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.