss the opportunity to do pull ups with RFK and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy who want more exercise sites at airports, not more air traffic controllers, just more pull-up bars.  And who doesn’t want to sit next to a sweaty traveler, even one in Duffy mandated professional attire.  

More 💩: ProPublica reports that in 1993 Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence. He’s never resided in either.  Both houses are used as rental properties.  Lisa Cook and Tish James would like to have a word. 😊  How is it that Trump is so frequently guilty of the “crimes” he accuses other of committing?