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.

I hope everyone had a lovely visit with family and a good Thanksgiving dinner. I certainly did. Now, back to work …

One of the first news stories I saw this morning had Trump announcing that his land invasion of Venezuela will start “very soon.” Oh, goodie. The headlines aren’t using the word “invasion,” of course. It’s an “action” against “drug trafficking networks.” But the bottom line is that Trump intends to order the U.S. military to do something within some other nation’s sovereign territory without that nation’s agreement. Maybe the something is bombing raids rather than boots on the ground, but IMO hat’s an invasion. And the Trump Administration wants us all to know that the Commander in Chief is not bound by some old war powers law that requires him to get permission from Congress to do, you know, war stuff.

It’s still not absolutely clear to me why Trump is so obsessed with Venezuela. I understand there are other Latin American countries with more drug smuggling rings, notably Mexico Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru. Everything with Trump is personal. Did Nicolás Maduro call Trump a bad name?

Complicating Trump’s plans, it appears Putin is standing with Venezuela. The Times of India reports today that “At the 19th session of the Russian-Venezuelan intergovernmental commission, Moscow reaffirmed its support for Venezuela’s sovereignty and strengthened its strategic partnership with Caracas.”

About the second thing I noticed this morning was Paul Krugman’s new substack, Getting Ready to Party Like It’s 2008. In brief, a Trump appointee to the Federal Reserve is working to weaken banking regulations to allow riskier financial moves, similar to what caused the financial meltdown in 2008. And there are members of Congress — including some Democrats — promoting the wider use and loose regulation of crypto.  Between that and widespread concerns that the stock market is being propped up by a tech bubble, this is no time to be bullish.

Meanwhile, Trump is so delusional that he’s been musing that his wonderful tariffs will enable us to eliminate income taxes.

On the plus side, Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent. How low can he go? And see also …

Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, The Great MAGA Crac-up Has Begun

Paul Waldman, Public Notice, Why MAGA Is Coming Apart at the Seams

Trump is not acting as if he knows his own political jeopardy. Maybe that’s because he only knows one way to act. Maybe that’s because he honestly doesn’t know, or refuses to accept, how much his political base is cracking. In any event I can’t imagine he’s going to do anything that would substantially bring his approval back up.

Getting back to Venezuela, if he does bomb or otherwise assault the sovereign territory of Venezuela, it’s predicted this will cost him some support even of the MAGA die-hards. His promise to avoid getting entangled in foreign military misadventures was a major reason a lot of the low-information Right supported him. It’s a reason right up there with releasing the Epstein files.

Regarding the shooting in DC and the tragic death of Specialist Sara Beckstrom of the West Virginia National Guard, I agree with Josh Marshall —

Two National Guard are in critical condition after having been shot in Washington DC. These were West Virginia Guard. True to form, Pentagon Pete thumped his chest and declared he would send 500 more Guard to DC.  And I see that Trump has ordered that the 500 troops be deployed.

And I’m just hearing that the suspect is a 29-year-old Afghan national. He was shot while being apprehended, but is still alive, We don’t know a whole lot yet.  See also Keystone Kash Vows to Track Down National Guard Shooter Already in Hospital.

Pentagon Pete has more testosterone than sense. And I’m not sure if there’s a word for the stew of personality disorders that motivate Trump. There was no point in the Guard being in DC other than Trump showing off that he’s the Big Bad Commander in Chief who doesn’t like “Democrat” cities. Trump uses troops as if they were his personal dancing monkeys. Those Guard should have been at home anticipating a turkey dinner. These troops are yanked away from home and put in danger for no other reason that to give Trump a power rush and serve his political ends. Sending 500 more Guard to DC is an emotional reaction, not a rational one.

Speaking of illegal orders — earlier this week a federal judge blocked Trump’s National Guard deployment to DC. But he gave Trump time to appeal.

Given the pack of incompetent losers who will be in charge of investigating this incident at the federal level, I expect it to get ugly.

Anyway — this is what I was going to post. I’ll be spending tomorrow with my children and grandchildren, and even better, I don’t have to cook. Enjoy your day.

Trump loses again: