Feb.05

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Today's Crazypants Roundup

Week 3 is underway, and the Trump administration is still pumping out vast mountains of... stuff, let's say. So much that we are having trouble keeping up. Every single thing below could very well be its own item, but in hopes of trying to stay caught up, we're going to have to do this round-up-style. Here's a rundown of some of the whackadoodle stuff that's happened, courtesy of Donald Trump & Co., in the past several days:

• You're Fired, Part I: The administration's efforts to get federal employees to quit voluntarily is not going very well, it would seem. The goal was to get somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 folks to exit, stage right. Thus far, only 20,000 people have accepted the "buyout" offer. That is rather less than 100,000 (much less 200,000) and, on top of that, you have to figure that some sizable chunk of that 20,000 was about to quit anyhow, with or without White House "encouragement." In hopes of trying to get the number up, the administration did at least two things yesterday. First, it circulated a memo warning that layoffs are "likely" if not enough people quit, and that they would begin immediately after the February 6 buyout deadline. Second, it announced that "buyouts" would now be offered to all CIA employees. Previously, the various national security agencies were excluded from the staff-reduction efforts, on the theory that they are too valuable. But not anymore, it seems.
  
  
• You're Fired, Part II: Left with no real options, the FBI yesterday bowed to the White House's demand that the Bureau compile and submit, to the Department of Justice, a list of every one of the roughly 5,000 employees who worked on January 6 cases.
  
  It is unbelievable that a president could be such a small person that he would try to wreak vengeance like this. These 5,000 folks, with only very rare exceptions, were doing what they were told to do by their superiors. And many of them are not agents; they are secretaries and file clerks and the like. That said, Trump is as small a man as anyone who has ever occupied the Oval Office. Further, he is all-in on his belief that the 1/6 insurrection was legitimate, and that the resulting prosecutions were a conspiracy targeted at him and his loyal followers. Further, if he's determined to fire a bunch of federal employees, then targeting 5,000 of them who are also his "enemies" is a two-fer.
  
  Trump has not actually fired anyone yet, but a group of FBI employees has nonetheless filed a lawsuit in which they seek certification for a class action complaint. So, this could get very messy and very expensive. And this is just one agency; there are going to be lawsuits in every other agency and department, too. During Trump v1.0, there were trackers following how many lies he told. This time around, we might like to see a tracker counting every lawsuit he's triggered. We are sure the number is already above a hundred, and that by the end of this year, it will be above a thousand. Trump is now going to flood the legal zone until it capsizes.
  
  
• Fawning Obeisance, Part I: Donald Trump and his loyal commissioners on the FCC have been applying enormous pressure to CBS, over the Kamala Harris interview that has the President so angry. Why he can't just move on, given that he won and she lost? That is a good question, but also a rhetorical one. We know full well why he can't move on; as we note above, he's a very small person (and equipped with a very thin skin).
  
  Anyhow, as part of legal actions that have been undertaken by conservative groups and by Trump himself, CBS agreed last week to hand over a transcript of the full interview with Harris. The contention made by Trump and his acolytes is that the presentation of the interview on 60 Minutes was edited in such a way as to give a false impression of Harris, and so amounts to illegal false advertising.
  
  As we wrote last week, CBS' corporate parent is inclined to settle the suits because they don't want a pending merger to be scotched by the Trump-loyal Department of Justice. However, we erred in writing that the suit is for $10 million. It's actually for $10 BILLION. Who knows what amount Trump might take to drop the matter? Who knows what Trump and/or his acolytes will do with the Harris transcript?
  
  
• Fawning Obeisance, Part II: Yesterday, it was announced that Trump will attend this Sunday's Super Bowl in New Orleans. He will become the first sitting president to do so. That may sound surprising, but really it's not. To insert a president into that kind of very large, very boisterous crowd creates major nightmares for the Secret Service, while also imposing a cost on spectators who are likely in the midst of a very expensive, "bucket list" kind of experience. So, most presidents have decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and taken a pass. But Trump is not most presidents.
  
  That he is attending is not the "fawning obeisance" element of the story, however. For that, we have to explain, for those who do not know, that after the murder of George Floyd, the NFL started putting messages on the far edge of the endzones. The most common of those is "END RACISM," which has been a part of the field for each of the last three Super Bowls. Here's what it looked like last year:
  
  
  
  Is there a bit of irony in pairing "END RACISM" with a team name that appropriates Native American culture? Mayyyyybe.
  
  Anyhow, entirely by coincidence we are sure, a couple of hours after Trump said he'd attend the game, the NFL announced that they are going to rotate out "END RACISM" and replace it with something else. The league says this has nothing to do with placating the anti-DEI Trump, and that it is because they want something "positive" and "uplifting" in the wake of the terrorist attack on the city last month. That means that even if you take the NFL at its word, they have just revealed that they do not consider ending racism to be positive or uplifting.
  
  Incidentally, Trump will be a guest of New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson. She is a devout Catholic. She is also deeply enmeshed in a scandal right now wherein she, and other team executives, assisted the Archdiocese of New Orleans in trying to cover up child sex abuse. Think, for a moment, what Fox would do with that if it was Joe Biden or Kamala Harris who was attending the game as Benson's guest. Now think about how many microseconds of coverage Fox will give the story, with Trump the one who is attending.
  
  
• Sovereign Wealth Fund: On Monday, Trump issued an executive order ostensibly creating a sovereign wealth fund for the United States. If the plan comes to pass, then this would create a pool of money the U.S. would invest in various business ventures.
  
  This proposal is... questionable, in a number of ways. First, the money that goes into sovereign wealth funds comes from budget surpluses. A country that sells billions of dollars in oil each year, and that provides limited social services to its citizenry, might have such a surplus. The United States does not run a surplus. Second, even if this proposal made sense from a policy standpoint, Trump cannot create a sovereign wealth fund by fiat. Remember, Congress has the power of the purse. At least, that's what it says in OUR copy of the Constitution.
  
  We intended to write this news up yesterday, but then it got late, so we held it. Had we completed that piece, we were going to scratch our heads and write that we didn't know how this idea had gotten into Trump's head, and that we guessed he was just copying the authoritarians he so admires, like Mohammed bin Salman. However, given that we now know he really does want to "develop" Gaza (see above), it's a little clearer where the sovereign wealth fund XO is coming from.
  
  
• Trump Pretends to Care about Antisemitism: Another executive order that flew under the radar was this one, entitled "ADDITIONAL MEASURES TO COMBAT ANTI-SEMITISM." That may seem like a broad, and useful, goal. However, if you read the text, you will learn that other than require a bunch of federal departments to submit reports, the only thing the XO does is declare that protesters on college campuses who are: (1) pro-Palestine and (2) are on student visas, will be arrested and deported, while their visas are canceled.
  
  This XO is "solving" a problem that does not currently exist, and is doing so in an ineffective way. As we expected would be the case, the campus protests largely fizzled out when the 2023-24 school year ended. While they could return, they have not done so yet, and they might not, given that most schools have taken rather aggressive steps to prevent a repeat. Meanwhile, the people driving the protests were, almost exclusively, U.S. citizens. Many of them were not actually students, but that's not the issue this XO addresses.
  
  Put another way, this is another very clear case of Trump trying to get a "two-fer" (or, really, a "three-fer," or maybe a "four-fer"). Under the guise of "I'm fighting antisemitism," he also gets to strike out at Muslims, immigrants, and those evil, liberal, pinko universities. This is another item we intended to write up yesterday and, if we had, that last observation would have concluded our assessment. But given the Gaza redevelopment plan, it becomes clearer why Trump would want to position his administration to crack down on, and so to capitalize on, any new protests that might unfold.
  
  
• Trump Pretends to Care about the California Fires: Over the weekend, Trump "solved" California's wildfire problems. How did he do it? He ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to release multiple billions of gallons of water from a couple of reservoirs in the Golden State. When Trump sent out this braggy message, the total release was 2.2 billion gallons:
  
  
  
  By the end of the weekend, the total was supposed to reach 5 billion gallons.
  
  There are, as you might guess, some problems with Trump's claims. First, none of that water is going to reach Los Angeles. Heck, it's not even going to flow in Los Angeles' direction. It's going to end up in Tulare Lake, which is almost as close to Las Vegas as it is to L.A. Second, the water isn't going to do anything, sitting there in Tulare Lake, except evaporate. It's certainly not going to stop any current wildfires, or prevent any future ones. Third, the water is held in the reservoirs because it is needed... during the growing season. Rain-wise, it's been a light year for California, and it is very unlikely the billions of gallons of reserve water will be replenished before the state enters the rain-is-very-rare season (basically, at the end of March). So, if that water is needed in May or June, it probably won't be available.
  
  Even by the standards of someone as inscrutable as The Donald, this one's a real head-scratcher. Was he just looking for another "win"? Or is he so thoroughly invested in his cockamamie theory of California ecology that he simply had to take it to its logical conclusion? Or maybe he knows that the absence of that water will hurt Californians and the California economy in 6 months, and that was the real point? These all seem possible to us. Was he throwing a bone at Big Ag? Who knows?
  
  
• Trump Breaks Wind: Donald Trump hates new and renewable energy sources, presumably because he sees them as being in competition with the petroleum and coal interests who help fund his campaigns. He has a particular, longstanding animus about wind energy. And whatever the reasons for that might be, they aren't solely political. He has been railing against windmills and wind farms since the 1990s, long before he was a politician for sale to the highest corporate bidder.
  
  The Biden administration, of course, was very wind-friendly. And so, a number of states, most of them blue, began work on ambitious wind-energy projects. Those projects require considerable time to execute, such that the Biden-inspired wind farms are largely ready to start building, but haven't been built yet. The new administration has just made clear that no further federal funding is forthcoming and that, in addition, various federal permits may well be canceled. And so, most of the wind projects are effectively dead in the water, at least until 2029.
  
  
• Randy Homosexual: Maybe we have related this story before, but we don't think we did. If our memory is in error, sorry. Anyhow, about 15 years ago, there was a Christian-based website that had paid for a subscription to the Associated Press' stories, and that had a bot that auto-posted AP news and sports stories to the site. However, before the stories were posted, they were run through a filter that replaced certain terms with more "Christian-friendly" language. As a result, game wraps for Patriots games were "auto-corrected" in a manner that was, shall we say, sub-optimal. That is because the team, at that time, had a cornerback named Randall Gay. And this website ended up the butt of national jokes when its bot auto-changed a headline so that it read: "Randy Homosexual Reaches End Zone."
  
  We were reminded of this because the White House has ordered the CDC to pause or retract all papers currently scheduled for publication, or under consideration for publication, in academic journals. The reason is that the administration wants the papers to be scrubbed of what it regards as "DEI" terms. Here is the list: "Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female." Obviously, the focus is on trans people, who remain the bugaboo du jour. The silver lining, such as it is, is that scholars can still include a few Randy Homosexuals in their papers, at least for now.
  
  
• We Don't Need No... Edjucashyun: For the entirety of its existence, Republicans have been talking about getting rid of the Department of Education. It's an established enough GOP doctrine that even Rick Perry was able to remember it. Yesterday, in a terribly unsurprising development, news broke that Donald Trump is planning to make it happen, and that he will do so—of course—via executive order.
  
  This is example #139 of Trump infringing on the powers of Congress and daring them to do something about it. Since most Republicans on the Hill don't like the DoE, and the rest are scared stiff of challenging the Dear Leader, they are not likely to say "boo." If you would like to watch something amusing, see this brief clip (maybe 15 seconds, from 1:42 to 2:00 or so) of Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) twisting himself into weird knots as he expressed support for Trump's plans, just to get to a metaphor that is so clichéd the sidebar about his eating habits and his sex life was entirely unnecessary:
  
  
  
  Truth be told, even if Congress did want to do something, we are not sure there is all that much they could do. That is to say, if Trump fires every employee of the DoE, and then refuses to replace them, then the Department is effectively dead, even if it still exists on paper. Note, incidentally, that Secretary of Education-designate Linda McMahon has not had her confirmation hearings yet. The fact that her would-be department is on the chopping block should make those... interesting.

Obviously, this list does not include the crazypants stuff we've already written up, like Elon Musk's invasion of federal computer systems. And by tomorrow, there will surely be more. No wonder we can't keep up. (Z)