Who's Next? 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🚤

First They Came For:  In his famous poem Martin Niemoller warned “against apathy and silence in the face of injustice” by listing all of the groups that were demonized and then hauled off in the years leading up to the Holocaust while he failed to speak out. It’s fair to assume that Trump is unfamiliar with Niemoller’s writings because reading and history aren’t his things. It’s also fair to assume that if he were familiar with the poem he’d see it as a step-by-step instruction manual. With the help of junior Goebbels Stephen Miller, whose family knows all about what happened during the Holocaust, Trump’s been going after brown people and during the 2024 campaign he went after Ohio’s Haitians, accusing them of eating cats.  This week Trump’s moved on to demonizing Minnesota’s Somali immigrant population. It’s not clear if he’s targeted the Somalis because Minnesota Governor Walz has gotten under his skin, most recently by pushing him to release the results of his latest MRI, or whether it’s because he despises Somali born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, or maybe it’s just because the Somalis are Black and Muslim without oil money to throw his way. Yes, there’s been recent news about some members of the Somali community engaging in benefits related corruption but, as evidenced by many of the pardons he keeps handing out like candy, corruption doesn’t seem to bother Trump when it’s committed by his supporters and people with open wallets so it’s more than likely it’s not the corruption but the that the Somalis are not white, not MAGA, and from one of those 💩hole countries he frequently rants about.  So don’t turn your eyes away, don’t be silent, anyone of us could be next. On a more conspiratorial note, also don’t miss that he’s got his team spinning stories about the not so normal string of “routine” MRIs that Governor Walz queried.  Noting that his hand is once again camouflaged, this time with make-up and flesh colored band-aids, Dr Twitter, who attended the Medical School of fanciful thinking with Dr Google posits that Trump could be getting monthly infusions of Leqembi, a drug used to treat early Alzheimer’s. It’s recommended that patients on the drug undergo multiple MRI scans. That could explain Trump’s increasingly irrational behavior and frequent nodding off during press conferences but then again, he’s long been irrational and hate-filled so there’s that. 🤷‍♀️

Cabinetry:  So, it turns out then when you pick a cabinet based on their fealty and how “hot” they look during Fox appearances, you get a cabinet full of unqualified incompetents with camera ready hair.  Trump is now playing whack-a-mole, trying to fend off accusations against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, FBI Chief Kash Patel, ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Health Secretary RFK, to name a few.  Yesterday, a select group of Senators and Congresspeople saw the video of the September 2 sinking of the alleged “narco-terrorist” boat while also hearing from Admiral Bradley, the Naval officer who ran the operation, or at least ran it enough to be left holding Trump and Hegseth’s blame bag. Notably Bradley was the Admiral du jour because Hegseth forced his predecessor, Admiral Alvin Holsey to resign for pushing back against the boat attacks. Republican viewers of the video like Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton are going with the “it wasn’t so bad” because extra judicial killing of drug smugglers is okay even when it falls into war crime territory.  Democrats, not so much.  Connecticut Congressman Jim Hines says that the video, particularly the killing of the two hanging on to the shreds of their boat, was the worst thing he’s ever seen.  Hines and a number of others, mostly Democrats, want the video to be shown to everyone in Congress as well as all of us.  Trump says that he does too but then again, we still haven’t seen the Epstein files so take what he says with a grain of sea salt. Whether or not Hegseth ordered the killing of all the boat’s occupants or not, the whole operation as well as the killing of at least 87 other alleged drug smugglers on a total of 23 vessels may all be illegal because we are not at war and anyway if we are, the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual forbids the killing of shipwrecked personnel or the targeting of enemy combatants who are unable to fight. The September 2 “double-tap” is only one of Hegseth’s problems.  Yesterday, the contents of the Pentagon’s Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins report on Hegseth’s inappropriate Signal chat, the one that The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally invited into, was revealed. In short, Hegseth’s actions “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed US mission objectives and potential harm to US pilots” because he sent information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned US aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved unsecure network. Naturally, Hegseth who refused to provide his phone or to otherwise cooperate with the IG’s investigation leaving the IG to rely on Jeffrey Goldberg’s transcripts of the Signal chat said that he was fully exonerated.  He wasn’t. That said he’s still Secretary of War and Beer and it’s not a stretch to believe that Acting IG Stebbins will soon be out of a job.

The Other 🦫s:  Kash Patel who has come under a lot of criticism of late for flying his girlfriend around and otherwise mismanaging the FBI may have earned himself a reprieve yesterday by announcing the arrest of the person believed to have left the pipe bombs outside of the RNC and DNC on January 6, 2021.  He used the opportunity to attack all things Biden by pointing out that his predecessor, the Trump appointed Chris Wray, had failed to accomplish what he had accomplished in less than one year.  He has a point but then again Wray was kind of busy investigating and arresting those who’d attacked the Capitol on that fateful day, the gun carrying, pole swinging, Auschwitz t-shirt wearing miscreants who have since been pardoned because they unlike the alleged bomber were only tourists. Also, as any watcher of Dateline can attest, sometimes it takes years to put all the incriminating details together.  Kind of interesting that Patel’s announcement came during what was otherwise a bad news week for Trump. Attorney General Bondi also participated in Patel’s press conference but then her day went downhill after a Virginia  Grand Jury failed to indict New York Attorney General Tish James, this time faux US Attorney Lindsey Halligan wasn’t involved.  It’s not clear if Bondi will try again though Trump will probably push her to because retribution. As to ICE Barbie Noem, who could have guessed, that her rushed efforts to hire 10,000 INS officials isn’t turning out all that well.  Apparently, her new recruits haven’t been adequately vetted, many can’t read, are unfit, including my favorite a 469-pound guy whose own doctor declared him unfit for physical activity, and a few have even been caught physically accosting their female team members.  And, despite his promise to Louisiana Senator Cassidy, the doctor who should have known better than to believe him, RFK Jr is about to disrupt vaccine schedules.  People will die but RFK is okay with that because he believes in raw milk, Vitamin A, ivermectin, and survival of the fittest.    

Other 💩:  There was some good news for Republicans on the redistricting trail.  Yesterday, the Supreme Court which appears ready to rule that racial gerrymandering is cool said that Texas can move forward using its new maps, the ones that have been drawn to disenfranchise Democrat voting people of color.  The perhaps not so good news for Texas is that if the results of this week’s Tennessee election are any indication, some of Texas’s previously safe Republican districts could now be ripe for flipping.  One district that Republicans hoped to win, the one currently represented by Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar will likely remain in Democratic hands.  Cuellar and his wife had been indicted on bribery and   

Money laundering charges by Biden’s DOJ but is now the beneficiary of a Trump pardon. Cuellar thanked Trump but then immediately announced he was running for reelection as a Democrat something that makes Hakeem Jeffries happy but left the Mike Johnson just a wee bit aghast because he’d been counting on winning Cuellar’s district with a new candidate or with a “converted” to Republican Cuellar. Johnson has been facing lots of push back from members of his party including NY’s Elise Stefanik who has attacked his inept leadership.  Stefanik who is hoping to snag the Republican nomination to run against NY Governor Kathy Hochul has had a hard year.  First Trump pulled her UN Ambassador nomination away moments before her confirmation vote because he needed her to stay in the House to vote for his Big Ugly Bill, then while she was ramping up her run for Governor by attacking NY Mayor-elect Mamdani he bearhugged the “anti-Semitic” “socialist” (her words). She might now be positioning herself to take over Johnson’s spot, a consolation prize if her run for governor doesn’t work out. Stefanik isn’t Johnson’s only problem, a number of other Republican Congresswomen are not happy with him, something about him not being all that into promoting female colleagues who he’d prefer to see at home playing tradwives. South Carolina’s Nancy Mace who is not planning to run for reelection because she like Stefanik is running for governor is now threatening to join Margie Q by quitting in January. Then again, Mace is erratic so her plans may not be set in stone.