Trump dictates. Musk desiccates

Sporting a black MAGA hat and with one of his young children happily crawling up his back, co-President Elon Musk played with the White House press pool on Tuesday while Donald Trump gave him free rein in the Oval Office. Musk doubled down on cleaning up waste and cutting federal expenses — especially on regulatory agencies that have an influence on his many businesses. Trump smiled. No one in the room seemed to recognize or notice the hypocrisy.

“People are going to get what they voted for,” Musk explained. Trump sat, smiled and said Musk’s son had a high IQ. “And that’s what democracy is all about,” Musk added, admitting he may have misspoken on a few items on a few occasions. Trump smiled and signed another executive order. Later in the day, it was announced Musk had a tentative agreement to sell $400 million in armored trucks to the government. No one asked about that.

Also left mostly unasked, unanswered and unspoken was what the titular head of the government, Trump, will do after being challenged in court on several executive orders that attempt to circumvent Congress and take over the entire U.S. government. He said he would follow the courts but he also believes he has the ultimate authority.

That attitude was echoed by one of his attorneys, Alina Habba — a cheerleading inerudite dolt, who said on Fox News, while Trump played host to Musk and his son in the Oval, “There’s a separation of powers for a reason. The executive branch is the ultimate authority on federal issues.”

As Johnny Carson would say; “Wrong, Lysol breath.”

She may have a law degree and she may have passed the bar, but Habba is entirely ignorant of how the American government is supposed to work. The Constitution is the ultimate authority on federal issues and the executive branch is merely a co-equal branch of government along with the judicial and legislative branches.

At the same time, Trump, who claims he is going to be “transparent”, banned the Associated Press from attending the event in the Oval Office because it doesn’t recognize the “Gulf of America” as the new name of the Gulf of Mexico. So, as the fourth week of Donald Trump’s imperial regime unfolds, there are few things more transparent than the fact that nothing is going to deter Trump from doing what he wants. Whatever it says in the Constitution, whenever there is a dispute of facts, if Trump doesn’t agree with it there is no place for it in his world. 

Hell bent on revenge, despite saying his second administration would be otherwise, Trump has proven one thing beyond all doubt: He will listen to no one but himself as he does what he damn well pleases. And since he controls every branch of government, there is nothing anyone can do about it. If he wants to defy court orders, then he will. 

Most unfortunately, his dominance in our lives extends beyond politics. 

“It is a great honor to be chairman of the Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing board of trustees,” Trump said Wednesday.

After declaring himself the chair earlier in the week, the board elected him to that post “unanimously” Trump declared. He decided to be the arbiter of the arts because he didn’t like “drag shows” and while he said he hadn’t been to any Kennedy Center shows, he was disgusted with what he hadn’t seen.

Trump was a frequent visitor to New York’s Studio 54 in the late 70s and early 80s and was well known for his debauchery. What exactly upsets him about the drag shows he claims he’s never seen? Who knows? But it is par for the course in an administration dominated by licentious, lying lotharios and those who wish to make money off of the backs of the voters. Remember 77 million people voted for this. 

Trump’s appetite is insatiable. He’s not satisfied with politics. He’s not satisfied with art. He also wants to determine how we play sports. While at the Super Bowl, he decried the new kickoff rules. “The worst part of the Super Bowl, by far, was watching the Kickoff where, as the ball is sailing through the air, the entire field is frozen, stiff. College Football does not do it, and won’t! Whose idea was it to ruin the Game?” the president said in a Truth Social post.

The more he grasps, the more he wants. He wants to take over Gaza. He wants Greenland. He wants Canada. He wants Mexico and the Panama Canal. 

He is aided and abetted in his tyranny by a South African racist who is not only the richest man on earth but serves as Trump’s defacto co-president and is doing to the country what he did to Twitter when he bought it; tearing it down and removing all roadblocks to Trump being able to run the country as a monarch. Further, Musk is also trying to buy an AI company so he can dictate and frame the political argument to further spread disinformation.

Some see much of the current talk as typical Trump distractions. “We’re not going to invade and occupy Gaza. We’re not going to invade Greenland. We’re not taking back the Panama Canal,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told MSNBC last week, referring to some of the president’s more extreme foreign policy ideas. “But Donald Trump is really good at this campaign of distraction.”

I don’t think Murphy or the rest of the Democrats quite understand the situation. What you see as a distraction is merely Trump extending his reach as far as he can. He may not be upset if he doesn’t get everything that he wants, but he’ll definitely push the issue to get everything he wants. Hell, he got Tulsi Gabbard confirmed by the Senate as the Director of National Intelligence – and most Democrats thought uttering her name and the word “intelligence” in a sentence was an oxymoron. “That’s a title thick with irony,” a Capitol Hill staffer told me.

“He is the master of the art of the deal,” His prep-school cheerleading press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told us in one of her rare briefings Wednesday afternoon. 

His critics say otherwise. Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman and briefly a candidate for president who ran against Trump on the Republican ticket, summed it up this way on “The Social Contract” podcast recently; “If you actually listen to Trump and Musk every day - our military sucks, the deep state controls our justice dept and the FBI, there is no independent media, the federal government is all fraudsters and bad bureaucrats, even the judiciary is corrupt. According to Trump/Trumpism, America just sucks. But yet…he got elected saying all of this. And elections have consequences.”

Yes. They do. And the Democrats who didn’t vote, those who voted for Trump and the independents who did the same have all put us in the same boat heading down a Class-5 rapids before we tumble over a deep waterfall. We have no oars to steer, no one who knows how and millions of voters still think it’s a cheap thrill ride at a waterpark.

Further evidence of that is United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a tattooed cartoon character of a man who apparently aspired to be Jack Sparrow, but JD Vance stole the eyeliner so he had to settle for the role of Bootstrap Bill. On Wednesday, Hegseth said the U.S. will not be supporting Ukraine as stoutly as Joe Biden did. Hegseth said Ukraine’s desires for peace were unrealistic.

Trump, of course, announced Wednesday that there is a chance of peace in Ukraine and that Joe Biden is responsible for the “ridiculous war, totally unnecessary. God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine.” And he also told us there never would have been a war if he had been president in 2020. While decrying foreign interventions and cheering isolationism, Trump also said this week that he owned Gaza, would not eliminate the possibility of putting troops there, and at the same time said Putin invited him to visit Russia. 

If any of it sounds confusing it’s only because it is.

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Wednesday his press secretary also told us how popular all of this is making Trump and how great the U.S. is now “Thanks to the great, strong leadership of President Trump.” 

Trump, so far, has seen little pushback from the press, and when we do push back, the press secretary uses the Brady Briefing Room lectern to criticize what she calls “dishonest narratives.”

When questioned about a constitutional crisis emerging from the White House, she said, “The real constitutional crisis is within the judicial branch. " She argued that the threat is actually among judges who aren’t honest arbiters of the law and are trying to thwart Trump. She added that it is “nothing more than the continuation of the weaponization of justice” against Trump. She also told us that 77 million people elected Trump, and he thinks he has the right to do whatever he wants. Remember?

She blamed Biden for continuing inflation. “This is an indictment on the Biden administration,” she said. No one asked when Trump would be held accountable for the economy, and she never offered an answer. Her high point came when she said, “If anybody in here wants to argue that the federal government isn’t fraudulent in some capacity, then be my guest…” Unasked and unanswered was how much fraudulence Trump is guilty of.

Finally, when Kaitlin Collins from CNN pressed the administration on banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office, the press secretary said the quiet part out loud. “It is a privilege to cover this White House . . . Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions,” Leavitt said. “We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office.”No one followed up on Collins’ question. No one mentioned that Trump is privileged to be in the White House by the grace of 77 million American voters. But a few other reporters did congratulate the president’s press secretary for calling on them to ask meaningless and worthless questions.

Thus we now have it. Our press passes are useless and as the administration says, “We are going to hold those who lie accountable” though no one is holding them accountable. It is the Gulf of America, and that’s what it is. “It’s very important to this administration that we get that right,” we were told by the cheerleader.

The only hope at this point is the asteroid which increasingly looks like it will strike Earth in a few years; but hey most of the rich, politicians, celebrities and sports heroes have bunkers so at least they’ll survive. If it sounds like doomsday, relax. That has already passed. You’re just living in the aftermath of the political destruction.