I’m not going to waste a gift link to it, but today the New York Times is running an op ed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner headlined “Trump Leadership: If You Want Welfare and Can Work, You Must.” A sample:

America’s welfare programs were created with a noble purpose: to help those who needed them most — our seniors, individuals with disabilities, pregnant women and low-income families with children.

In recent years, though, these welfare programs have deviated from their original mission both by drift and by design. Millions of able-bodied adults have been added to the rolls in the past decade, primarily as a result of Medicaid expansion. Many of these recipients are working-age individuals without children who might remain on welfare for years. Some of them do not work at all or they work inconsistently throughout the year.

The increased share of welfare spending dedicated to able-bodied working-age adults distracts from what should be the focus of these programs: the truly needy.

The great right-wing fantasy that has lived at least since LBJ initiated the Great Society program is there are vast numbers of deadbeats who are living off “welfare” instead of working. And if we got rid of welfare, they’d go out and get jobs and be perfectly fine. There is all kinds of authoritative data easily found via web search saying otherwise, of course.

This is from Axios:

By the numbers: There’s little evidence that people are somehow free-riding on Medicaid.

64% of adults with Medicaid work full time or part time, according to an analysis of census data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. [That would be 44 percent full time, 20 percent part time]

Another 32% are taking care of home or family, are ill or disabled, attend school, or are retired.

2% could not find work. And there’s another 2% in an “other” category.

You can’t live on Medicaid. The beneficiary doesn’t see a dime of it. It just pays for medical care already received. Nobody is sitting around watching teevee all day and living off the Medicaid checks. According to the American Hospital Association, “Approximately 42% of Medicaid beneficiaries are adults, 36% are children, 10% are disabled, and 10% are age 65 or older.” So more than half of Medicaid recipients are children, seniors, or disabled.

The House “big, beautiful budget bill” now includes work requirements for receiving Medicaid. Axios reports that “The bill would require Medicaid recipients who are under 65 years old, without dependents, to confirm they are working at least 80 hours a month. Another provision requires some to certify twice a year that they qualify for insurance.” A few states have tried this, and I understand the administrative costs of checking up on the work requirements are prohibitive. In Georgia, Axios says, the state spent $13,000 per enrollee just to sign them up.  It’s probably more cost-effective to let a few deadbeats slip through. And a lot of people who should be able to qualify aren’t able to navigate the system.

Regarding Georgia, do read He Became the Face of Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement. Now He’s Fed Up With It. by Margaret Coker at ProPublica. A real Georgia Medicaid recipient who runs a small business was featured on state-sponsored video ads about what a great medical benefits program Georgia had. Since the ads aired the guy has lost his benefits twice because of bureaucratic red tape, and he’s fed up with it. You really need to read this. It appears the state is perpetually changing the work hour reporting procedures so that people make reporting mistakes and their benefits can be canceled.

And on that note, see Paul Krugman, Republicans Hate You.

Allow me to elaborate. If you struggle to pay your bills, if you have anxiety about your economic future, if the cost of housing and college and just ordinary living weigh on you all the time? There is nothing more important for you to understand than this: Republicans hate you. They think you’re lazy, they think you’re stupid, they think you don’t deserve anything better than to be a wage slave working your ass off so they and their billionaire buddies can have more servants and vacation houses and private jets, while they sit around laughing about what a sucker they think you are. They hate you.

I’ll go into detail on what this message accomplishes and why it’s so important, but first let’s consider this in context of what is probably the most abhorrent part of the budget bill: enormous cuts to Medicaid that would lead to millions of Americans losing their health coverage — as many as 14.7 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The primary way they will do this is through “work requirements,” i.e. forcing recipients to navigate a bureaucratic obstacle course to prove, over and over again, that they are working and therefore deserving of health coverage.

Work requirements are terrible policy, but what matters is why Republicans want to use them to kick all those people off their insurance. It’s because they hate people who need Medicaid. The same goes for those who might need food stamps or student loans, workers who want to bargain collectively, and pretty much anyone who isn’t lucky enough to be rich. They hate you.

I bolded that last paragraph because I think it’s true. They hate people who need benefits. Those people are a drag on the ability of rich people to not pay taxes.

Remember back during the depths of the covid pandemic, when the Senate had to debate relief checks? This is from Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, March 2020:

At some point on Wednesday, the Senate is expected to vote on a desperately needed $2 trillion coronavirus relief package. When that will happen is unclear, though, because a number of leading Republicans are demanding changes to the legislation, worried that it provides perverse incentives that could ultimately hurt the country. Do their concerns have to do with huge multinational corporations using the funds on buybacks? Insufficient aid to hospitals or low-wage workers unsure of how they’ll be able to afford food in a week? Not exactly! Rather, Senators Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, Rick Scott, and Tim Scott are sick with fear that the legislation will make unemployment so enticing that low-wage workers will decide to lay themselves off.

In the minds of these, um, people, those low-wage workers had better get their asses into the workplace, covid or no covid, and if some of them die that’s okay, but they can’t be allowed to not work!

Claiming the relief package will encourage people to stay out of the workforce, Graham told reporters that the bill “pays you more not to work than if you were working,” noting that it would provide the equivalent of $24.07 an hour in South Carolina versus the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. “If the federal government accidentally incentivizes layoffs, we risk life-threatening shortages in sectors where doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trying to care for the sick, and where growers and grocers, truckers and cooks are trying to get food to families’ tables,” Graham, Sasse, and Scott said in a statement. Yes, it takes a real parody of a Republican to worry—at a time when a deadly pandemic is sweeping the nation and doctors are discussing the prospect of having to pick which patients get to live—about the possibility of being too generous to people making 1/1000000th of their annual salary.

See also Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Mike Johnson Just Wrecked Trump’s Ugly “Working-Class GOP” Scam. The current GOP bill creates a whole new benefit for wealthy investors. Greg Sargent explains it better than I can. The Tax Foundation analysis of the bill says that one effect of the bill will be to limit wage growth.

American incomes measured by Gross National Product (GNP) would increase by less than 0.05 percent because the deficit impact of the bill drives a wedge between the increase in economic output and the increase in American incomes. The tax provisions would increase the budget deficit by $3.3 trillion from 2025 through 2034 on a dynamic basis, and that higher budget deficit would require the US government to borrow more. As interest payments on the debt made to foreigners increase, American incomes decrease.

So it’s a terrible bill. At least I am also reading that a lot of Senate Republicans have some real issues with it, so there’s some hope it will be modified, I suppose. Josh Hawley, of all people, published another NY Times op-ed a couple of days ago headlined Don’t Cut Medicaid. Hawley dishonestly pretends that Trump wants Medicaid left alone —

Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid. But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party’s Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.

Trump has promised a lot of things, but it’s obvious the one promise he wants to keep is cutting taxes for the rich. If the little people have to suffer, too bad.

This wing of the party wants Republicans to build our big, beautiful bill around slashing health insurance for the working poor. But that argument is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.

Hawley isn’t stupid.

Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.

That percentage would probably be a lot harder if the state didn’t make signing up so difficult. I swear the application form is endless.

All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will be replicated in states across the country.

One of my constituents, a married mother of five, contacted me to explain why Medicaid is vital to her 8-year-old daughter, who depends on a feeding tube to survive. Formula, pump rentals, feeding extensions and other treatments cost $1,500 a month; prescriptions nearly double that cost. These expenses aren’t covered by private insurance. The mother wrote to me, “Without Medicaid, we would lose everything — our home, our vehicles and, eventually, our daughter.”

If Hawley puts up a meaningful fight to stop the Medicaid cuts, I might take back some of the bad things I’ve said about him. Not all of them, though.

Recommended read: Jamelle Bouie, They Were Waiting for Trump All Along.

A letter someone sent to Josh Marshall:

My feeling about Qatar gifting Trump a 747 is simply that it is just embarrassing for the United States. The US can afford and can build its own state-of-the-art Air Force One. The US doesn’t need a gift from a little country of a used plane that is out of production and largely used for freight. It’s not becoming of the United States nor the President of the United States. It’s just embarrassing. 

I’m reading that retrofitting of the plane to have Air Force One capabilities and being sure there are no bugs or other security risks built into it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And it will probably take at least a couple of years. The plane may not be ready for Trump to fly before his term ends. And even a lot of Republicans are opposed to accepting the “gift.” Never mind the emoluments clause thing. This transaction may be doomed. We’ll see.

But the bribe may have already done its job. There are all manner of news stories out today reporting on a rift between Trump and Netanyahu. And it so happens Qatar is a major supporter of Hamas. Hmmm.

This is Newsweek:

A senior Hamas official tells Newsweek that the Palestinian militant group saw “positive” potential in signs of a growing rift between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after offering the U.S. leader a political win in the form of an American hostage release ahead of his Middle East trip.

“Given the unlimited support of the American administration for the entity, any disagreement between them would certainly be a positive development that would weaken Netanyahu’s stubborn position and open the door to the possibility of reaching an agreement to end the war,” Hamas Political Bureau member and spokesperson Basem Naim told Newsweek.

“This is especially true since the continuation of the war does not serve Trump’s strategic projects in the region,” he added, “and Hamas will not accept any agreement that does not lead to an end to the war, ensure the withdrawal of hostile forces and rebuild the Gaza Strip with the participation of its residents.”

Here is WaPo:

During his first major overseas trip this week, President Donald Trump is set to visit three countries in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — without stopping in Jerusalem.

It’s not the first time he has bypassed Israel — or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

From embarking on nuclear talks with Iran to attempting hostage talks with Hamas without Israel’s knowledge, Trump has increasingly sidelined Netanyahu, stoking anxieties in a country long accustomed to being consulted by successive U.S. administrations.

Looking at all the Stupid coming from the Naked Emperor in the past couple of days, one hardly knows where to start. But let’s start with his latest prescription drug declaration.

What does this tell us? One, that he has paid absolutely no attention to what’s been going on in Congress with prescription drug prices for about a quarter century now. And all those other countries have NATIONAL HEALTH CARE PLANS  that include strict price controls on all prescription drugs. Republicans (and “centrist” Democrats) for all these years have refused to allow such things in the U.S.

Two, he tried to pull this same stunt in his first term, but a judge stopped it. Like most of what Trump tries to change through executive orders, this sort of thing really needs to go through Congress. I expect the drug companies will tell Trump to go pound sand.

Third, central planning of the economy, anybody? Isn’t that something like Original Sin for Republicans? I guess the worship of the Free Market is out of favor, suddenly.

Fourth, Joe Biden pushed through some legislation that really did set prescription drug prices to go down. although much of that law hasn’t fully gone into effect. I expect Trump to take credit as various provisions do go into effect. President Biden also issued some of his own executive orders requesting changes in drug policies to lower cost, but Trump rescinded those as soon as he took office.

Now, let’s move on to the Qatar $400 million 747 jumbo jet boondoggle. David Kurtz at TPM covers that pretty well. The story is that the government of Qatar offered to give the U.S. Department of Defense a Boeing 747-8 jet, with the understanding that it would be for Trump’s use as president, to replace Air Force One. Technically, this gift will only be temporary, so that once Trump is out of office Qatar can transfer the jet to Trump’s presidential library so that he can still use it.

There are several problems with this plan, even beyond the emoluments clause. The first is that yesterday Qatar said the plans to “transfer” the jet to the U.S. DoD were not finalized. Maybe Qatar would send over a jet, and maybe not. It sounds like Trump may have announced the transaction prematurely.

Second, even if the jet does materialize, it would present a security nightmare. “The (US Air Force) would have to tear it apart looking for surveillance equipment and inspect the integrity of the plane,” it says here.

Third, as David Kurtz explains, retrofitting even a very nice luxury jet to have the same essential capabilities as the current Air Force One may not be possible, and even if possible could take years. Trump expects to be able to use his shiny new jet by this fall. There’s no way that’s going to happen.

So what’s wrong with the current Air Force One, besides being 40 years old? Trump had put Boeing to work on a new Air Force One in his first term, and Boeing is still working on it. I take it the plane wasn’t a big priority to Joe Biden. Trump apparently can’t deal with having a shabby forty-year-old jet at his disposal; he wants a newer one. As Kurtz writes,

While the apparent lawlessness of such an arrangement is alarming, there’s an emperor has no clothes aspect to the whole thing. Trump wants what he wants, and no one wants to tell him no. And so everyone pretends it’s possible, even to the point of entertaining wildly corrupt scenarios to make it happen. But in the end, the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

On to tariffs. This morning there were headlines about a “major breakthrough,” as China and the U.S. have agreed to lower tariffs for 90 days while negotiations are ongoing. The Trump Administration is calling this a win; most commenters say it’s a cave. Per Paul Krugman, “This wasn’t a case of both sides backing down. China only imposed its tariffs as a response to Trump’s gambit, and has reduced them only because he retreated. And retreat he did. This was basically Trump running away from the killer rabbit.”

Krugman also points out there is still a 30 percent tariff on Chinese imports, which is still way too high and probably coming to late to avoid big price hikes and empty shelves. And nobody knows what will happen when the 90 days are up.

And the House Republicans are still planning to throw millions of people off Medicaid, even if they deny that’s what they are doing.

Getting back to my hypothesis that Trump is dumb as a bag of hammers, let’s look at something he said yesterday —

During a press briefing in the Oval Office, Trump downplayed concerns over job security sparked by a significant drop in cargo volumes as a result of his sweeping tariff policy and ongoing trade negotiations with China.

One reporter said that traffic at U.S. ports “has really slowed, and now thousands of dockworkers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs,” before being interrupted by the president.

“That means we lose less money, you know? When I see that, that means we lose less money,” Trump replied. He claimed that China had been making “over a trillion, 1.1 trillion, in my opinion.”

“And frankly if we didn’t do business, we would have been better off,” Trump continued. “So, when you say it slowed down, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Probably most of this is Trump refusing to acknowledge that his policies are hurting people. But what he’s actually saying here is that trade is bad. He’s saying the U.S. would be better off economically if we closed our borders to imports, according to Trump. We should just sell stuff to other countries, not buy stuff.  Maybe he doesn’t really believe it, but he’s sure as bleep dumb enough to say it. I guess he thinks that if all the dockworkers lose their jobs they can get those factory jobs “screwing in little screws” all day long, like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick talked about recently.

Lutnick is another specimen that belongs in the Overprivileged Twit Museum.

Update: I missed this earlier. Steve Benen wrote on the Maddow Blog,

As the week got underway, NBC News aired Donald Trump’s latest appearance on “Meet the Press,” during which the president shared some odd claims about trade policy. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China,” he said. “Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Of course, by that reasoning, if I stopped doing business with my local grocery stores, I could boast about all of the money I’m saving, which would be great except for the related fact that I wouldn’t have any food.

A couple of days later, Trump again said that he didn’t care about the collapse of economic activity between the U.S. and China. “You know, we lost a trillion dollars to China on trade … and by not trading, we’re losing nothing,” the Republican claimed. “So, we’re saving a trillion dollars. That’s a lot.”

So if we all stopped buying stuff we’d save a lot of money. However, I’m not sure how that’s going to increase federal revenue. The General Services Administration does buy some electronics and other technical stuff from China, but I doubt that such purchases add up to a trillion dollars.

In other news — retired Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter has died.

Trump has fired the Librarian of Congress for being an obstacle to President Trump’s agenda. I’m struggling to understand what the Librarian of Congress could possibly do that interferes with anyone’s agenda.

Update: Another perspective —

There is now an American pope. For what it’s worth. There’s some evidence the new Pope is not a fan of Donald Trump. At least the guy should probably avoid J.D. Vance. Just to be safe.

A bit of good news — the Ed Martin nomination for U.S. attorney for D.C has been pulled. Martin was something of a festering boil in Missouri politics for a lot of years, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has been running editorials with headlines like “Missouri Owes America an Apology” and “Ed Martin’s Toxic Road Show Continues.” Unfortunately they’re all behind a paywall. My aunt has been sending me newspaper clippings. Juicy stuff. Let’s just say the guy is not overly burdened with intelligence, competence, or ethics. See also Greg Sargent, Trump Erupts as Top DOJ Pick Implodes in Huge Blow to MAGA at The New Republic.

However, before we celebrate — there is speculation Trump will choose the wackadoo Fox News host Jeanine Pirro for the job.

In other personnel news — Cameron Hamilton, acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was fired from his job yesterday.

The firing occurred one day after Hamilton told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the nation needs FEMA, which Trump has suggested abolishing or shrinking.

“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton said at the hearing.

The Atlantic Council, among others, has pointed out that abolishing FEMA would hurt Red states more than Blue ones. Although it wouldn’t be good for Blue states, either.

On to tariff news. After bragging that he has negotiated 200 trade deals, Trump finally announced one. Except it’s not a deal, says Paul Krugman.

The Trump administration is planning to announce its first trade deal today, with Britain. Except it won’t be a deal; more of a “deal.” Reportedly it will mainly be a “framework” for an actual deal that may or may not happen sometime in the future. This is the tariff equivalent of “concepts of a plan” for health care.

In other words, this will be smoke and mirrors, an attempt to persuade the gullible that Trump’s tariffs are actually working. Markets — driven by small investors who seem desperate to believe that the people in charge have some idea what they’re doing — may briefly bounce on the announcement.

Most news outlets will dutifully report there is a “trade deal,” as if one deal with one nation is going to mend the disruption Trump has caused.

Even good writers can be wrong. David Dayan wrote yesterday that Senate Dems “caved” and were preparing to rubber-stamp a Republican crypto bill. But they didn’t. Instead, all Dems, plus Rand Paul and Josh Hawley, voted to keep the bill from being voted on in the Senate.  For now at least. I take it the bill was intended to create a legal framework for cryptocurrency and provided for a little regulation, although surely not so much regulation that it would interfere with the Trump family’s ongoing crypto currency money grab.

But let’s go back to David Dayan, anyway.

As we reported on Monday, a bill called the GENIUS Act would set up a relatively weak regulatory framework for stablecoins, digital assets pegged to the U.S. dollar and used mostly to facilitate crypto trading. It was almost destined for success, as a significant number of crypto-friendly Democrats, boosted by campaign contributions from the industry, were all set to sign on. But then reports about Trump’s family organization launching a stablecoin, and the United Arab Emirates using it in a $2 billion deal to purchase the digital currency exchange Binance started bubbling up. Suddenly, it seemed like terrible politics for Democrats to effectively rubber-stamp Trump’s crypto corruption.

And so nine pro-crypto Democrats vowed to vote against cloture and maintain a filibuster, thus blocking the bill, without changes. Some assumed that asking to address “concerns” was just a pretext to kill the measure. Others thought that the crypto Dems were just searching for a fig leaf they could use to say that their concerns were addressed and the bill could go forward.

It was the latter. 

Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Mark Warner (D-VA) engaged in round-the-clock negotiations with Republicans on the GENIUS Act to get to yes. Earlier on Wednesday, Gallego told MeidasTouch that he wouldn’t let Republicans “jam us and pass bad legislation” without Democratic input. “Don’t try to fuck us on it, that’s not going to happen,” Gallego said. But the language was generally based on trying to get a “good bill” that supposedly protects consumers and investors. Gallego and Warner voted for the initial version of the GENIUS Act in the Senate Banking Committee.

Sens. Gallego and Warner did not respond to requests for comment about the negotiations.

Meanwhile, Democrats engaged in a classic tactic when they want to pass something but the optics are bad: come up with a different bill that will never pass so they can pretend they care. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Jeff Merkley introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act, which would ban the president, vice president, senior officials in the executive branch, members of Congress, and their immediate families from financially benefiting from crypto assets that they issue or endorse, including stablecoins. 

And so on. I take it that the vote today was premature; negotiations were ongoing. I also get a sense that the crypto-friendly Democrats may have been spooked by recent news stories of Trump’s blatant corruption, promising top traders of his stupid memecoin access to him and tours of the White House.

Note: Trump really did issue a proclamation calling May 8 World War II Victory Day. Like the Pacific War was just a messy little skirmish that didn’t really matter. I am not celebrating.

Pete Hegseth is in the news again. It’s been discovered that some weeks ago he randomly stopped shipments of weapons to Ukraine that had already been approved, catching even the White House off guard. He’s also decided the Army has too many four-star generals and admirals, and he’s cutting their ranks by 20 percent. But CNN says there are only 37 four-star generals and admirals across the entire military. That really doesn’t seem an excessive number, considering the size of the U.S. military. One wonders if the boy’s hitting the bottle again.

Incompetence abounds. I take it the House has really hit a wall over cutting Medicaid. Yesterday Trump released a budget calling for massive cuts to medical services, but he’s saying benefits won’t be cut. But nobody with any sense thinks he can have his cuts without impairing benefits. He wants women to be having more babies, but Medicaid is paying for more than 40 percent of American births (nearly 50 percent in rural areas). Plus, the economic anxiety his policies are creating aren’t exactly conducive to long-term commitments, like a baby.

Trump wants to bring back coal mining. But he’s also cutting safety regulations in coal mines. Coal mining can be deadly. Before there were regulations, thousands of miners died every year. And then there’s black lung. Trump has cut programs that screened miners for black lung and provided treatment. Miners were stunned.

These guys think Trump will reinstate the program if someone just explains it to him. They still haven’t figured out what he is.

He doesn’t care, and he also doesn’t connect one thing with another. He’s not bright enough to think comprehensively. He wants coal miners to love him, so he promises to bring back coal mining. He wants mine owners to like him, so he cuts regulations. He wants to fund his tax cuts, so let’s cut all these health programs he doesn’t understand. This is not 12-dimensional chess. It’s just stupid.

He keeps saying he has made hundreds of tariff deals, but won’t announce them. But if you listen to these remarks he made today, it’s pretty clear he hasn’t made any deals at all. He thinks he can just set terms, and countries can work with us, or not. But it’s really American consumers are the ones who have to pay the price.

He has no idea what he’s talking about. In his meeting today with Canada’s  Prime Minister Mark Carney, he actually said, “We don’t do much business with Canada from our standpoint. They do a lot of business with us. We’re at like 4%.” Canada is the top buyer of U.S. exports.

I keep reading articles that try to explain “why” Trump is taking this or that destructive position. There is no “why.” He’s an idiot.

There must be at least some Republicans in Congress who realize he is an idiot. Some of them are nearly as dumb as he is, but I don’t think they all are. Some of them must realize how much he’s screwing up. Maybe they think their voters won’t notice.

See also Philip Bump on American’s Least American President.

It may be that the most significant thing that happened today is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp deciding not to run for the Senate in 2026. This boosts incumbent Jon Ossoff’s chances considerably. The future of this country depends on a Democratic-led House and Senate starting January 2027. I haven’t heard why Kemp decided to not run, but I can speculate that he just plain doesn’t want any part of the mess Congress is now,

Meanwhile, Trump seems to have fully entered Mad King mode. He’s putting a tariff on foreign-made movies. Hollywood filmmakers have no idea how this would work.  He doesn’t know if he has to uphold the Constitution. He doesn’t know anything. And the sanewashing continues.

Here’s a bit of good news.

A federal judge on Monday ordered the North Carolina Board of Elections to certify the Democratic incumbent’s victory in a State Supreme Court race, rejecting a monthslong effort from the Republican challenger to throw out tens of thousands of votes.

I really thought the Republicans were going to get away with stealing this election. But the people prevailed. There will be an appeal, no doubt, so perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate just yet.

More tomorrow.

Public Notice is running a story by Stephen Robinson headlined “Trump’s Brain Is Gone.” It begins,

Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.

Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Trump gets graded on his own curve, unfortunately. Robinson goes on to highlight sections of the recent interviews in which Trump, clearly, was untethered from reality. Well, there was more today.

First of all, let us remember that nobody in Trump’s family ever served in the U.S. military, even though Trump’s German grandfather arrived here in bleeping 1885, He fled Germany to avoid military conscription, btw. Second, it’s beyond crass to claim the U.S. alone won the victory. It’s stuff like this that makes people in those other countries dislike us. Third, November 11 is already a national holiday, dumbass. And fourth, bleeping World War II wasn’t over in May 1945. That was just the war in Europe. The War in the Pacific had not ended. The Battle of Okinawa was ongoing on VE Day. I sincerely wish someone would grill the moron to find out if he knows anything at all about the Pacific War.

It’s perhaps odd that we don’t have a national annual commemoration of the end of World War II, which ended for us officially on September 2, 1945, with the surrender ceremony on the U.S.S. Missouri. But it just irks me beyond all tolerance that someone who is inhabiting the office of President of the United States, however incompetently, would have so little knowledge of, or apparent interest in, American history.

PBS television and NPR radio weren’t around when Trump was a child, but maybe if he’d been exposed to some of their programming at a young age he wouldn’t be the sucking black hole of ignorance and tastelessness he is now. Late yesterday he issued an executive order to end all public funding for NPR and PBS. He doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do that, but since when did he ever read the Constitution? Or read anything beyond a third-grade level, especially when there are no pictures?

Back in 2023 Republicans in Congress proposed cutting all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Even before that, in 2021 Ted Cruz had a meltdown because Big Bird told children to not be afraid of the covid vaccine. And before that, Mitt Romney’s proposal to eliminate funding for the CPB in 2012, when he was running for president. Which probably didn’t help him politically. But the Republicans keep trying.

And then this morning Trump went back to declaring he was going to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status, which he also doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do. He’s basically waging war on knowledge and intelligence at this point.

Okay, so now I’m just venting.

Update: Here’s another one. When asked what the Declaration of Independence means, Trump said, “Well, it means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration. A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.” So he’s never read it and has no idea what’s in it.

Well, here’s a new wrinkle. A federal judge finally came out and said Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to round up and deport immigrants without due process. Even better, the judge who ruled this is a Trump appointee. This is from the New York Times:

A federal judge on Thursday permanently barred the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans it has deemed to be criminals from the Southern District of Texas, saying that the White House’s use of the statute was illegal.

Well, okay, this ruling only applies to the Southern District of Texas. This district takes in Houston, Galveston, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and Laredo, plus some places I haven’t heard of. Later in the article it says the ruling only applies to Venezuelan immigrants. But it’s something.

The 36-page ruling by Judge Rodriguez, a President Trump appointee, amounted to a philosophical rejection of the White House’s attempts to transpose the Alien Enemies Act, which was passed in 1798 as the nascent United States was threatened by war with France, into the context of modern-day immigration policy.

Here is a link to the decision; it’s interesting. I’ve only read a bit but I intend to read it all later.

“The court concludes that as a matter of law, the executive branch cannot rely on the A.E.A., based on the proclamation, to detain the named petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country,” Judge Rodriguez wrote.

He also found that the “plain ordinary meaning” of the act’s language, like “invasion” and “predatory incursion,” referred to an attack by “military forces” and did not line up with Mr. Trump’s claims about the activities of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang, in a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

So we are not, in fact, at war with Venezuela.

Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U.’s lead lawyer in the cases, praised the ruling by Judge Rodriguez.

“This decision correctly recognized that the president cannot simply declare there’s an invasion and invoke a wartime authority during peacetime,” Mr. Gelernt said. “As the court recognized, Congress never intended this law to be used in this manner.”

And then a bit later …

Early in his decision, Judge Rodriguez rebuffed an argument by the Justice Department that he lacked the authority to even consider the White House’s use of the act, which has only been used three times in U.S. history: during the War of 1812 and during World Wars I and II.

Department lawyers have consistently maintained that even judges have no power to intrude on the president’s decisions in matters of foreign policy. And while Judge Rodriguez acknowledged that the Alien Enemies Act gives the president “broad powers,” he also said that judges still have the ability to determine whether presidents were using the law correctly.

Judges certainly do have the authority to say whether a presidential administration is violating the Constitution. And since when is detaining immigrants or anybody else on our soil and deporting them to who knows where a matter of “foreign policy”? Y’all are doin’ this stuff here, dudes. The only foreign government involved, so far, is that of El Salvador, and that’s only because the administration is paying El Salvador to warehouse people. This is not about “foreign policy.” What nonsense.

The result of this is that unless and until Judge Rodriquez is reversed on appeal, Trump can’t detain and deport people from the southern district of Texas under authority of the Alien Enemies Act. And while that’s kind of limited, I understand this is the first court ruling that directly addressed the plain fact that Trump’s interpretation and use of the AEA is bonkers.

In another development today, it’s reported that Michael Waltz is no longer the national security advisor. He is now the official scapegoat for the Signal Chat scandal. Trump is still standing by Pete Hegseth, possibly because Trump doesn’t want to admit Hegseth was a stupid choice for the job of Secretary of Defense. If you count Trump’s first term, Waltz is Trump’s fifth national security advisor. At least he lasted longer than Michael Flynn (January 20, 2017–February 13, 2017).

But, hey — just now, the Washington Post reported that Trump is appointing Waltz as ambassador to the UN. So he’s not good enough to be national security advisor, so let’s park him in the UN where no one will notice?

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he plans to nominate Michael Waltz as U.N. ambassador, hours after reports emerged that he would be replacing Waltz in his current position as national security adviser. Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as national security adviser on an interim basis while continuing to lead the State Department.

Yeah, like the Secretary of State isn’t that busy, I guess.

What a bunch of amateurs. So pathetic.

Since I don’t have a car, I spent much of yesterday either riding on or waiting for buses to get to a phone repair shop. Which I finally did, and as the proprietor was testing the battery,  which was fine, the phone came back to life. So now the phone is working again, no charge for the fix, but what an exhausting hassle. And Mercury is not in retrograde; I checked.

Okay, so where was I? Much of the news over the past few days has been about Trump’s falling poll numbers. He’s not just historically unpopular; with the exception of “border security” his “policies” are underwater as well. The majority do not like his handling of the economy, or of immigrants, or anything else. Yet  he’s not getting the message. Jennifer Rubin writes that Trump is doubling down rather than backing off.

Whether it is court decisions, nominees, or taxing everyday American consumers, Trump seems so wedded to boneheaded ideas that he might continue insisting on upping the ante rather than cutting his losses. In doing so, he will likely wipe out a table of Republicans who have stood by him but will soon have to stand for reelection.

It’s becoming increasingly easy to understand how he bankrupted all those casinos.

Josh Marshall writes that Trump has already lost.

I see the signs all around. He’s doubling down on things people don’t like. He’s fomenting a growing political backlash. The more signs we see of the limits of Trump’s power, the more people show signs of bucking that power. All power is unitary. We see signs of it everywhere. You simply cannot impose an autocracy if a clear majority of the country opposes what you are trying to do at the outset, when you are trying to do it.

They are now reacting to initial resistance by doubling down on things that are not popular. They appear to be upset that they’ve managed to have fewer deportations during Trump’s first hundred days in office than Biden had in his last hundred. Now they’re going to crack down on local officials and are threatening more indictments of judges and other officials who get in their way.

Good luck getting 12 jurors to convict any of these people. 

Nobody is saying that the administration is going to collapse soon. It’s going to be a couple of months before the effects of the tariffs hit the retail stores, and consumers.

We still don’t know what’s going to happen to Medicaid. The last I heard, the Republicans in the House were considering ending the federal subsidy (which covers about 90 percent of the cost) and telling the states they can keep Medicaid if they can fund it themselves. It doesn’t seem to occur to any of these people that it’s the Red states that will cancel it immediately. But these often are the states, especially the rural ones, that need Medicaid the most, to keep hospitals open and their larger percentages of poor people from losing all access to medical care.  Cutting Medicaid will be economically devastating to large (and very Red) parts of the country. Are Republican politicians collectively trying to shoot themselves in the foot?

The House also is talking about work requirements for receiving Medicaid. This has been done in some states; it usually just adds a lot of administrative cost and hassle and doesn’t save the state any money. I’m not sure what percentage of Medicaid recipients are either seniors or children, but it’s probably a lot.

Not surprisingly the U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter. Not surprisingly, Trump blamed Joe Biden.

“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” Trump posted to his Truth Social platform after the economic news dropped, and markets braced to open lower.

“I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers.

“Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’ This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”

But most economists are telling us there is no way the economy will get better as long as Trump refuses to completely change course. It’s probably not too late to salvage a decent economy out of the mess, but Trump is unlikely to let that happen.

So there we are.

Worth reading: Jamelle Bouie, The New Deal Is a Stinging Rebuke to Trump and Trumpism.

Update: Josh Marshall is calling out House Republicans on the Medicaid cuts.

What we haven’t had until recently is good data for how many constituents House moderates are ready to axe. But now the Center for American Progress has mushed together budget and census data to show the number of people who lose coverage by district with each option.

So let’s start with one of my favorites: New York Republican Mike Lawler (NY-17). Under the $880 billion proposal, 42,000 of Lawler’s constituents lose their health care coverage. Under the Obamacare cuts, the number who lose their health care is 25,300. It’s fewer but … more than 25,000 of his constituents lose their health care. It’s even wilder when you look at Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11) just south on Staten Island. Under the big slash, 79,000 of her constituents lose their health care coverage. That’s more than 10% of the people in her district. Under the kinder, gentler slash that Politico says the moderates want, the number is 58,800. Ummm okay, only 8%.

Lemme throw in one more detail. Speaker Mike Johnson? 88,000 lose coverage under the big slash — and 59,800 under the kinder, gentler slash.

Lawler is my congressman. Awhile back he was running Facebook ads promising to not touch Medicaid. I knew he’d cave; the only question was how much.