A Liberal in Trumpistan

AS GROUNDHOG DAY approaches, we can say we already have a good sense of what the next four years under President Trump are going to be like.

Lots of lying, and daily chaos.

A tall tale about condoms.

February 1, 2025: As all Fox News viewers now know, Team Trump has swooped in to save American taxpayers from sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. Now all those Hamas killers will have to have unprotected sex and die of syphilis.

But wait. The free press does a little digging. In 2023, USAID did spend $61 million, worldwide, to send condoms and contraceptives to other countries. But only $8 million went for condoms.

And zero dollars for condoms went to Gaza.

You can read more about the matter – including $100 million which was headed for Gaza. But that money was to be provided by a humanitarian nonprofit – and was aimed at propping up basic hospital work in the pulverized Gaza Strip, where 47,000 Palestinians have already been killed.

“The very definition of tyranny.”

Same day: You may have heard about Project 2025, a right-wing plan for how to take over and dismantle the U.S. government. That plan was so unpopular that Candidate Dumpling had no other choice than to deny he knew anything about it – and wouldn’t know any of the authors of the plan, if they tumbled from the sky and landed on the lawn at Mar-a-Lago. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” he insisted during one of his debates with Kamala Harris. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it,” he continued.

Now, it is easy to believe that Trump didn’t read it, because Trump is an incurious numbskull. But we now know that the people who wrote the project have their fingerprints all over recent orders and policy pronouncements meant to seize control of every aspect of the federal government. Russ Vought, author of Chapter 2, in the document, was clear that he believes the Founding Fathers meant for the president to have “enormous power” and shape the government as he sees fit.

Vought is a fan of “enormous power,” himself – so long as it is wielded by a “modern conservative President.”

Yeah. What could go wrong with that?

He even quotes James Madison and then misses the point.

In Federalist No. 47, James Madison warned that “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

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“Competent white men must be in charge.”

2/3/25: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announces that Darren Beattie will serve as acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. And we can assuredly report that Beattie is no DEI hire. In fact, he was fired from a different post during Trump’s first term as president, after speaking at a conference of white nationalists.

As recently as last October, he laid out his beliefs succinctly: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

Beattie looking competent?

FUN FACT: Beattie also started a website where you can buy t-shirts with fun messages like, “It’s okay to deny 2020,” and another, which excuses the MAGA nuts for their violence, on January 6, with this: “FBI setup to frame Trump supporters as insurrectionists.”

Same day: Apparently, tariffs will hurt Americans – no matter how often Trump apologists say, “Don’t worry.”

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa has asked Donald Dumpling for a “carve out.” After citing the high costs farmers faced during the Biden years, he begged, “So I plead [with] President Trump to exempt potash from the tariff because family farmers get most of our potash from Canada,” he said of the crucial fertilizer ingredient.

As Axios reports, “American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall said in a statement over the weekend that ‘farmers and rural communities will bear the brunt of retaliation’ from the tariffs.”

Christian vs. Christian vs. Elon Musk.

Same day: If you haven’t been paying much attention, you might have missed the attacks by Trump-loving Christians on non-Trump-loving Christians. Lately, Elon Musk has joined the fray, although we should point out that he is not a Christian of any style and positions himself with either the agnostics or atheists.

Which is not entirely clear.

What Elon does hate is Christians following the gospels of Jesus, caring for the poor and needy. Currently, Elon is in an uproar because Lutheran churches support Global Refuge, an organization that helps resettle refugees – including in this country. F**k those refugees, right, Elon.

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2/4/25: Sean Parnell has snagged a coveted “competent white man” appointment, to be spokesman for the Pentagon, and serve as a drinking buddy (possibly) for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Like Pete, Sean is a combat veteran, and also an alleged wife abuser. In 2021, during a custody battle in Butler County, Pa., Parnell’s estranged wife, Laurie Snell, provided damning testimony.

Snell alleged that “[Parnell] tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him” to get free, the Inquirer reported last week.

“He was strangling me,” she said, and told the judge that Parnell once called her a “whore” and a “piece of s---“ while holding her down. The newspaper reported that Snell said Parnell slapped one of their children hard enough to leave a mark through the child’s shirt.

She also testified last week that Parnell told her to get an abortion while they were on a trip in 2008….

In a statement following last week’s hearing, Parnell said Snell “made a number of false allegations. There is no truth to them, not one. They are complete fabrications; not distortions or misrepresentations — just flat-out lies.

Snell also said that Parnell had a nine-month long affair in 2014, with Melanie Rawley, who she identified in court as his girlfriend.

A quick check, appears to show that Parnell – who lost a race to become Pennsylvania’s U.S. senator in 2022, despite Donald “Grab ’em by the Pussy” Trump’s endorsement – solaced himself in the arms of Ms. Rawley. On December 29, 2022, the recently divorced Mr. Parnell posted this photo on then-Twitter:

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2/5/25: President Trump told a great story about Sen. Tommy Tuberville and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes on Wednesday. Tuberville, he explained to reporters, had coached Patrick in college.

That, of course, was wrong; because Tuberville coached at Auburn – which is in Alabama – and Mahomes played quarterback at Texas Tech – which you will not be surprised to learn is in Texas.

Only Trump’s story got even better – by which, I mean, he was blowing it out his ass, as he so often does.

Also known as “lying.”

Donald was in the process of signing another executive order, banning transgender individuals from playing sports, or peeing in the wrong bathrooms, or basically existing, when the topic of sports – and his plan to attend the Super Bowl – percolated to the surface of his conscious mind. He wanted to talk about Tommy and what he told him about his college quarterback. “I said, ‘How good was he?’ He said, ‘You don't want to know how good. He made me into a great coach.’”

A conversation Donald just made up.

FUN FACT: I would fail as a humorist if I neglected to mention a favorite “Tommy Tuberville” moment from the past. One day, a reporter asked the senator to name the three branches of government – a relatively easy task for a member of one of the three. Coach Senator gave it the old college try. The three branches, he suggested, were, “You know, the House, the Senate, and the Executive.”

Correct answer: Legislative (inc. the House and Senate), Executive (yay, Tommy!) and Judicial.

Tommy also botched a question about World War II, even though his father fought in that war. He said his dad fought to help save Europe from socialism – when, in fact, the war was fought to save that continent from fascism.

(It is assuredly true that many of the MAGA faithful cannot tell the difference between the two.)

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Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Reports: Jobs Added or Lost.

2/6/25: The final monthly jobs report of the Biden presidency is released. The number is preliminary, and subject to change until the March report, but for now, it appears the economy added 143,000 jobs in January. (You can be picky and argue that Donald Dumpling gets credit for at least some of those jobs, added in the last eleven days of the month.)

We will leave it to you to decide, but we will keep it simple, and end Mr. Biden’s “job clock” on February 1.

The December jobs report is subject to change in February; but for now, we know that in 2024, the U.S. economy added 1,996,000 jobs.

During 2023, 2,594,000 jobs were added.

During 2022, the figure was 4,555,000.

In Mr. Biden’s first year in office, starting with the February report, 6,868,000 million jobs were added to the economy or recovered in the wake of the pandemic.

We can also report that on February 1, President Trump inherited a much better economy than he left, with unemployment at 4.0%. The rate on February 1, 2021, when we start the Biden clock, was 6.4%.

So, how do we fairly compare presidential records regarding job gains and unemployment rates? This blogger considers Trump the worst president in U.S. history – but job losses during the pandemic are hard to blame on his policies. Every country in the world saw economic losses during that period. So I have always tried to compare job numbers during his first 37 full months in office – before the pandemic hit – with Obama’s last 37 months in the White House.

CHART OF JOBS ADDED…

Jobs added under Obama in his last 37 months:

2013: 57,000 (December)

2014: 2,991,000

2015: 2,713,000

2016: 2,331,000

Total: 8,092,000 divided by 37 = 218,703 jobs per month.

(For simplicity, we always skip January 2017, because that month was split between Obama and Trump.)

Jobs added under Trump in his first 37 months:

2017: 1,895,000 (February-December)

2018: 2,286,000

2019: 1,986,000

2020: 497,000 (January-February)

Total: 6,664,000 divided by 37 = 180,108 jobs per month.

Now, we also know that once the pandemic hit, the U.S. economy shed, in just March and April 2020, 21,868,000 jobs. Then, from May to November, we experienced a welcome rebound, with 12,037,000 jobs added or recovered. Then, in December 2020, the economy closed out a terrible year with an additional loss of 183,000 jobs.

That put the loss for the entire year at 9,517,000 jobs. So, yes, you can argue that Joseph Biden didn’t add all the jobs it looks as if he did – but rather, simply recovered “Trump jobs” that were temporarily lost.

Let’s figure all the jobs added under Biden in 2021 were really “Trump jobs” come back from the dead. By the end of June, the U.S. had recovered 9,955,000 million jobs. But the good numbers under Biden continued. From July through December, the Biden recovery added 3,953,000 jobs, equal to 60% of all the jobs added to the nation’s economy by Mr. Trump, before the pandemic hit.

Again, we can bend over backwards and try to be fair. If we take Mr. Biden’s last two years in office, after all the pandemic losses are regained, and a net of another 3,953,000 jobs for kicks, then we have his last 25 months in office to consider. Now we have 4,733,000 jobs added, January 2023-January 2025, or:

189,320 per month.

Another positive: Wages were up 4.1%, year-over-year in January 2025.

We should also note that Biden’s policies reduced unemployment to 4.2% by November 2021, and kept it from ever going higher the rest of his presidency, a little more than three years. Trump inherited an economy on the rise, with unemployment standing at only 4.7% in January 2017. He didn’t “inherit a mess” as he has so often complained.

There are other variables, including population growth, and labor participation rate, that could put Trump slightly ahead of Biden, but the raw numbers are clear. After Obama cleaned up George W. Bush’s mess, he got the economy rolling again – and Trump jumped on the bandwagon and kept it going.

Then Biden inherited the Pandemic Recession, and helped us recover, and kept the U.S. economy chugging.

Let’s see if Trump can keep up the good work.

Same day: Dear Leader (and we do mean Donald J. Trump) woke up angry this morning and insisted that one of the major U.S. television networks be shut down. According to Dear Leader, CBS edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her look more polished in her answers.

This prompted our president to go on the following rant:

CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before. They 100% removed Kamala’s horrible election changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview. This was election changing “stuff,” Election Interference and, quite simply, Election Fraud at a level never seen before. CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable “NEWS” show should be immediately terminated.

So, let’s see if we can tease out the meaning of Dear Leader’s rant. First, D.L. hates the free press – unless the free press kisses his ass. (No way of knowing whether he uses his favorite orange skin toner on his posterior or not.)

For example, when Fox News spent one broadcast after another, pushing the idea that the 2020 election was stolen (and it wasn’t) that was “good journalism,” even though Fox got hammered for $787.5 million in a defamation suit for lying about a company Fox said helped in the stealing.

Which was imaginary.

You would think that even the most loyal MAGA types would see the danger in Trump’s words. You would imagine that even Sean Hannity, the biggest buffoon on TV, would realize that if Dear Leader can revoke the license of CBS, the next Democratic president could revoke the license for Fox News.

You would imagine that all Americans could see the hypocrisy: Fox News = good = stories helpful to Donald Trump.

Fox News hires Lara Trump = gives her a show of her own = this version of the free press is great.

Trump picks two former Fox hosts = Pete “Grab ’em by the Pussy” Hegseth to head the Department of Defense = Sean Duffy to be Secretary of Transportation = Duffy married to yet another Fox News host = the kind of free-press-you-can-trust-and-always-renew their licenses.

This is not hard to grasp.

There really is NO FREE PRESS if a Dear Leader can start silencing critics – or arresting them – or shooting them, at the extreme.

A little nepotism never hurts.

Trump isn’t Hitler yet. He doesn’t have people running gas chambers. He’s not Vladimir Putin. He hasn’t had critics thrown off fifth floor balconies. He’s not Mohammed bin Salman, ordering a journalist cut to pieces with a bone saw.

The problem, my fellow Americans, is that Trump has every inclination to go in an authoritarian direction.

And I’m sorry, my MAGA friends.

You are too clueless to notice.

(Donald has also said ABC should lose its license, and he has threatened NBC with a similar fate, multiple times.)

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2/7/25: President Trump attends the National Prayer Breakfast, where he calls for blessings on all Americans…

Nah!

Trump insists that Democrats “oppose religion. They oppose God.” He also announces that he will create a White House Faith Office, which will be led by his long-time spiritual advisor Paula White.

What do we know about Pastor White? First, she preaches the “prosperity gospel.” That is, if the faithful will tithe to the church – that is, to her church – God will reward them with wealth and good health, and maybe a new Ferrari.

White also insisted, in the wake of Donald’s 2020 defeat, that “demonic confederacies” had been at work to steal the vote.

UPDATE (March 16, 2025): Since November 3, 2020, 1,593 days have passed, and no court has ever found significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. Dozens of recounts of all kinds of state and federal elections have also shown the dependability of the electronic vote, when compared with hand recounts of paper ballots.)

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2/8/25: President Dumpling announces plans to help victims of racism resettle in the U.S., a cause this blogger can get behind. In some mysterious way, however, Dumps is not keen on helping, say, Rohingyas or Uighurs. He is pumped about helping white South Africans, who have had land taken away by the government. That land, of course, they took away from the natives a hundred years ago.

The blogger is sympathetic to the plight of all kinds of people; but Donald’s rare concern for what he calls “human rights violations” seems hypocritical.

He has described the actions of the South African government as “government sponsored race-based discrimination.”

(Compare with Donald’s “they’re eating the pets” take on Haitians fleeing abuse.)

FUN FACT: Elon Musk is a native of South African and a really big fan of helping the white people there.

Same day: Donald also decides to fire most members of the Board of the Kennedy Center and pick a new chairperson.

Himself.

I think we can all agree that the name “Donald Trump” is synonymous with “culture,” which the Center has always tried to advance.

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2/9/25: Good news, America! President Trump went to the Super Bowl in New Orleans last night. So far, he has been working hard at presidenting, and in three weeks in office has only traveled to New Orleans once, and Mar-a-Lago three times. Then again, unless you are a numismatist, you will be thrilled to know that Donald Dumpling has told the U.S. Mint to stop stamping pennies.

Did you know it costs the government 3.07 cents to make one penny? We lost $179 million in 2023, producing coins that no one loves, and that we are too lazy even to bend down and pick up anymore, if we see one on the ground.

Finally! Donald has done something I can agree with.

UPDATE: Dammit! Just when I thought Donald was going to get something right, I learn that if we stop making pennies, we will need to mint more nickels, and it costs 13.8¢ to make a nickel.

Same day: The penny isn’t the only part of American culture that The Dumpling wants to see vanish soon. Upset on Friday with an editorial in the Washington Post, President Thin Skin called for the immediate firing of the author, Eugene Robinson. Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

Naturally, Trump labeled him “INCOMPETENT,” capitalizing at random, as is his wont.

Then Elon Musk joined the anti-free press parade, labeling Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Katherine Long a “disgusting and cruel person.” Long’s sin was investigating individuals that Musk has hired to help him run his Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), including Marko Elez. Long was able to run down social media posts Elez, 25, had made that were clearly racist.

In one post he made clear, “You couldn’t pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” (I am thinking women, even in his ethnicity, are probably not lining up to wed the boy, as it is).

Another gem: “Normalize Indian hate.”

And another: “For the record, I was racist, before it was cool.”

But wait! There’s more! Before he became “famous,” Elez touted the idea of a “eugenic immigration policy.”

Also, he thought we should repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Last but not least, he showed his love for humanity, noting that he “would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

You are forgiven, if you are mixing up Elez with the other Musk staffer, Gavin Kliger, who liked to post online material culled from the neo-Nazi ramblings of Nick Fuentes – who once got invited to dine at Mar-a-Lago.

We should also mention Edward Coristine, 19, whose username at LinkedIn was “bigballs,” although that account has now been deleted. As Rolling Stone notes, there is “evidence suggesting he may have once tried to pay for a cyberattack with Bitcoin.” He’s the Musk hire who was previously fired from Path Network, for “leaking proprietary company information” to a competitor.

Anyway, Vice President Vance, who continues to crawl under bars set lower than for any vice president in history, still manages to crawl. Vance’s wife is of Indian heritage, and Vance’s children are darker skinned than many Trump fans like, but Vance still managed to say he thought Elez deserved a second chance.

Vance even managed to attack Ms. Long who uncovered the racist posts, writing, “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”

FUN FACT: Speaking of “journalists who try to destroy people,” let’s circle back to One America News and Newsmax. Both organizations were sued for defamation for insisting that there was proof two Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, both African American, had stolen tens of thousands of votes in that state, during the “Stolen Election” of 2020.

Freeman and Moss were inundated with death threats and terrorized at home as a result of all the lies told about them.

President Trump attacked them by name – and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, was a crusader spreading lies about the women.

They finally hired lawyers and fought back – not to mention the fact that Georgia state officials absolved them of any wrongdoing. Rudy got his lyin’ ass dragged into court and a jury listened to what he had said – and what the facts were – and said he owed $148.2 million dollars in damages.

Then Rudy caught a “break,” when a judge reduced his damage settlement by a couple of million, to $145,969,000, reflecting the fact that Freeman and Moss had already collected more than $2.2 million in a defamation case against OANN.

For fun, the two women also won a defamation suit filed against the right-wing website Gateway Pundit, although lawyers for the website managed to craft a deal which kept details of the settlement secret. You could tell who won, however, when the website removed twenty articles in its feed related to the alleged misdeeds of the two women.

(President Trump? Yeah. He has never apologized for his lies.)

Now we learn that certain news agencies, who have had dedicated office spaces in the Pentagon – you know, so they can keep us abreast of important developments involving war and peace – have been “rotated out” of those spaces. Eight organizations are out. Eight are in. See if you can tell the difference.

OUT IN

CNN BREITBART

THE HILL DAILY CALLER

NBC NEWS FREE PRESS

NEW YORK TIMES HUFFINGTON POST

NPR NEW YORK POST

POLITICO NEWSMAX

WAR ZONE ONE AMERICA NEWS NETWORK

WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON EXAMINER

UPDATE (March 7, 2025): We can now report that Newsmax has also been pummeled in court, after defaming Smartmatic, a voting software company, having claimed Smartmatic helped steal victory from Donald J. Trump.

The cost of all that “Stolen Election” lying: A cool $40 million.

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2/10/25: We all remember how Donald Dumpling won the “War on Christmas” during his first term in office. Since he hasn’t yet managed to end the war in Ukraine – which he claimed he could do in one day if elected – he has turned his attention to the gory “War on Paper Straws.”

As USA Today explains:

The president ordered federal agency and department heads to stop buying paper straws and make sure they aren’t offered in their buildings. Agencies also must work to eliminate policies that “disfavor plastic straws” and Trump is tasking the head of his Domestic Policy Council with creating a “national strategy to end the use of paper straws.”

Trump complained Monday to reporters in the Oval Office that paper straws “break, they explode. If something’s hot, they don’t last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds, it’s a ridiculous situation.”

“So we’re going back to plastic straws,” the president added.

To put it bluntly, the president is an ill-informed lout. Plastic pollution is an increasing health issue. The material breaks down slowly, but as it does, microplastics break off and enter the water, blow about in the air, and end up in the food chain. Even worse, a recent study, reported in Nature Medicine indicates that we may have as much plastic in our brains as would equal the weight of a plastic spoon.

Or straw.

What we really need is more plastic in our brains.

Same day: Trump buddy Steve Bannon agrees to plead guilty in a border fraud case. In case you have forgotten, Steve and three shady pals bilked the MAGA faithful into donating millions of dollars on a promise to build a border wall with Mexico, using those donations.

No wall was ever built. Bannon’s pals all went to jail, and then Donald Dumpling pardoned Steve on all federal charges. But not his three pals. So, the New York State courts filed state charges against Steve and nailed him.

Same day: Trump tells reporters that he was correct to pardon all the fine, patriotic January 6 rioters.

“I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” he said in a half-hour news conference with the reporters traveling with him on his flight to the Super Bowl on Sunday.

“That’s who were assaulted and they were treated unfairly. There’s never been a group of people in this country outside of maybe one instance I can think of, but I won’t get into it, that were treated more horribly than the people of J6,” he continued. “So no, I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”

Same day: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard.” The president did not immediately announce the appointment of new members to the boards.

“We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards,” Trump wrote in his post on Monday morning. “We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

FUN FACT: Donald Dumpling clearly intends to fill key posts with complete toadies during his second term. For the board at the Naval Academy, he has chosen Walt Nauta. Nauta is a navy veteran (and thank you for your service), which is good, and was indicted along with Donald in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which is not. Walt was facing six felony counts, including one for obstruction of justice, after he lied about helping the former president play hide-and-seek with highly classified documents.

Including nuclear secrets.

Walt told investigators he knew nothing about boxes of documents being moved around to keep them from being found. Then the feds revealed they had Nauta on surveillance cameras doing just that.

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“To pursue justice impartially.”

2/11/25: For reasons difficult to fathom, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, has ordered the Department of Justice to drop a federal case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Adams, who faced an impressive array of corruption and bribery charges, had gone to Mar-a-Lago to beg to be rescued, and apparently convinced the president that he, Adams, alone could help Donald clear out all the illegal immigrants in his city.

As always, Donald’s decision came down to Donald’s needs and wants and perceived hurts.

Trump, who was convicted last year of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment, has previously expressed solidarity with Adams. He hinted at the possibility of a pardon in December, telling reporters that the mayor had been “treated pretty unfairly.”

He had also claimed, without offering evidence, that Adams was being persecuted for criticizing former President Joe Biden’s policies on immigration.

“I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ, for speaking out against open borders,” Trump said in October at a Manhattan event attended by Adams. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

Seven top prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office for Southern District of New York resigned in protest. As Hagan Scotte, one of those prosecutors, put it, only a “fool” or a “coward” would comply with Bove’s demand to drop the charges.

Danielle Sassoon, a Republican, and Trump’s own temporary pick to fill the top job at the Southern District, also refused.

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon said the order to dismiss the case was "inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor.” She added: “I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.”

Nor was Mayor Adams alone in his bribery and corruption schemes. At least five others had been charged, one top aide had been forced to resign, as had a handful of other aides and associates.

And one man charged had already pleaded guilty.

Sprinkle in a few charges of witness tampering for fun, add phones being seized by federal agents, and allegations of a $100,000 bribe in one incident, and you can see why prosecutors who had worked on the case were reluctant to see the suspects all skate. As is so often true with Donald Trump, honest people soon leave his service, and only scoundrels and sycophants survive.

A smile for Mayor Adams - charges dropped.

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2/13/25: Kansas farmers learn to their dismay that Elon Musk and his DOGE storm troopers are going after waste, fraud and abuse perpetrated by dastardly Kansas farmers. Congressman Tracy Mann, who represents Kansas District 1, is forced to explain to local news outlets that in reality, there is no waste, fraud, abuse, or even federal flatulence. Rather, USAID sends “surplus food” – from farmers in places like Kansas – to people in need around the globe. Rep. Mann calls it a “win-win,” for both farmers in his state and U.S. foreign policy, adding that “I have never met a farmer that doesn’t care about feeding hungry mouths around the world.”

In fact, he argues, if you want to limit the growth of international terrorist groups, providing food to starving populations “is the most cost-effective thing we can do.” Elon and the DOGE Boys don’t give a shit about starving humans.

Same day: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invites far-right activist Jack Posobiec along on a trip to Belgium, Germany and Poland. Jack does Hegseth a favor in return, after Hegseth informs European allies that Vladimir Putin can pretty much expect to have his way in any negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Pete first says that it will be “unreasonable” for Ukraine to expect to be able to return to its borders, as those borders existed in 2014. So: A win for invaders!

Second, Ukraine is not going to be allowed to join NATO, if Pete and Donald have their way. A second win for Putin!

Posobiec “pays” for his free ride to Europe by misinforming his ill-informed followers on “X,” “What SecDef Hegseth accomplished on this trip is historic. He delivered hard truths that are necessary to set conditions for peace. And he showed his true concern for the American soldier.”

Oh, and FU to the Ukrainian people and all their soldiers, tens of thousands of whom are already dead or maimed.

Posobiec is a former naval intelligence officer, so you know he has some brains; but he is also famous for spreading conspiracy theories, like the “Pizzagate” myth, about Democrats running a child sex-trafficking operation out of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.

He is also a fan of the January 6 rioters – which makes me realize I should add that he was an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy, not the Russian navy.

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2/14/25: Happy Valentines’ Day to all right-wing romantics – for example, Donald Dumpling, Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk.

Today, far-right influencer Ashley St. Clair (see below) announced that she and Elon welcomed their new baby five months ago. Ashley has previously been seen posing alongside neo-Nazi weirdos Nick Fuentes, Jacob Wohl and Tim Gionet. So, you get a little more insight into the Musk vibe. Ashley is also proud author of an anti-transgender children’s book, Elephants Are Not Birds.

Elon is doing his best to support Christian values by having thirteen children by four women, exactly one of whom he bothered to marry.

Elon's ladies are often hot; and also kind of crazy.

UPDATE (February 28, 2025): Not to be undone, Shivon Zilis (see below), announces that she and Elon have welcomed another new baby to this world, their fourth child together, and lusty Elon’s fourteenth.

I think we can assume that Elon buys Valentines’ Day cards in bulk for all his ladies and all his offspring.

FUN FACT: The white supremacists who are always busy warning us about the “White Replacement” crisis (see: Stephen Miller, key White House aide), will probably be perturbed to find out (assuming they read this fine blog) that Zilis has one Canadian and one Punjabi parent.

For the white supremacist dolts, “Punjabi” means she’s of Indian background – as in people from India.

And Canada is the place that will never be our 51st state.

Miller ponders the "dangers" of White Replacement.

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2/15/25: It should not be lost on any American, that President Trump has a clear idea of where he wants to go – even if it means dragging most of us along for the undemocratic ride. His goal is to amass and deploy unlimited power.

Today, he posted:

That quote is attributed to the French field marshal, and later emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Not exactly the image of a future that most voters signed on for in November.

If Trump has weird ideas about being the savior of our great land, co-president Elon Musk is even weirder. A short clip of his father, Errol Musk, talking, helps us understand why the boy turned out as he did. In this clip, Errol informs an amused interviewer that it is “common knowledge” that President Obama is “a queer, married to a man who dresses as a woman.” He goes on to say that Joan Rivers revealed the truth, and “she was dead two weeks later,” implying with zero evidence, that she was whacked by Team Obama. When his interviewer laughs, Father Musk adds, with the supreme confidence of an arrogant asshole, that it’s “common knowledge,” that you can “look up on any internet thing.”

“Yeah. Michele Obama is a man. Obviously,” he continues. “They have pictures of her in track suits with her 9-inch schlong hanging down it’s leg.”

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2/16/25: Team Trump 2.0 is making it clear that protecting the free press is not a priority, or even something Donald Dumpling views as worth consideration.

The president has now banned Associated Press journalists from riding aboard Air Force One or joining other reporters in the Oval Office.

And why?

Because the AP has refused, so far, to go along with the silly renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, as Donald demands.

“Make America Great Again” means groveling before Trump, no matter how petty his every whim.

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2/17/25: Elon is in the news again, calling for journalists at CBS News to face “long prison sentences” for what he believes they did during the 2024 election. He believes editors at “60 Minutes” reworked Kamala Harris’s answers to questions she was asked during an interview, to make her sound more polished. Clearly, Mr. Musk fails to understand the importance of a robust free press.

In a hypothetical world, this blogger would not want a Democratic president or that president’s hypothetical sycophant, calling for Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham to be sent to jail for long prison sentences, just because their jobs are predicated on making Donald Dumpling sound smarter than he is.

We should also remind readers that President Dumpling has called for “60 Minutes” to be “immediately terminated.” The Dumpling has also insisted that CBS should also lose its license to broadcast.

FUN WITH THE DUMPLING: We would like to report that the 47th President of the United States showed up at the Daytona 500 on Sunday. First, Donald ordered Air Force One to do a flyover at the racetrack – burning up taxpayer dollars spent on fuel. Then he did a lap on the track, in his presidential limousine, which had been hauled to the track aboard a second Air Force plane, burning up even more dollars that you or I, or Grandma Smith had to pay.

We also know that the previous weekend, Donald decided he just had to travel to New Orleans to watch the Super Bowl – instead of staying home and watching the game with Melania and all the kids and grandkids.

In fact, Donald left the game shortly before halftime.

EXTRA DUMPLING FUN: We should also report that Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) has big plans to honor the president. She wants to establish June 14 as a new federal holiday! And that holiday shall be called not just “Flag Day,” but “Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day,” oddly putting Trump before the flag.

Rep. Tenney wins the “Ass Kissing” award for the week – despite stiff competition from other shameless smoochers.

She stuck the landing, as they say – the smooch – when she justified a new holiday, arguing that Donald Trump is “the founder of America’s golden age.”

Rep. Tenney and Donald Dumpling.

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2/18/25: Tom Homan, President Trump’s “border czar,” has come under criticism for suggesting that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be prosecuted for explaining legal rights to undocumented immigrants.

Even Jonathan Turley, Fox News’ legal analysist, warns that such a prosecution would “be an assault on free speech rights.”

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“And I’ve had it.”

2/21/25: The Dumpling has completed a month of “presidenting” but he’s having trouble getting Russia and Ukraine to end their war – even though he said he could end it in a single day, if elected.

That means he’s 0 for 30.

Meanwhile, the president has said Ukraine has “no cards to play” which is a skillful negotiating stance if you want Russia to hold out until the murderous Vladimir Putin gets everything he desires.

After three crushing years of war in Europe, Trump goes on to tell Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, that he’s the real person suffering – with all the negotiating and posting stupidly on Truth Social.

“You get sick of it, you just get sick of it. And I’ve had it,” he explains.

Putin: Still putting it over on Donald Trump.

Same day: During an Oval Office meeting, with reporters present, Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, lays it on with a trowel, promising that Donald will make America rich again. “I’d like to thank you President Trump,” he says, while The Dumpling looks on. “It is the greatest honor to work for you, to be with you, to carry your name, your leadership, and your flag throughout the world.” After criticizing the free press for not fawning over his boss, Lutnick assured reporters, “I know him as the smartest, most thoughtful, and most intuitive person I’ve ever met.”

Secretary Lutnick (who has an estimated worth of $1.5 billion) is going to be in line for a nice tax cut if Trump gets the plan he wants through Congress.

Same day: The Dumpling wrapped up another busy day by canning Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replacing him with Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine. As Donald tells the story, he fell in love with Caine in 2018, when the general assured Trump that ISIS could be defeated in a week. Gen. Caine was so happy to meet him, Donald claims, that he slapped a red MAGA hat on his cranium and gushed, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

In case you’ve forgotten, it took far more than a week to defeat ISIS, with most of the bloodiest work carried out by our Kurdish allies.

Trump “rewarded” the Kurds by completely turning his back on them, after all the shooting was complete.

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2/23/25: If you aren’t paying attention, you may not realize that President Trump and his enablers are trying to rewrite the history of what happened on January 6, 2021. Now the most violent attackers are described as “patriots” and the assault on Congress is called an act of “freedom of expression, and right of assembly.”

On “X,” the blogger notices a post by some dope named Mark Naughton. He says he was “fortunate” to follow “Bigo” Barnett on his return to the Capitol. Barnett was last seen on the day of the riot with his feet propped on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office desk.

Meanwhile, a Trump ass-kisser named Jake Posobiec insisted in a speech Sunday, that Donald Trump was “the living embodiment of the American Constitution.”

He even repeated Trump’s recent claim (see: 2/15/25), slightly altered: “A man who saves his Country, violates no law.”

Evidence that Elon Musk and his hardy band of government wreckers don’t know what they’re doing continues to accumulate.

Park workers at Yosemite decide to hang an upside down flag, representing a nation in distress, from the top of El Capitan, a formidable rock wall that visitors see as they enter that iconic national park.

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The United States stands with scuzz bags.

2/24/25: The United States todays sides with seventeen other countries and votes against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. Key U.S. allies, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, The Philippines, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom vote in favor.

President Trump stands “proudly” with:

Russia

Belarus

Burkina Faso (admit it; you could never find this country on a map)

Burundi (or this one)

Central African Republic

Equatorial Guinea

Eritrea

Haiti

Hungary

Israel

Mali

Marshall Islands (you didn’t even know this was a country)

Nicaragua

Niger

North Korea

Palau (yes, that’s a country, too)

– and –

Sudan

In other words, Donald Trump has the United States of America standing shoulder-to-asshole with:

Vladimir Putin, famous for having critics thrown off fifth-floor balconies, or poisoned with radioactive tea.

Kim Jong-un, whose government holds at least 120,000 political prisoners, and abused American prisoner Otto Warmbier, who died soon after his release. Communist North Korea is considered by many to have the worst human rights record in the world. The Kim family has ruled since 1948.

Nicaragua – another country where arresting government critics is in style, including human rights defenders, and thirteen individuals affiliated with Mountain Gateway, a Texas-based religious organization.

Burkina Faso –currently ruled by the military and subject to regular coups.

Haiti – one of the countries Trump labeled “shitholes, during his first term in office, and .currently considered a “failed state,” overrun by gangs.

Belarus – which just held an election, to no one’s surprise handily won by incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko. It was Lukashenko’s seventh successive victory, as the ally of Mr. Putin extended his 31-year rule.

Yay, America!

Meanwhile, Team Trump 2.0 was slapped in the head by Team Trump 2.0, as the Office of Budget Management has informed the more-than-two-million employees of the federal government that they do not have to reply to a threatening email sent to them last week by Elon Musk.

Elon insisted that every employee would have to respond with five bullet points, explaining what they accomplished at work the previous week, or be fired. Failure to respond, he warned, “will be taken as a resignation.”

That set the clock ticking, with the deadline at midnight Monday. Now the clock has been whacked with a baseball bat.

Response is now “voluntary.”

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Oligarchs welcome!

2/25/25: You can argue the details of immigration policy until your hair turns gray and all your teeth fall out. Some issues are simple, others not. In that second category, we have Team Trump’s recent decision to turn away a Christian convert from Iran. Artemis Ghasemzadeh was seeking asylum, knowing that a return to her homeland could mean imprisonment or worse.

How did she come to convert?

The New York Times explains:

She first entered a church on a visit to Turkey. She remembers feeling a sense of calm so overpowering that she purchased a small Bible. She wrapped it in her clothes and smuggled it back to her hometown, Isfahan, in central Iran.

Artemis Ghasemzadeh’s conversion from Islam to Christianity evolved over a few years starting in 2019, through an Iranian network of underground churches and secret online classes. Three years ago, she was baptized and, in her words, “reborn.”

Converting was colossally risky. While Christians born into the faith are free to practice, Iran’s Shariah laws state that abandoning Islam for another religion is considered blasphemy, punishable by death.

The young Iranian woman fled last December. “I wanted to live freely, to live without fear, to live without someone wanting to kill me,” she told a reporter recently. In company with her brother, Shahin, also a convert, they took several flights that got them to Mexico City. Next, they paid a smuggler $3,000 each to transport them to Tijuana, and used a ladder supplied by the smuggler to climb the border wall. Landing on U.S. soil, Artemis remembers telling her brother, “It’s over. We are finally here.”

Under other administrations the pair would have been granted temporary asylum, and their asylum claim would have been scheduled for a hearing. Instead, Artemis and Shahin were nabbed by border patrol agents. Both were sent to detention facilities – and on February 12, Artemis was placed aboard a military flight and sent back to Panama. Now she and nine other Iranian Christians are trapped at a camp in Panama.

If Panama sends them back to Iran, it could mean death.

As the Times explains, “Every night Ms. Ghasemzadeh scribbles Christian quotes in a small notebook. On one page, she wrote to Jesus in Persian: ‘I am certain you can hear my voice from up there. So please help.’ Next to it she drew a tiny red heart.”

By comparison, President Trump is now pushing a plan to create a kind of golden visa card. Not “VISA” cards, as in credit cards; but cards good to admit one visa applicant to the United States.

Such cards can be yours, in return for a minimal fee! Well, minimal for oligarchs. For $5 million, an individual can be admitted to this country, granted a green card, and offered a path to citizenship.

Same day: For a second day in a row, Team Trump 2.0 is slapped silly by Team Trump 2.0. Elon Musk now warns that federal workers will be given one more chance to answer an email, and should they fail to outline their accomplishments in five bullet points, covering the last week, they shall be fired.

The heartlessness of all of this, compounded by the ineptitude of the messaging, has led to an outpouring of anger, and congresspersons are hearing that anger in public town halls. Don’t worry, however, if you are fired, Rep. Mark Alford told attendees who had just been fired during one such gathering.

“Just because you have a government job, doesn’t mean it’s a lifetime appointment like a Supreme Court,” he responded in tone-deaf style.

“So I would encourage anyone who finds themselves in this situation to realize that we are going to get this economy turning again. There are jobs available. God has a plan and purpose for your life.”

(Right now, His “purpose” is that you should be unemployed and stressed out about how to pay your family’s bills.)

Meanwhile, former Republican congressman Tim Miller posed a pointed question for heretofore colleagues: “What did you guys think you were signing up for?”

He noted that for decades Trump has made it clear “he does not care at all about the humanity of anyone besides Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who has been serving as Trump’s hatchet man, “certainly has not shown one shred of evidence that he cares about the humanity and dignity of the little people that that, you know, he doesn’t know or care to learn about what it is that they did in the government.”

He told Republicans, “This is the program that y’all signed up for. And if you don’t, if you want to show compassion and humanity and dignity, then you’re going to have to take power back from them because these guys aren’t going to do it.”

Begging them to won’t work, he said.

“Like you might as well do nothing, right? Because asking Donald Trump and Elon Musk to show humanity is a fool’s errand,” he said.

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2/26/25: Remember how easily measles used to spread – and how much damage it could do to unvaccinated kids, not to mention unborn children, if pregnant mothers contracted the disease?

Of course you don’t! Because we vaccinated the shit out of our children and measles was considered eradicated in this country in 2000.

Only the anti-vaxxers knew better.

Today, in Texas and New Mexico, we have a growing outbreak. There are 130 known cases, with eighteen patients hospitalized. The first death of a school-age child in Lubbock, Texas, has been announced.

The situation is expected to get worse because an exposed person may not show symptoms for two weeks. Meanwhile, they can spread contagion everywhere they go, where the unvaccinated might be found. Even worse, the disease can spread with frightening ease. Droplets expelled by an infected person can live in the air and on various surfaces for up to two hours.

As the infectious disease physician Amesh Adalja of Johns Hopkins University explained, “Measles still kills over 100,000 individuals every year worldwide.” This rare death of an American child, Dr. Adalja notes, “should serve as a reminder that there was a reason that the vaccine was developed and that the vaccine is a value to individuals. These deaths are almost entirely preventable”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that a 95% vaccination rate is needed to ensure “herd immunity” in this country. In recent years, vaccinations have declined, and only 92.7 percent of kindergartners in the 2023-2024 school year had had the shot. That left 280,000 children at risk.

Make Measles Great Again!

If measles aren’t your style, how about gross incompetence from the DOGE team? Elon and his merry band of “efficiency” hawks have shown themselves to be spectacularly inept when cutting federal workers and gutting government programs. The latest example: Employees of the National Park Service (which has seen 1,700 workers terminated or take early retirement) have found their credit cards frozen.

That means rangers can’t fill their vehicles with gas, and there’s no money for toilet paper for park visitors.

(Tourists can always use leaves.)

Among the firings were park service personnel who clean up after visitors. Yay. More trash to look at while visiting Yellowstone. Also, rangers who patrol the back country, looking for lost or injured hikers. Yay. More meals for grizzlies! And, if a park catches fire? Crews who battle blazes have been reduced. So, campers just jump in the nearest river or lake and pray you escape the flames.

The final bonehead bonus?

DOGE rescinded job offers for thousands of seasonal park workers, always essential during the busy summer season, when tens of millions of Americans hit the road, hoping to gaze upon Mount Rushmore, hike Glacier National Park, or camp in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Public outcry forced the dopes at DOGE, and the head dopes, Elon and Donald Dumpling, to backtrack. Not only would the Park Service be allowed to hire the planned 6,300 seasonal workers – that number would be expanded to 7,700. And there might even be money for toilet paper!

FUN FACT: I think we can all agree, after looking at Trump’s lard ass for several years. That man is never going hiking in any park.

FUN FACT #2: Trump wasted part of another day hawking new MAGA hats from the Oval Office. This time, they carry the words: “Trump was right about everything,” and he tossed a couple to reporter friends.

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2/27/28: The DOGE blunders continue to cut a broad path of destruction across government agencies.

The Food and Drug Administration, for example, learns what cuts to staff can mean. FDA units charged with evaluating high-tech surgical equipment and insulin delivery systems are gutted by sledgehammer style cuts. And those units were paid for by user fees.

Those fees? Authorized by Congress.

Some scientists who were studying ways to improve tests for bird flu were cut. Other experts were examining the accuracy of AI software programs that scan MRI results for signs of cancer. Also cut: Employees examining the brain-implant technology of Elon Musk’s Neuralink devices.

About 85 staffers in the unit studying tobacco products and risks, were also axed. So, let’s hope the AI programs work.

Ironically, nine members of a unit studying the safety of food additives got the boot, even though RFK Jr., the new head of Health and Human Services, has said he wants to dig deeper into the safety of…food additives.

Getting a high-risk kind of heart implant? Yeah. The DOGE team got rid of employees checking the safety of those.

Employees who were cut received a “thoughtful” you’re-fired email, universally informing those let go, that their work had “not [been] adequate to justify further employment by the agency.” Many were able to point to “outstanding” ratings received only weeks or months before.

Tony Maiorana, 37, a chemist, worked on product approval and safety in the fast-changing field of diabetes devices. In the last decade, the field has moved from painful needle pricks and test strips to systems that measure glucose levels just below the skin and automatically infuse the needed insulin.

The work of reviewing new products is painstaking: Novel algorithms measure and dispense insulin; materials implanted in the body must evade rejection by the immune system; and millions of patients from toddlers to the elderly are at risk if devices malfunction.

Still, about half of Dr. Maiorana’s product-review team was eliminated, he said.

“If you’re a patient and you complain, we are the ones that field your complaints,” he said. “We are the ones that monitor the death reports. We’re the ones that are telling companies: ‘Hey, there’s a big pattern of error happening here. People are dying or ending up in the hospital because of your device’ and ‘What has changed? What happened?’”

Dr. Maiorana said that he had expected his government job would be “chill,” but it turned out to be intense. His team had to assess whether studies of new devices that had never been used in humans were safe for adults and children. They also had to watch online marketplaces for diabetes technology that had not been approved by the agency.

“This is the reason the F.D.A. was founded — to protect the public,” Dr. Maiorana said.

A unit of eleven experts, tasked with studying the safety of surgical robots, saw four members cut, including Dr. Albert Yee, who had warned a reporter about the dangerous implications of such senseless firings. “The institutional knowledge we’re losing is just horrific,” he said. “I am concerned about public safety with this type of purge.”

Four hours after a story about these cuts appeared in The New York Times, Dr. Yee was notified by the F.D.A. that his job had been saved, and he would be welcome back at work on Monday.

Ladies be warned: Tate brothers return to America.

Same day: The Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, both former kick boxers, returned to Florida today.

Michelle Goldberg, writing for The New York Times, explains:

On Thursday the influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, until recently stuck in Romania amid an investigation into allegations including human trafficking and money laundering [emphasis added], arrived in Florida, apparently thanks to the good offices of Donald Trump’s administration.

The Tate brothers, British American dual citizens, have been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. They are also being investigated for rape and human trafficking in Britain and were to be extradited there when the Romanian cases concluded.

Though they maintain their innocence, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist and the more famous of the two, has regularly boasted about abusing and pimping women. His method, he’s often said, was to seduce women and then pressure them into the sex trade. He offered to teach his technique to other men in online courses where students could earn “pimping hoes degrees.” Women who live in his compound, he said in one video, aren’t allowed to go out without him. Some are tattooed “owned by Tate.” He left a voice note for a British woman who accused him of rape saying, “The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it.”

Tate is a big fan of Donald Trump, championing him to his millions of mostly young male followers on social media. “I’m a Trump fan because I’m a man,” Tate said in October in an online conversation with Adin Ross, an internet personality who is something of a Tate protégé, and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “You have to support Trump if you’re a man.”

What else do we know about Andrew? He’s reportedly a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., which is vomit-worthy, if true. One of Tate’s former lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is now White House liaison for the Department of Justice. And Elon Musk is a fan of Andrew, as well, having endorsed his half-baked plan to run for British prime minister. More vomit-worthy information, for sure.

Speaking of vomiting, we also have another Alina Habba sighting. As Goldberg writes,

I think we have some idea. On Thursday, Trump said that he knew nothing about Tate’s return to the United States, but even if he’s telling the truth, the people around him have been agitating for it. Last month, when Tate was on “The Benny Show,” a right-wing podcast, Alina Habba, now serving as counselor to the president, joined so that she could say hello to him.

“Your anger is the same that President Trump has for our country, and the time is now for us to stop being wimps,” she gushed. Then she said, “I agree with everything you say, and I have your back out here in the States.”

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2/28/25: Zelensky meeting….this post will be handled separately. I have never had a chance to watch the entire tape.