When I saw a headline this morning saying that a judge had blocked ICE from re-detaining Abrego Garcia, I thought I was seeing something left over from yesterday. But no, this happened very early this morning. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia to be released yesterday. And he was. But then ICE directed him to report to its Baltimore office at 8 am this morning. Fearing that ICE planned to re-detain him, his lawyer went to Judge Xinis and got a restraining order against ICE. And, it turns out that ICE really did intend to re-detain the poor guy. Get this:

The basis of Xinis’ order to release Abrego Garcia was that ICE had never issued an order of removal against him — itself an extraordinary development because his wrongful deportation in March to El Salvador and his subsequent detention since he was returned to the United States were entirely predicated on the supposed issuance of an order of removal in 2019.

After Xinis ruled Thursday morning that no such order of removal existed, Philip P. Taylor, the acting regional deputy chief immigration judge in Baltimore, rushed out a new order around 7 p.m. ET that purported to fix the “scrivener’s error” in ICE’s records on Abrego Garcia and retroactively create an order of removal. Taylor’s order was comically subtitled: “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error.”

Taylor’s sudden intervention is procedurally flawed in myriad ways, but that didn’t stop him from purporting to make a number of “corrections” to the record in Abrego Garcia’s 2019 case, waving it all away with a breezy: “These corrections are hereby issued nunc pro tunc to the Immigration Court’s written decision and order of October 10, 2019.”

Judge Xinis was not impressed. Seriously, read the whole thing. But this comes back to why are they so obsessed with this one man? If ICE had just retrieved him from detention when it was first ordered to, most of us would have moved on to more recent atrocities. It appears ICE — and the Trump Administration — simply cannot admit it made a mistake to arrest him in the first place. This is pathological.

Along these lines, see Greg Sargent at The New Republic. Black and Latino voters are shifting hard against Trump, Sargent writes, because they are turned off by his naked bigotry. Sargent is talking to William Saletan, who has a piece at The Bulwark documenting the uglier things Trump has said about immigrants in recent days. This is worth checking out. But for now I want to point to this one bit —

Trump and Stephen Miller really thought they could test-run this fascism with shock and awe against immigrants and that voters would actually rally to it. If you recall, Stephen Miller was doing all sorts of very ostentatious things for a while there, like lining the White House driveway with mug shots of Latinos and migrants and that sort of thing.

And it was very clear that they thought that they were going to rally a majority of the country behind the type of agenda you’re talking about: the fully ethnonationalist, openly fascist agenda. But, you know, I think at least politically we’re seeing a surprising backlash to that. 

I’ve been thinking this all along, that Miller and Trump both assumed that they could treat immigrants — and people who look to them like immigrants — like disposable garbage, and most (white, I presume) Americans would approve. I’m sure the hard-core MAGAts approve, but most Americans of all ethnicities and races do not. And I don’t think Trump and his people are yet admitting that the tough guy act is hurting them politically. The Trump/Miller immigration policy is nothing but a reflection of Trump’s and Miller’s sick, ignorant bigotries. They can’t even seem to have processed that they are losing the Latino voters that were critical to Trump’s win in 2024. A year ago people were talking about a permanent realignment of Latinos with the Republican party, but that’s already gone.

I have to mention Rep Seth Magaziner’s (D-Rhode Island) skewering of Kristi Noem in a House hearing yesterday. It was glorious.I understand Noem finally got so rattled she excused herself to go to another meeting that had already been cancelled.

Filed under — “more news that will have Trump posting all night in ALL CAPS” — the National Trust has sued to stop Trump’s ballroom construction. About time.

The lawsuit from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represents the first major legal challenge to Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot addition and is poised to test the limits of his power. The organization argues that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or receive congressional authorization for the project, which Trump has rushed to launch in hopes of completing it before his term ends in 2029.

In other headline news, I see that House Democrats have released a bunch of photos showing Trump and a lot of other famous people — including Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, Alan Dershowitz, the former Prince Andrew, etc. etc., with Epstein. I don’t know that any of it is incriminating.

If anything else significant happens today, I’ll tack it on to this.

Update: I forgot to mention that Trump seems to be even more confused than before about the state-federal thing. Yesterday he pardoned Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of election interference. The problem with that is that Peters was convicted by the state of Colorado, not a federal court, so Trump has no authority to pardon her.  He also issued an executive order to stop states from regulating AI. And states are fully within their rights to ignore his executive order.

Also, too, this afternoon the Department of Justice announced actions against people they think “stole” the 2020 election from Donald Trump. See DOJ sues Georgia county as Trump pushes debunked 2020 election fraud claims

This brings up something William Saletan said in the Greg Sargent piece linked above.

I mean, picture yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes at a Trump rally. You’re looking out over the podium. What are you seeing? You’re seeing mostly a sea of white people, and you’re seeing a sea of white people cheering you as you slur various ethnic minorities, in particular the Somalis lately, right?

So you live in this bubble where everybody agrees with you, and you generally are in denial of polls, although we just had an exception there. So yeah, you’re gonna think that people are voting your way.

And of course, the 2020 election denial itself is about Donald Trump’s inability to accept that outside his bubble, people voted against him, right? That can’t be true. So he thinks this issue is a winner for him. I gotta underscore, Greg, that I am kind of dismayed that there isn’t more of a backlash against this.

It’s hard to know with Trump. He may genuinely believe he rightfully won in 2020. Or, on some fuzzy, subconscious level he may know that Joe Biden got more votes, but he thinks he was entitled to those votes and if he just throws a big enough tantrum the votes will be given to him. And he’s not going to give up as long as he’s breathing.

Here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting. “A bipartisan bill to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies has attracted 16 Republican co-sponsors, according to an official list obtained first by POLITICO.” The group is threatening to use a discharge petition to force a vote on the measure if Moses Mike doesn’t allow it.

The Kiggans-Gottheimer bill would extend enhanced premium tax credits for one year with new income caps and guardrails to crack down on fraud. The bill would also require a vote by July 2026 on other policies designed to reduce Americans’ health insurance premiums.

The bill currently counts the support of a total of 38 members, including Kiggans and Gottheimer. The Republican co-sponsors so far are Reps. Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota of New York; Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez of Florida; Jeff Van Drew and Tom Kean of New Jersey; David Valadao and Kevin Kiley of California; Juan Ciscomani of Arizona; Jeff Hurd of Colorado; Don Bacon of Nebraska; and Monica De La Cruz of Texas.

I see my rep, Mike Lawler, on the list. I’m sure he realizes he doesn’t have a prayer of being re-elected next year if Medicaid tanks. He promised for months he would protect Medicaid, and then he voted for the Big Ugly Bill. People noticed.

The Senate is supposed to vote on two bills today to “fix” the subsidy problem. Neither is expected to pass.

The bill from the Democrats would extend the current subsidies for three years. The Republican bill is the one I wrote about yesterday, in which people under 50 who are losing the subsidy will instead get a whole $1,000 they can put in a Health Savings Account  to help them with out-of-pocket expenses for a whole year, provided they pay for a high-deductible “bronze” account that has thousands of dollars in deductibles. Those from age 50 t0 Medicare age get $1,500.  This will work for people who don’t need medical care, but if you do, you’re screwed. But as I said, neither is expected to pass.

I suppose we can have faint hope that the House bill will get voted on and the Senate will pass the House bill and that Trump would sign it.

See also The Senate is set to vote on 2 rival health plans. Here’s what’s at stake for Americans from the Associated Press. Good backgrounder.

Update: I understand neither bill made it past cloture. So they’re nixed.

In other news — a federal judge has ordered the long-suffering Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be released from ICE custody. See this very good explanation of what’s going on by David Kurtz at TPM — The Cruelest Irony of the Abrego Garcia Case.

Stuff to read — see John Roberts’s Dream Is Finally Coming True by David Daley at The Atlantic. It begins,

In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, the Reagan Justice Department had a goal: preserve the VRA in name only, while rendering it unenforceable in practice. A young John Roberts was the architect of that campaign. He may soon get to finish what he started.

Update update: This just in — Justice Department again fails to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James.  This was the third attempt. I say they’ve struck out. Will Trump make them try again?

Before getting into Trump’s weird speech from last night, I want to note that Democrats pulled off a couple more election upsets yesterday. Miami elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years. And Georgia Democrats picked up a state House seat yesterday. “That’s 25 pickups for Democrats nationwide this year—and zero for Republicans” it says here.

So naturally I’m also reading that Democrats may have a primary problem (some pesky progressives might try to run!) and that Democrats are seen as “too liberal” and “out of touch.” I acknowledge that there are Democratic politicians who are out of touch. But what does “too liberal” even mean? That Dems aren’t racist enough? That they should back off supporting the Bill of Rights? What?

People who are afraid of the word liberal tend to not know what it means. Maybe they need to be taught.  And while fingers are wagging at the Dems to not get too out of hand, the entire Republican Party has turned into a hyper-dystopian episode of The Outer Limits. So tired of this …

On to the weird speech. I didn’t watch the thing but saw bits and pieces. Here’s a sampler, if you can stand to watch it:

If it weren’t for his tariffs, we’d have no steel? Sure. Anyway, the box he’s in is that he can’t admit he is failing. So he simultaneously tells his supporters they’ve got the best economy they ever had and if they don’t like it they can just cut back on spending. Don’t buy your daughters so many dolls, for pity’s sake. Or pencils. You don’t need that many pencils. 

Weird on steroids. I don’t know if he honestly doesn’t understand the cost of living has gone up since he took office, or if he does know and cannot admit it. Either is plausible.

Paul Krugman:

Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approval on his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.

That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.

Trump spoke for 97 minutes last night, but according to news stories most of the speech was an anti-immigrant tirade — he is itching to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar — with a defense of the boat strikes on the side. Because he can’t talk about the economy. Really, he can’t. See also 10 Stupid Moments From Trump’s Pennsylvania Rally and Trump’s return to MAGA rallies is a flop.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress still haven’t settled on what they’re going to do to replace the ACA subsidies. The most effective thing they could do is just continue the subsidies, of course, but they won’t do that. Senate Republicans appear to have settled on a plan to let the ACA subsidies drop to pre-Covid levels. Instead, according to Reuters,

Their bill would authorize up to $1,500 for health savings accounts for individuals earning less than 700% of the federal poverty level. It also would bar the funds from being used for abortion or “gender transition services,” according to a summary released by the two senators. They said the measure also would lower insurance premiums by 11% in 2027 and reduce federal Medicaid funding to states that provide healthcare coverage to “illegal immigrants.”

I read elsewhere that this only goes to people who aren’t getting insurance through employee benefits; Reuters doesn’t make that clear. As I understand it, people under age 50 get $1,000. And yes, that’s that’s an annual payment, although if you don’t spend it all you can roll it over to next year. To receive the money one would then need to be enrolled in a high-deductible “bronze” plan and pay the premiums.

So if you don’t get sick or hit by a bus and can pay the bronze plan premiums, you should be okay. Otherwise …

House Republicans haven’t yet decided what they will do.

Update: This is twisted. See US Wants Five Years of Some Tourists’ Social Media to Enter the Country at Mother Jones.

Update Update: The U.S. has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker of the coast of Venezuela for reasons that are not clear to me. If anyone else understands this, feel free to explain it.

Remember the South Park Underpants Gomes?  Phase one, steal all the underpants. Phase three, profit! The problem is that nobody knows what phase two is supposed to be, or how collecting all the underpants leads to profit. They just have absolute faith it will work.

The Republican Party seems to have an Underpants Gnome problem. There are several news stories out today saying that congressional Republicans are panicking about rising health care and other costs, and they don’t know what to do about them. Politico:

It’s a sad thing to say on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks, but Trump has pretty much killed the safety net of international alliances that came out of World War II.

Last week the White House released its official National Security Strategy.  Some have boiled this down to Make Europe White Again.

Anton Troianovski writes in the New York Times,

The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.

President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.

The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.

The NSS promises to stop “hectoring” authoritarian countries to be more democratic. But apparently it’s okay to hector most of Europe. This is from the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

The NSS is blatantly derisive toward Europe.  … Far more concerning, however, is the NSS chastising Europe for cultural decline. This is particularly ironic, given the rest of the document’s profession that it will not criticize monarchs or interfere in other nations’ sovereign affairs. It also has a stark undertone of anti-migrant sentiment. For example, it complains about “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” citing “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” This should give even President Trump’s most fervent supporters pause. Not only does it misread Europe’s current state, but it leans hard into far-right wing political parties’ talking points. It further suggests that part of the reason for strife with Russia is Europe’s lack of self-confidence, which will come as music to Putin’s ears and nails on a chalkboard for Brussels. The NSS says, “as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat.” That’s because it is an existential threat, Mr. President. Look no further than Russia’s increasingly aggressive strategy of hybrid warfare across the continent.

See also Trump Has Long Disdained Europe’s Elites. Now, It’s Official. by Jason Horowitz at the New York Times.

The Trump administration issued a national security strategy paper this week that called for European nations to take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, indicating that the United States should no longer guarantee Europe’s security. It accused the European Union of stifling “political liberty,” warned that some NATO members risked becoming “majority non-European,” and said the U.S. should align with “patriotic European parties” — code for Europe’s far-right movements.

The blunt, bracing and official nature of the document added injury to incessant insult, making clear to mainstream European leaders that they stand at a strategic crossroads. On a paper stamped with the president’s seal, the trans-Atlantic alliance was being openly denigrated by the superpower across the ocean that has ensured European security in the 80 years since World War II.

On the other hand, New US security strategy aligns with Russia’s vision, Moscow says, according to the BBC. Among other things, the NSS blames the EU for blocking its efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Not Putin for starting the bleeping war and insisting on being rewarded for it.

At The Atlantic, Eliot A. Cohen writes that Trump’s Security Strategy Is Incoherent Babble. See also Unpacking a Trump Twist of the National Security Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR has concerns.

None of this is a surprise, of course. Money is the only measure of value to Trump, and he doesn’t give a hoo-haw about alliances.  I understand there have been noises coming out of the White House recently about ending support for Ukraine. Like Trump ever really supported Ukraine. It’s been obvious all along Putin’s aggression is just fine with Trump. He just wants to know how to make money out of it.

In other news, recently Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, who with his wife had been charged with accepting bribes from foreign governments. I thought this was odd at the time, since Cuellar is a Democrat. But apparently Trump thought he had a deal that Cuellar would switch parties. Politico:

President Donald Trump rebuked Rep. Henry Cuellar on Sunday for a “lack of loyalty,” just days after pardoning the Texas Democrat.

Cuellar, who along with his wife was charged in 2024 with accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities, filed to run for reelection as a Democrat in his battleground South Texas district on Wednesday — the same day he received a pardon from Trump — quelling speculation that the moderate lawmaker intended to switch parties.

“Only a short time after signing the Pardon, Congressman Henry Cuellar announced that he will be ‘running’ for Congress again, in the Great State of Texas … as a Democrat, continuing to work with the same Radical Left Scum that just weeks before wanted him and his wife to spend the rest of their lives in Prison – And probably still do!” Trump wrote in a Sunday morning post to his Truth Social platform.

The Texas Tribune:

Cuellar’s legal controversy began in 2022, during the Biden administration, when the FBI raided his home and office as part of a federal probe investigating the diplomatic practices of Azerbaijan. Cuellar and his wife were indicted by the Department of Justice in 2024 on 12 counts of bribery, conspiracy and money laundering centering the congressman’s alleged acceptance of nearly $600,000 in bribes from the Central Asian country and a Mexican commercial bank. The indictment alleged that the money was laundered through shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar, and that the congressman subsequently pushed policy benefitting Azerbaijani interests. …

…The case had already ensnared two of Cuellar’s political advisers, who pled guilty to conspiring with Cuellar to launder over $200,000 in bribes from a Mexican bank.

I sincerely hope some Democrat is going to primary Cuellar.

NBC News is reporting that the January 6 pipe bomb suspect believed the 2020 election had been stolen.

CNN is reporting that the January 6 pipe bomb suspect believed the 2020 election had been stolen.

Breitbart is reporting that the suspect is Black.

Same old, same old. Now we know why the DoJ crew weren’t talking about motivations yesterday. Or today, for that matter. The truth leaked out. But this has got to be a huge disappointment for MAGA, which fervently believed that “the pipe bombs were an inside job by deep-state law enforcement and intelligence officials intended to discredit the far right” it says here. Nope; the alleged perp is a Trump supporter, albeit a Black one.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino had pushed a theory that the FBI (under Biden) had been hiding the perpetrator. Now he’s disowned that theory. Here is his excuse:

“Listen I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” Bongino said. “That’s clear. And one day I will be back in that space, but that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

Such a hindrance, those fact things.

As to why it took so long to identify a subject — I don’t know. Marcy Wheeler is worth reading on this point. A lot about this is still very murky, seems to me.

I’ve spent a large part of this week straightening out some insurance issues. I believe this is accomplished, but I’m exhausted. I have been attempting to follow all the trouble Pete Hegseth is in. The poor guy was right in the middle of his third excuse/gaslight for why he wasn’t responsible for the “second strike” order, and then the Pentagon Inspector General released the findings of the “Signalgate” investigation.  Yet he still has a job. How much longer, I wonder? It’s up to Trump, unfortunately, and Trump probably thinks Pete’s boat snuff videos are cool and plans to keep him.

But with my flagging energy I do try to imagine where Pete goes next. When the hammer falls maybe Fox News will take him back. But I can’t see many people lining up to hire him. Thirty years from now somebody may spot a seedy, inebriated wreck in a bar someplace and recognize the former SecDef.

And then there’s the SCOTUS. Having greenlit political gerrymandering (see “Supreme Court Just Okayed One Neat Trick to Illegally Gerrymander Your State” by Kate Riga at TPM), now they’ve taken up birthright citizenship and will rule on it for real this time. This is terrifying.

This is from Daily Beast:

President Donald Trump unleashed an early Friday rant where he claimed Democrats were looking to obliterate the Supreme Court in a bizarre social media post. …

… “The Democrats number one policy push is the complete and total OBLITERATION of our great United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote. “They will do this on their very first day in office, through the simple Termination of the Filibuster, SHOULD THEY WIN THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS.”

Trump seems to have forgotten he was calling for an end to the filibuster to end the shutdown just a few weeks ago.

“The Radical Left Democrats are looking at 21 Justices, with immediate ascension,” Trump wrote, despite zero evidence.

“This would be terrible for our Country. Fear not, however, Republicans will not let it, or any of their other catastrophic policies, happen,” the president continued. “Our Country is now in very good hands.”

No need for twenty-one. Fifteen works. Six more liberals.

Update: See Paul Waldman, Democrats Need to Treat the Supreme Court Like the Villain It Is

See also The President Who Never Grew Up.

The POTUS is now raging against affordability, which is a new word he discovered less than a month ago. Here is Chris Hayes a couple of days after the November 7 elections.

The stuff about affordability is in the first three minutes or so, but the whole segment is worth watching.

On November 12 the White House released this video proclaiming that Trump is making America affordable again.

Sure he is. That same day Trump signed the bill that ended the shutdown. During the televised signing he accused the Democrats of wanting to give trillions of dollars to illegal aliens and promised affordability. So he’s all on board with this new affordability craze, I guess.

But no more. Now he’s big mad at affordability. Yesterday he called the word a “hoax” and a “Democrat con job.”

If you listen, you can pick up that he thinks inflation was last year’s problem that he has already solved and nobody is giving him credit for it. Because he won the election last year by a lot! So everything is fine now! See also Rachel Cohen at NJ.com, Trump just trashed his most major issue: ‘Worst messaging from a politician in history’.

In other news, the Republican won the special election in Tennessee but the margin looks uncomfortably slim to Republicans. “Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle,” said one House Republican.

The White House is also threatening to withhold SNAP money from states that refuse to share personal information about the people receiving the money — mostly blue states, obviously.

There’s more, as always, but that’s all I can deal with at the moment.

Trump went on a marathon “truthing” spree last night, posting over 160 times. “Most of the posts involved sharing MAGA-friendly content from right-wing sources including Fox News, YouTuber Benny Johnson, and broadcasters Scott Jennings and Alex Jones,” says Daily Beast. Among the choicer “truths” is that Michelle Obama was in charge of Joe Biden’s auto-pen. Trump shared a lot of videos targeting his many political “enemies” — Gavin Newsom, Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, James Comey, etc.  To me, this reveals obsessive, seething rage and a whole lot of insecurity.

Last week the New York Times published an article that pushed Trump over the edge, according to several reports. In Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office, Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman write that Trump works hard to “project round-the-clock energy, virility and physical stamina.” But, they note that he keeps shorter working hours and lighter meeting schedules than he used to, plus he’s been caught falling asleep in public several times recently. Many news outlets reported that Trump raged and fumed and lost it over the report. Right-wing outlets ran puffery about what an exceptional physical specimen Trump is, of course.

But then see The Bubble-Wrapped President by Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic. Whatever his physical status, he is extraordinarily isolated even by presidential standards. For example, he’s making international trips but not seeing much of his own country.

I looked at Trump’s travel schedule from the fall of 2017, the first year of his initial term, to compare it with this fall’s, and I was surprised by the drop-off. Back then, he traveled into the country more than a dozen times from September to November to talk with energy workers in North Dakota, rally support in Alabama for a Senate candidate, and explain his agenda directly to his supporters. During that same stretch this year, he barely traveled at all. This fall, he’s ventured beyond the Washington, D.C., metro area; his New Jersey golf club; and Florida, the home of Mar-a-Lago, only five times. Four of those domestic trips were to New York, including three to hang out with rich friends in luxury boxes at sporting events. The other was to attend United Nations meetings, but he stayed only one night, compared with five in 2017. The fifth trip was to Arizona, to attend Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.

After the Big, Ugly Bill passed, people close to him tried to get Trump on the road to do some rallies or other personal appearances around the country to sell the thing. He just never got around to it. He was asked to make appearances with some of the candidates who lost in last month’s elections. He did a couple of virtual appearances but wouldn’t travel.  His media consumption is mostly right-wing outlets that say good things about him, and the people who work for him in the White House are all brown-nosers. He’s cut himself off from just about everybody else. Including his own voters, out there in flyover country. And this is significant, because it means it’s very unlikely he’ll do anything to win support back. This may be a sign of flagging energy, or it may just be that now that he’s in charge he’s just going to do what he wants to do, nyah nyah nyah. Or both.

See also David Graham, Trump Seizes Back the Spotlight (That may not be the boon he thinks it is), also at The Atlantic. The things he is doing to get attention aren’t making him look good. And we still don’t know what’s going to happen with the Epstein files. But I suspect that those anticipating Transparency At Last will be disappointed.

One big way the Trumpers miscalculated since the beginning of this term is in the optics they want to promote. Trump seems to have believed people would think videos of mass military roundups of brown people would be cool. Mostly, they don’t. Remember when his thing was to show lots of brown people being loaded onto big military planes? That fell apart. Then somebody must have thought it would look cool to send Ice Barbie  to El Salvador to pose with the prisoners. “Cringy” is probably a better word.

In September Ice agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters onto an ordinary Chicago apartment building to terrorize the residents. Somebody must have thought that would look cool. The White House claimed that a Venezuelan gang had taken over the building. But the raid resulted in no criminal charges. I’m sure the die-hard Trump base eats this stuff up, and the low-information crowd may barely know this is happening. But I doubt the whopping majority of Americans are favorably impressed.

And now it’s the boat strikes. Even people who are dumb enough to believe there’s some legitimate purpose to the strikes may not want to look at them. Trump/Miller/Hegseth and whoever else is behind this may think videos of bombing boats are cool. That’s only reason I can think of for not just relying on the Coast Guard.

The most recent example of prepubescent “humor” coming out of the White House, Pete Hegseth posted an image of a children’s book character destroying boats.

He did this after the Wall Street Journal published the “second strike” article, mind you. What is he trying to say? That killing people is just good, innocent fun? People are selling T-shirts with that image on them, btw. And the publisher of the Franklin the Turtle books is, justifiably, furious. I hope the publisher sues.

Update: Do see Paul Waldman at The Cross Section, A Few Bad Men, who is making a lot of these same points.

Bottom line, though, the executive branch is being run by a pack of sociopaths. They have all the judgment and sensibilities of spoiled 8-year-old boys. And Trump’s poll numbers continue to slip. He’s fallen into late-term Richard Nixon territory.

Tonight we’ll learn if Republicans can hang on to their House seat for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district. I’m making no predictions. But a close Republican win should make the GOP pretty nervous, since Trump won it by 22 points last year. And the polls are all very close.

Regarding the heinous “second” boat bombing that killed two men clinging to their sinking boat, as reported in WaPo — Pentagon Pete forcefully denied giving an order to “kill them all” as WaPo reported. And yesterday Trump said he believed Pentagon Pete. But this afternoon White House press secretary and minion of tribulation Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Hegseth ordered the second strike.

Julia Manchester writes for The Hill, “Leavitt told reporters at the White House press briefing that Hegseth authorized Adm. Frank Bradley to carry out the second strike, which reportedly killed two people who were hanging onto the burning vessel after an initial strike.” Further,

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narco-terrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war. With respect to the strikes in question on September 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Adm. Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” Leavitt said. 

“Adm. Bradley worked well within his authority and the law to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” she continued. “This administration has designated these narco-terrorists as foreign terrorist organizations. The president has the right to take them out if they are threatening the United States of America, if they are bringing illegal narcotics that are killing our citizens at a record rate, which is what they are doing.” 

I believe most people who know anything about “the law” are saying that Trump’s boat strikes are not even close to being legal. I still say that if any suspicious boat enters U.S. territorial waters, let the Coast Guard take care of it. They’re pretty good at that, I understand.

But was there a decision to throw Pete under the bus? Or are they setting up Adm. Frank Bradley to take the fall? Or both?  Hmmm.

Update: And the answer is — they’re offering up Admiral Bradley as their sacrificial lamb. The newest version of what went down out of the White House is that it was Admiral Bradley and not Hegseth who was responsible for the second strike order. Hegseth had merely “authorized” him.

Another follow up is from David Dayen at The American Prospect. In Marco Rubio’s Sales Pitch: War in Venezuela, Dayen addresses the “Why Venezuela?” question.

While you were shoving the last of your Thanksgiving leftovers into the microwave, another war was being furnished, not by a media mogul or corporate titan—though certainly some defense contractors are counting up future bonuses inside their mansions in Northern Virginia. No, the secretary of state has been ginning up this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and probably a side benefit of the imminent incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way of thinking about it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing South Florida exile friends.

I’d read in several sources that regime change in Venezuela has been a priority for Rubio for some time. And I don’t think Rubio is all that concerned about the oil.

Trump was reportedly not buying the pitch until Rubio related it to something the president’s terminally 1980s brain recognizes: the war on drugs. Vaporizing alleged drug boats through summary executions, including what appears to be a patently illegal order of a second strike, has a visceral appeal for Trump. The inconvenient problem is that almost no fentanyl is produced in Venezuela, but fortunately for Rubio, Trump doesn’t read past the first page of the briefing book, and also doesn’t read that page either.

Sounds about right.

This is from the Wall Street Journal, republished elsewhere —

Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

the apt title for this is “Make Money, Not War.”

For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.

Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.

The two businessmen shared President Trump’s long-held approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the treet from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.

And then a bit later it says,

A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.

I have read that Putin is no genius, but it doesn’t take a lot to be smarter than Trump. I’ve said before that Trump assumes all kinds of messy conflicts and problems could be easily solved because he doesn’t understand them. It was obvious in his first term that he has absolutely no concept of, for example, strategic alliances. Like NATO. He just sees a cost drain, not the purpose. That goes along with his abysmal ignorance of history. It has been credibly reported that when he visited the Pearl Harbor memorial someone had to explain to him what happened there. Most American boys his age spent their childhoods listening to their dads talk about the war and playing at being combat soldiers with their buddies in their back yards. Somehow, he seems to have missed that. Trump’s only drivers are power, money, and racism. That seems to be all he’s got.

And don’t miss All the President’s Millions: how the Trumps are turning the presidency into riches by Tom Burgess at The Guardian.

Pentagon Pete is in trouble for something reported by WaPo:

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

What’s remarkable to me is that even Republicans in Congress are getting concerned about the boat bombings.

A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors. …

… “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Representative Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio and a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.

“There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided,” he said. “But this is completely outside of anything that’s been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.”

The investigations by both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are the sharpest scrutiny to date by Congress of Mr. Trump’s escalating military offensive, undertaken without congressional approval or consultation, which he says is aimed at taking out drug traffickers.

They constitute a notable step by Republican lawmakers who have spent much of the year deferring to Mr. Trump and refraining from exercising oversight of his actions.

And it is all so unnecessary. There’s nothing going on that the Coast Guard couldn’t handle in the usual manner. But maybe some of the Republicans are realizing they need to start being legislators.