Sunday, May 04, 2025

Distinctly Not Well

Trump: The election was rigged…

Welker: I don’t want to look back. You took your case to court about your allegations..

Trump: There’s no question. The election was rigged. The facts are in and it’s still being litigated.

Welker: You did take your case to court more than 60 times

Trump: I won a lot of court cases

Welker: Let’s talk about here and now

Trump: The election of 2020?
One question: who the fuck is still litigating the election of 2020? The country doesn’t understand that BECAUSE IT’S NIT FUCKING TRUE!!! But Joe Biden was old, so, you know: better now. Gotta give the Congresswoman her say. A) He doesn’t really rely on his lawyers.

B) He’s got really dumb lawyers.

These are not mutually exclusive propositions.
Man. Woman. TV. Camera. Something. Wait a minute. If China eats the tariff, then how does Amazon raise…never mind. The stupid makes my head hurt.
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If It Ain’t Online, It Ain’t Shit!

 


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Dispatches From Bizarro World

The Social Media Presidency. 

During the recent call, Sheinbaum said, Trump had asked how he could help fight organized crime and suggested sending troops.

She said she declined, telling him that "we will never accept the presence of the United States Army in our territory."

Sheinbaum said she offered to collaborate, including through greater information-sharing.

Trump himself said in an interview last week with conservative outlet The Blaze that he had offered to help Mexico fight the drug cartels, but that he had been turned down.

Trump has seen one too many John Wayne movies. 

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The Logic Of A Not Particularly Bright Three Year Old

So, no dolls at Xmas is a good thing? Forget the AI image of Trump as Pope; I want one of Trump as Cotton Mather. No, she didn’t ask what diaper you’re wearing. He remains a brilliant negotiator. In his own mind. "Me Me Me! They’re all against ME!!” If you’re playing the board game “Risk.” Otherwise…. You’ll notice he never says this about Mexico.  🤔 Is he living in the 19th century?

The value to him. It’s scheduled for his birthday. BONUS! He’s not paying for it. Of course you do.
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Narcissists Gonna… Narcissist

The law has a concept of a “reasonably prudent person.” It ain’t Elmo. And truly reasonable people know that reasonable people can disagree about the same information. And also understand that they may not even understand that information. The fired federal employees and Twitter employees and people helped by USAID, to name just three groups, have entered the chat. I’m willing to accept that I’ve hurt people in my life, but dude, you’re in a completely different class. Wasn’t he going to Mars? Oh, that’s right, you can’t replicate the rocket NASA launched repeatedly in the moon landing program. 50 years ago.

And the Cybertruck was a giant step backwards.
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Saturday, May 03, 2025

Who Do I See About Canonization?


 

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Always Being Classy

Even his “fans” on Truth Social are not happy. Welp....
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Friday, May 02, 2025

“Everything Is Ok.”

It’s not gonna hurt him. He’s got the job for four years . And his crypto scam. And no children to buy toys for at Xmas. 

He’d just make the servants dance, anyway.
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You Can’t Make This 💩 Up, Dept.


Um, guys?
Other pro-military Republicans like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said the White House’s request “a cut in real terms” for the U.S. military with an “intent to shred to the bone our military capabilities and our support to service members.”
He turned this valve that’s as big as a house, and it made the rains come! The caption refers to a Guardian story (no link so, sure. I guess.) stating Trump signed an order to “tackle inflation and lower energy prices.” So not only the elements but the global markets bend to his awesome will! Sshh! You’ll hurt his delicate fee-fees.
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Sorry, didn’t mean to let Auden slip in there. And then the tariffs took their first bite.

Trump Argues Toy Shortages Easily Overcome By Making Servants Dance

Every cloud has a silver lining.
BREAKING: The USDA has dropped their lawsuit against Maine over its transgender student athletic policies.

“I told him I’d see him in court. Well we did see him in court, and we won,” Gov. Janet Mills said.

https://www.pressherald.com/2025/05/02/maine-settles-case-over-frozen-usda-school-funds/
See?  🌞 
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Justice Coney Barrett Has Entered The Chat 💬

 


Does this make bribery an “official” act? Or nah?
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I Know I Feel Better!

Like the "Gulf of America," that's....not a thing. The President doesn't declare, nor name, national holidays. The country had "VE" Day and "VJ" Day. Let it go, old man. Your dementia is showing. Life is easier when you retire.....
The current annual inflation rate in the United States, as of March 2025, is 2.4%. This is based on the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The CPI-U measures the change in prices paid by U.S. consumers over time.
Something else that's...not a thing. A) Trump can't do it unilaterally. B) Congress can't do it without changing the Tax Code and effectively removing the exemption for almost every private education institute in the country. Which Congress ain't gonna do. See? 🧠🪱🪱 The 🧠🪱🪱 have spread to the media.  Which is not news....
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Thursday, May 01, 2025

And It Will Be For The Rest Of The Year

A) Pics or it didn’t happen. 
B) Ewwww! 🤮
“Fuck your college degrees! Get a job doing stoop labor on a construction site! The rich factory owners of America need you! To build their factories!!”
MORAN: What does it (the Declaration of Independence) mean to you?

TRUMP: It means exactly what it says; it's a declaration of unity, love and respect and it means a lot. It's something very special to our country.
Not a fucking clue.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Unity? Love? Respect? Arguably, it ends on those themes:
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Trump is incapable of understanding what those words mean.

Late night lagniappe:
Jennings wants the President declaring war “when we are invaded.” We were invaded in the 20th century: December 7, 1941.  Congress declared war on Japan the next day. There is no provision in law or history for allowing the POTUS to declare war, even in response to an invasion. (Jennings wants to call people crossing the southern border an “invasion.” That’s precisely why the Congress alone should declare war. Who would Jennings have us declare war on? Mexico? Venezuela? Central and South America generally? Brown people? Trump and Miller would like that last one.
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Speaking Of George Clooney

In fairness, when you’re retired you lose track of the days of the week… And your lagniappe for the day:
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Donald Trump, Religious Icon

🤔 All 193, plus: Narnia; Gondor; Mordor; Rohan; Moria , and Uqbar, among others. I know I’m supposed to be outraged by this but, honestly, it doesn’t make any fucking sense. Without him the sun wouldn’t rise. Without him the tides wouldn’t ebb and flow.  (That one isn’t any more coherent.) From countries not trading with the U.S. because Americans don’t want to pay the tariffs? 

A trifecta of “What the fuck?!”  

(George Clooney is busy on Broadway and could not be reached for comment.)
"2 Corinthians”? So Trump only plays an ignorant, irreligious, amoral boob on television?

I don’t believe I. I saw him in “Home Alone II.” He’s not that good an actor.
The moment I’d really like God to say “Fuck it, “ and throw a lighting bolt. OTOH, it’s Dan Patrick. Like Trump, really no one to blame but the voters. (Patrick wouldn’t know God or a believer if either walked up and shook his hand.) It’s all about Trump. That’s what makes him such a man of deep faith and conviction. Every accusation is a confession. If Trump was a man of deep faith and deep conviction, he’d understand that. (Acyn published that one, then removed it. No idea why, but I’m keeping the text.)
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The Puppet Master Takes The Stage

As well as physically impossible. I know they’re giving away 2 dozen free at Costco just for showing your membership card. Saved America from the brown people, he means. Miller has given up on saving America from the black people. At least until he can overturn the first section of the 14th Amendment.
Stephen Miller: "If you had a choice between a doll from China that might have lead paint from it that is not as well constructed, as a doll made in America that has a highly environmental and regulatory standard ... and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you probably would be willing to pay more."
Suck it, rubes, says the childless man. 

And I thought Trump was deregulating safety and environmental standards? Is Miller saying we’re importing goods in violation of those high standards?
Let's check in with U.S. toy companies:

“We have a frozen supply chain that is putting Christmas at risk,” said Greg Ahearn, chief executive of the Toy Association, a U.S. industry group representing 850 toy manufacturers. “If we don’t start production soon, there’s a high probability of a toy shortage this holiday season.”
TAKE YOUR MEDICINE, AMERICA! There are certainly going to be some of the largest economic cuts in history.
Stephen Miller: "Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Dept of Education and provide funding to states, we're going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology."
Red Scare II: Electric Boogaloo. (Wait'll he finds out Trump can’t close the DOE or determine how funds are distributed contrary to Congressional intent.)

Miller is careful not to mimic Trump’s voice here, because that would give the game away.
Egotist.
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“Only What [Bukele] Called ‘Convicted Criminals’”

 NYT’s gift for understatement and refusal to attach responsibility continues to be unmatched:

Bukele had agreed to house "only what he called 'convicted criminals' in the prison. However, many of the Venezuelan men labeled gang members and terrorists by the U.S. government had not been tried in court," the report said.

"The matter was urgent, a senior U.S. official warned his colleagues shortly after the deportations, kicking off a scramble to get the Salvadorans whatever evidence they could," according to the Times.

"Mr. Bukele’s demands for more information about some of the deportees, which has not been previously reported, deepen questions about whether the Trump administration sufficiently assessed who it dispatched to a foreign prison," the report  said.
What Bukele “called ‘convicted criminals’”? Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is,’ is,” is hereby retired from its place in the Infamy Hall of Fame. Lawyers wouldn’t try to slice a statement so thinly to get it down to one side. Is it something in the translation from Spanish? Does “convicted criminal” have a different definition for Bukele from common usage? Because this goes to the root of whether there’s a binding agreement.

And before we get to the “well, duh!” issue of “whether the Trump administration sufficiently assessed who it dispatched to a foreign prison,” can we ask the question, again, about this agreement? Trump agreed to pay El Salvador to house prisoners, but Congress didn’t. Wasn’t that an issue in Iran/Contra? (I know; all my scandals have the dust of ages on them. Curiously, they all involve GOP Presidents, too.) The reported agreement also provided such detentions would continue until the U.S. decided what to do with said prisoners. An issue I’m sure is going to reappear in more than a few trials and appeals. (The government says it has lost authority over the prisoners. The agreement says otherwise.) Point being, who really gives a shit about a sufficient assessment of prisoners by the U.S.? Bukele blinked (Trump probably gave him more money.  ALWAYS follow the money.), and besides, there’s another question of legal authority. I. e., what gives Trump power to send people to a foreign prison anyway? There’s no colorable argument under the Constitution or federal law. (And there are reports he wants to do another such deal with Libya.)

Still waiting for that issue to surface in court, too.
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Wednesday, April 30, 2025

🧠🪱 🪱

I’m watching shit action movies on Netflix (call it a weakness) and if you put RFK’s dialogue in the mouth of a character, everyone would consider it so over the top it would ruin the movie. Nobody talks like that. Right? "Harvard,” “Harlem,” you can see how someone would confuse the two. Hand to God, my teeth were so bad I had to have some baby teeth (molars) pulled and replaced with dentures until my permanent teeth came in. A lot of dental work thereafter. I’m convinced that, were it not for fluoride, I’d have lost all my teeth decades ago. And nobody has ever accused me of being stupid. (Dumb, yeah; but not stupid.). RFK. Jr is proof that you can’t fix stupid.

RESEARCH FACILITY within the US National Institutes of Health that is tasked with studying Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases has been instructed by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to stop research activities.

According to an email viewed by WIRED, the Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland, was told to stop all experimental work by April 29 at 5 pm. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and is located at the US Army base Fort Detrick. It conducts research on the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases that are deemed “high consequence”—those that pose significant risks to public health. It has 168 employees, including federal workers and contractors.
They were using aborted fetal tissue in their research. Or food dyes, or fluoride; or something.
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The Art Of The Deal?

Is this how they think one negotiates? Where do the little screws come in? Does he know anything about manufacturing?  And “hi tech” depends on somebody doing the grunt work to make the tech. No tech, no “hi tech .” And we’re gonna need that “sea of sewing machines with Americans sewing” clothes if the tariffs last very long.
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Our National Summer At Camp Runamok

WIRED:
A YOUNG MAN with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency’s rules and regulations.
The Texas Legislature, decades ago, decided to codify Texas law. It went from Vernon’s Statues (the original publisher of Texas law, IIRC. Long out of business, but the name stuck.), into Codes. Government Code, Family Law, Probate, Civil, Criminal, and so on. Each statute had to be renumbered and reorganized, as well as rewritten. That was the crucial part: the rewritten codes couldn’t change the original statutes. Statutory interpretation depends on the wording: change the words, change the interpretation. But that was not the legislative intent. The intent was to make Texas law easier to find and follow. (I haven’t had to look at a Texas Code for over 30 years, but I could find the section I was looking for in a few minutes. I learned and worked (briefly) with Vernon’s. I wouldn’t know where to start in those.) It was a worthwhile endeavor, but it took years.

Remember the promise that all the emails government employees were required to send in to DOGE would be read by AI? And then the inbox backed up from the unread emails? Yeah; that’s how well this is going to work. 

There’s also the problem of not changing the regulations. AI is not a lawyer, nor a judge. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and it doesn’t know how to think like a lawyer. Neither does the young know-nothing in charge of this project. 

Assuming he doesn’t want to change the regulations, that is. If he does, he’s definitely not a lawyer; because a lawyer would know that project is against the law.

Not the criminal law; but administrative law. The law companies and people rely on; just like they rely on government regulations. Which means those regulations must be reliable, not changed at the whim of a child and in the “black box” of AI.  That creates all kinds of problems that government isn’t supposed to create. Revising or adding or deleting regulations is itself a regulated process. It takes time, involves a lot of people, including the public, and if it isn’t done right, the changes are invalid. Period, end of.
Sweet’s primary role appears to be leading an effort to leverage artificial intelligence to review HUD’s regulations, compare them to the laws on which they are based, and identify areas where rules can be relaxed or removed altogether.
Again: what does AI know? Fuck all. It knows how to make up case law, which means it “knows “ to do what it’s asked to do. Something a first year law student would know was NOT what was asked for.
Another source told WIRED that Sweet has also been using the tool at other parts of HUD. WIRED reviewed a copy of the output of the AI’s review of one HUD department, which features columns displaying text that the AI model found to be needing an adjustment while also including suggestions from the AI for alterations to be made, essentially proposing rewrites. The spreadsheet details how many words can be eliminated from individual regulations and gives a percentage figure indicating how noncompliant the regulations are. It isn’t clear how these percentages are calculated.
Close enough is not good enough. And deregulation, which is the measure of noncompliance referred to, has to be authorized by Congress. That’s what statutes are for:
One HUD source who heard about Sweet’s possible role in revising the agency’s regulations said the effort was redundant, since the agency was already “put through a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder before any rule was ever created” under the Administrative Procedure Act. (This law dictates how agencies are allowed to establish regulations and allows for judicial oversight over everything an agency does.)

Another HUD source said Sweet’s title seemed to make little sense. “A programmer and a quantitative data analyst are two very different things,” they noted.
The President can’t suspend or cancel that “multi-year multi-stakeholder meat grinder” just because it inconveniences his “agenda.”

So, a bunch more lawsuits, incoming. The story of the second Trump Administration, in one sentence. Trump isn’t overseeing an administration. He’s the Chief looney at Camp Runamok.
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COMING THIS SUMMER!

Sorry, kid, but tariffs hit the North Pole, too.
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, laid out a timeline in a presentation for clients that showed when the impact of tariffs announced by President Donald Trump could hit the U.S. economy. Based on the transport time required for goods from China, U.S. consumers could start to notice trade-related shortages in their local stores next month, according to the presentation.

“The consequence will be empty shelves in US stores in a few weeks and Covid-like shortages for consumers and for firms using Chinese products as intermediate goods,” Slok wrote in a note to clients Friday.

April 2: Tariffs announced, containership departures from China to U.S. slowing

Early-to-mid May: Containerships to U.S. ports come to a stop

Mid-to-late May: Trucking demand comes to a halt, leading to empty shelves and lower sales for companies

Late May to early June: Layoffs in trucking and retail industries

Summer 2025: recession
Supply chains: broken until at least Xmas. And Ebenezer Trump telling us all to suck it!

Trump recreating Jimmy Carter’s MEOW speech is going to be the cherry on the sundae. He’ll just tell us it’s all our fault for not clapping loudly enough to revive Tinkerbelle. Or more likely it’s our tough luck and don’t come whining to him about it.

Nothin’ but good times ahead! 
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Lost In The Woods

That’s not a thing. Gonna be hard to collect “external revenue” on goods that aren’t being imported. And since China was the major source of imports…. He says that like it’s a good thing. 🤦‍♂️  And like it doesn’t affect “external revenue.”

These people simply aren’t living in the same reality as the rest of us.
"…doesn’t mean it won’t get better and we don’t need to be patient….” 

With this clown show?
Please.
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Even The People At Trump’s Michigan Rally…

 



...aren’t paying attention to this shit. 

Trump played a video at that rally of prisoners getting their heads shaved in CECOT, and the monkey monkeys roared approval. But the majority of the country is still concerned with due process and fairness.

Nobody’s reading Truth Social except foreign intelligence agencies and internet political obsessives. What’s going to matter is pocketbooks, not Trump’s stupid excuses.

I still remember how popular Jimmy Carter was when he said we’d have to turn down the thermostat and drive less because OPEC raised the price of gas. He said the effort to change we needed was the “moral equivalent of war.” Russell Baker pointed out that spelled “MEOW.” Carter never recovered politically after that.

And now the Republicans are saying we all have to suffer for the greater good. MEOW. 🐱 
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Armchair Journalists

Ten years of Trump going on TV and just fucking saying whatever, and still nothing like an industry set of best practices to deal with it. Put someone on the set with a laptop to look stuff up, pause the interview, whatever. He'd walk off but so what. Amazing to still be at "agree to disagree."
The last interviewer to try this was Jonathan Swan, and he quickly went to the Grey Lady and was never heard from again. (He shared bylines with Maggie Haberman for a bit, but the high profile he had soon vanished.)

How many TeeVee journalists want Swan’s  career, v. Wolf Blitzer’s?

I love it when people give other people career advice they are themselves at no risk of being held to.
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The Shipping News

All the shipping from China is done. Businesses anticipated the tariffs and ordered accordingly, because they know how tariffs work. 

President Dunderhead doesn’t.

Not sure who he’s going to blame when shelves go bare this summer and the outlook for Xmas is bleak because he broke the supply chains. I’m sure he’ll send Peter Navarro out again to tell us the economy’s fine if we just ignore Trump’s tariffs and DOGE’s illegal activities. (Even Navarro admits there was “a surge in imports because of the tariffs.” He doesn’t, of course, follow that train of thought all the way to the station.)

And about how all those cuts in government spending are going to make us all richer;
A 50% cut to science funding (which is close to what Trump is proposing for NIH) would result in huge negative long-term economic outcomes:

*7.6% cut in GDP
*8.6% cut in federal revenues
*equivalents of making the average American $10,000 poorer
NYT:
Cutting federal funding for scientific research could cause long-run economic damage equivalent to a major recession, according to a new study from researchers at American University.

...

It is going to be a decline forever,” said Ignacio González, one of the study’s authors. “The U.S. economy is going to be smaller.”

A smaller economy also means less income for the government to tax. As a result, while cutting investment could save money in the short run, it could leave the federal budget in worse shape over the longer term. The researchers estimate that a 25 percent cut to research funding would reduce government revenues 4.3 percent in the long term.

Larger funding cuts would have even greater effects. A 50 percent reduction in funding would lower gross domestic product nearly 7.6 percent, the researchers estimate, and a 75 percent cut would reduce it 11.3 percent — a larger decline than in any recession since the Great Depression.
Yes, it would be that bad:
Such estimates might seem extreme, but they are consistent with other research. A recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that government investments in research and development accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

“If you look at a long period of time, a lot of our increase in living standards seems to be coming from public investment in scientific research,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and an author of the Dallas Fed study. “The rates of return are just really high.”
Or just ask Alabama about the prospect of losing funding for some of the major employers/economic engines in the state (healthcare and research). (In the’60’s, Alabama benefited from NASA. Most of the rockets were built in Alabama.). The idea that government spending all goes where the socks go in the dryer is just about ready to be challenged by Jimmy Stewart’s speech that stops the run on his S&L.
Political leaders in earlier eras appeared to recognize that payoff. In another recent study, Mr. Fieldhouse found that past efforts to cut the federal budget largely spared investments in nondefense research and development.
So everything old is new again; there is some cause for long term optimism.
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The Man Who Promised To Fix Everything Before He Took Office

The tariffs have already taken effect for businesses who were already planning for Christmas (and are now expecting disaster). As ew said: 
As "Art of the Deal" guy faces humiliating setbacks in several negotiations, he's going to have to do something to make up for the psychological and political damage of being a loser.
Trump will face it like this👆. The Big Idea cannot fail, it can only be failed.

The minute he took that oath, it was all his responsibility.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2025

The Strong Man 💪🏻

I never realized Trump had single-handedly fought Russia to a standstill in Ukraine. All these years, I thought that was the Ukrainians doing that. This is the photograph Trump is referring to: Even when:
Moran pointed out that the photo Trump was referencing was proven to be fake, as Abrego Garcia was photographed alongside Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) at the senator's hotel, and the purported tattoos were not present.
Trump still insisted the photo was real and the tattoos were real.

I guess the lawyers told him to think that.
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Sen. Foghorn Leghorn Reassures The Masses

So they can keep up with the inflation Trump is causing?

It’s a bold strategy. Let’s see if it works as unemployment ripples through the economy caused by a supply chain collapse caused by tariffs.

I’m sure it will all be fine….
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“You Already Paid For This”

 And yet my toilet remains unchanged:

(This is part of what I’m assured is Trump’s political genius. I’ve known at least two brilliant politicians (brilliant at politics, I mean, in my lifetime:  LBJ, and Clinton. Clinton actually balanced the budget and advanced programs that helped people despite being the target of a true witch hunt for most of his presidency.  LBJ, in just four short years (including his first term) created the modern world we’ve taken for granted, including Medicare, the Civil Rights Act , PBS, rural electrification…the list is incredibly long. Trump is not even a politician, by comparison. He’s only a con man, incapable of acting on the least of his promises.)

There is a process for changing product regulations. The FDA took three years to investigate and decide to ban red food dye no. 3, and gave companies using it until 2027 (in some cases 2028), to replace it in their products. Trump hasn’t changed anything, and if he had done so outside the regulatory process, the lawsuits would be (indeed, may be) flying. In any case, I’m pretty sure nobody’s re-tooling their factories.
These, after all, are the more interesting bits. Trump is doing this because Sean Duffy sucking his cock on Fox: is not affirmation enough. He had to sit through the Pope’s funeral, and couldn’t come back fast enough (Ukraine expected more discussions, for one). He needs the adulation. It’s really quite pathetic, and very newsworthy. Remarkable that the press doesn’t ask why a recently elected POTUS needs a rally like this. Well, that’s one reason. But does any objective observer really think this will change Trump’s standing in the polls? ???, indeed. He really didn’t. No more than the Supreme Court declared DEI illegal when they overturned Harvard’s admissions policy. Just not in the way he means.
100 Days, a Trillion Dollars: DOGE's Costs Keep Adding Up

$500B lost IRS revenue
$135B personnel fuck-up costs
$430B things we paid for but that were cut or frozen
ew has the receipts, here. Every sccusation is a confession. And the entire country is going to be in the shit.💩  Pretty sure Mike knows how to lose that much money while making pillows. Who explained that to him?!?!? I triple dog dare them. "You already paid for this. Ha ha ha ha ha.”—Laurie Anderson 
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Humpty Dumpty And The King’s Men

 This reads very much like the ideals of a mass murderer (McVeigh, et al.) expecting his action to spark the “race war” that will finally purge America and purify it. 

The former head of Project 2025 believes an “unchained” President Donald Trump has made immense progress during the first 100 days of his second term toward undoing liberal gains dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But Paul Dans — who led the effort to produce a detailed conservative transition plan and policy blueprint that was at the center of last year’s presidential election — believes the president needs an influx of new attorneys to fight for his policies in court. Those battles, Dans told NBC News, will shape the next 100 days.
Trump is not being stopped in court because he’s lost all “his” lawyers. The positions they are being asked to take are indefensible and contrary to law. New attorneys won’t fare any better than the ones who have quit, and certainly won’t be better qualified.

Trump’s problem is not the courts or the lawyers. His problem is the law, and the Constitution. One lawyer flailed so badly in a hearing on his Motion for Summary Judgment that the Perkins Coie lawyer had only to sit back and watch. The same fate awaits the DOJ lawyers in the Judge Dugan case, which is going to intimidate judges as much as Trump intimidated Canadian voters. Almost every EO Trump has issued has been stymied if not overturned. I know of three lawsuits credibly challenging his authority to even impose tariffs, and a new one challenging his authority to remake federal agencies according to his whim. It’s only a matter of time before challenges to his authority to act as he has become general enough to undo everything he has done wholesale, rather than piecemeal.

And all the king’s lawyers, and all the king’s paralegals, can’t put that Humpty Dumpty together again.
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First Principle Of Legal Practice: “They Don’t Pay Us To Be Wrong”

 Even though he is not a lawyer, JMM argued soundly two weeks ago that the agreements between Trump and several major law firms (one is too many; more than calls into question the soundness of the profession at “the top”) were unenforceable.

Just Security now agrees:

In short, the President cannot enforce the law-firm “deals” imposed by his Administration.  The firms who “agreed” under coercion should renounce those “deals,” or publicly explain why they feel constrained to fulfill illusory bargains. If those firms choose to honor the “deals,” their conduct might well prove to be illegal.  No new firms should accept them. And potential clients and employees are entitled to question why a law firm has chosen to surrender control of its choice of future clients or cases to the U.S. Government.
That’s the conclusion. Much of the analysis is a review of first year contracts law (because contracts are so much creatures of common law, and because so many basic legal principles and concepts are found in contract law), from consideration to coercion. The bottom line there is what I said earlier, based on JMM’s presentation of what the agreements said: i.e., they were not contracts and therefore unenforceable.

But Trump, of course, isn’t bothered by legal niceties. Which raises problems I didn’t consider, but Democrats in Congress have:
As some Members of Congress noted in recent letters to the “settling” law firms, if these agreements are in fact honored, the firms who execute them will have offered free services to the Administration in return for their continued access. Such open, continuing collaboration between the government and the firms runs the risk of violating a host of ethics and state laws, not to mention possible federal law violations ranging from statutes forbidding corruptly promising or giving “anything of value” in exchange for preferential government treatment to the ban on donation of voluntary services under the Anti-Deficiency Act. The accepting firms should clearly renounce what may otherwise be construed as “pay-to-play” arrangements aimed to curry favor with the Trump Administration.
I mean, inevitably, you would expect these firms to have foreseen the devil’s bargain they were agreeing to. I said before I think they thought they were being clever. But as Just Security points out, there was never any agreement Trump wouldn’t simply be more coercive, and no way to enforce such an agreement if the law firms thought they had one.

These law firms were the “winged with awe, inviolable” ones. Now it turns out their reputations were smoke and mirrors and a house of cards. The smart law firms told Trump to take a flying leap and went to court, where they filleted him. The cowardly law firms thought they could buy off a psychopath with ink stains on paper. And then he demanded they provide pro bono work for at least the rest of Trump’s term to every law enforcement officer in the country in so much as a disciplinary investigation. Now they are damned if they do, as they thought they would be damned if they didn’t.

Now they just look like damned fools. Not at all the kind of people you want negotiating your contracts. Negotiating anything from a business agreement to a settlement agreement. And, of course, if they’d put themselves in such peril, why would you trust them to see around corners for you?

A lawyer’s job is to foresee the worst possible consequences, and plan accordingly. As a lawyer I worked with liked to remind me: “They don’t pay us to be wrong.”
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The Alphabet Suit

 So:

...the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and four AFGE locals; American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and SEIU Local 1000; Alliance for Retired Americans, American Geophysical Union; American Public Health Association; Center for Taxpayer Rights; Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks; Common Defense; Main Street Alliance; NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council); Northeast Organic Farming Association Inc.; VoteVets; Western Watersheds Project; City and County of San Francisco, California; County of Santa Clara, California; City of Chicago, Illinois; City of Baltimore, Maryland; Harris County, Texas; and King County, Washington. The case, AFGE v. Trump, was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
have sued Trump, OMB, DOGE, OPM, every Cabinet Secretary and Department, as well as Americorps, GSA, EPA, NLRB, NSF, SBA, and SSA.

The basic legal theory being that Trump simply doesn’t have the authority to do what he’s been doing to the federal government.

This could be interesting.
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Harvard Should Have Known Better; Or…

Even rich people have something to lose.
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