MORE TRUMP/MUSK INSANITIES, THUGGERY AND IDIOCY
Dr. Common Good
Just see if you can wrap your head around the continuing barrage of absolute craziness:
- Trump has asked the military to draw up option plans for retaking the Panama Canal. This, my friends, is not sane.
- On Wednesday, Trump was crassly hawking Teslas in the White House driveway. Not only is that tacky, but it is illegal. And it is symbolic of the unprecedented, unelected and flagrantly illegal role of Elon Musk, who donated almost $300 million to Trump’s campaign, has had almost $20 billion in federal contracts himself over the past decade, and who knows nothing about the agencies he is decimating or their key roles across many domains of service to the American people and service to our important global policy goals and position. Absolute, in your face corruption.
- During a public meeting with the Irish prime minister last week, Trump called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “a Palestinian,” saying that “he used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” If any other public figure had made such an appalling and derogatory comment, they would have been widely excoriated.
- Elon Musk, who has never gone to war or suffered from any war, and who knows – or cares — absolutely nothing about American values and American history, had the gall, the shameless gall, to call Senator Mark Kelly a “traitor” for publicly supporting Ukraine. That is just bottom-of-the-barrel, and ignorant beyond belief. Ukraine has been fighting, and suffering, on behalf of the West in the face of Russian aggression. Senator Kelly is a former space shuttle astronaut and Navy pilot who flew combat missions in the Gulf War. Musk does not deserve to be in the same room as Senator Kelly. More people should follow Kelley’s example and ditch their Teslas, “built and designed by an asshole,” as Kelley said.
- Let’s talk about “fraud and waste.” Last week the Trump administration returned all 41 migrants currently in Guantanamo to the U.S. He had previously transported a small number of migrants to Guantanamo using giant, expensive, and unnecessary C-17 military transports. So, Trump wasted $16 million in taxpayer money for a “deportation show” involving very few actual migrants. Where is Elon Musk and his “crusade” against “fraud and waste”? Oh, and in the first 50 or so days in office, Trump has already taken two weeks of that to go golfing in Florida, at a cost to taxpayers of $18 million! Where, oh where, is Elon Musk and the infamous DOGE?
- In a shocking comment on Friday demonstrating, yet again, what he really thinks of the Constitution (and what little he even knows about it), Trump declared himself the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer” during a vengeful rant at the Department of Justice (that title actually belongs to the attorney general). Really. But of course it fits with his absolutist authoritarian view of himself, a view that, among many other things, comes out in his repeated threats against anyone who does anything he doesn’t like – including people who protest against Elon Musk at Tesla stores, news media (CNN, MSNBC, even the Wall Street Journal and Fox), law firms that represent his political appointments, universities, and more. Meanwhile, he tries to extort countries under threat like Ukraine and Taiwan – the former for its minerals, the latter for its semiconductor industry.
- And the Trump/Musk wrecking ball continues to decimate agencies whose mission and work is critical to the American people, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, relied on for weather monitoring and reporting, among many other functions), the Department of Education (which provides funding for a broad range of school-based assistance, including help for students with special needs, school lunches for hungry children, and much more), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which prevents financial fraud and abuse of customers). And meanwhile, Trump/Musk have dropped legal actions against dangerous polluters, and have already gutted environmental regulations.
Trump is a thug, an ignorant, malicious thug, who does not give one grain of sand about the United States, its people, its role in the world, or anything else. Musk is his equally thuggish, equally ignorant, pro-Nazi, billionaire backer who, like Trump, thinks of the U.S. as nothing more than a transactional asset that can be used for personal gain. This is not the America of the past 250 years, and is not the America that the world knew just a few short months ago.