The Trump Administration: The Clusterfuck Continues

I misspoke there. I was talking about when he recused himself from the Russia investigation, which is when Trump spit him out and stomped on him. He was under the impression that he should appear ethical. So yes, you are correct, he was never really ethical.

Somehow, I think that district FL-1 can probably find and elect someone almost as rightwing, unethical and Trump-loyal as Matt Gaetz, as hard as it might be to imagine someone with all those attributes.

In case anyone has any doubts about the number one item on Trump’s administration, this nifty article on Yahoo has it straight from the jackass’s mouth:

President-elect Donald Trump told House Republicans that he won’t seek a third term as president — unless they find a way to make it possible.

"I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you say, ‘he’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else,’ " Trump said while addressing the House Republican Conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Nov. 13. The crowd chuckled in response to his remark.

You know what they say, “Don’t take Trump literally, ‘take him symbolically’”.

The ‘symbolism’ here is so concrete it you could bury a body with it.

Stranger

Spotted on The Daily Show Xwitter account, regarding the Gaetz nomination:

The Department of Justice isn’t within 1500 feet of a school, is it?

I seriously thought you were kidding about this, but apparently not.

It’s an all-star right-wing gang. I am not even sure what to think at the moment.

According to Brian Tyler Cohen, Gaetz has already resigned from the Congress.

Interestingly enough, Gaetz’s resignation comes two days before a report - reported to be “highly damaging” to Gaetz - is to be voted on to be released from the House Ethics Committee.

The Ethics Committee loses jurisdiction over Gaetz the second he leaves Congress.

Lord, I’m not a praying man, but if you could see fit in your wisdom to tank Gaetz’s Senate hearing and somehow get the voters in his district to replace him with a Democrat, I’ll start giving my spare change to the Salvation Army bellringers again.

How far-fetched? I honestly don’t know. So many insane things have happened lately that I find myself unable to distinguish between probable and improbable.

Ron Brownstein on X:

"Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. "

Posted to X
To round up migrants, Miller said, Trump would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in TX,” to serve as internment camps for migrants

[1:51 PM · Feb 10, 2024]

Apparently Trump has hinted he’d use the Insurrection Act to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act. He wanted to do so during the George Floyd protests, but the GOP pushed back. I’m not so sure they’d try to stop him this time.

Miller is crazy, crazy like a Fox…News broadcast. Someone tell me this is couldn’t possibly happen.

Id tell you, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my almost 52 years on this planet, it’s to never lie to a woman.

I had been thinking the same as a poster above, it sounds really foolish of Gaetz to resign before he’s even been approved by the Senate. He could lose his House seat and not become attorney general.

I just wanted to highlight this part, because it completely and wonderfully sums up how I’ve been feeling for about the last week or so. I have a handful of posts here and there, but I don’t think I’ve posted more than three or four times since the election. And this is most likely the reason why. I couldn’t quite put it into words, but this summarizes it concisely.

I honestly have no idea what is going to happen next. I can realistically see scenarios ranging from Trump’s erratic laziness and insanity leading to the next 4 years being a complete cluster fuck and damaging to the country long-term, but otherwise indistinguishable from his first term. (Which was bad enough.) To worldwide scenarios that are essentially armageddon. I don’t want to think that and it seems insane for me to think that, but I can’t put it out of the realm of possibility. (What is Putin’s Russia going to do once he’s in office? And what effect is this going to have on NATO? Are we going to have recognizable elections in 2026 and 2028? I certainly hope so, but I wouldn’t care to bet money on that.)

And then the news that we got yesterday and the day before? Gaetz as attorney general? Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence? A fucking Fox News host as Secretary of defense? As another poster put it elsewhere that I saw, are you fucking kidding me? I want to think that more rational heads will prevail, and that our institutions will hold. But we just elected a man who tried to overthrow democracy once already, live on national television. I just don’t know anymore…

This is the one that blows my mind. Gaetz and the others are just slimy suckups, but we’ve known for years that Gabbard is at minimum a deliberate friend to Russia. Even the Russians have been quite open about it; this clip is from 2022.

If I were head of an intelligence service anywhere in the sane Western world, I would slam the door on sharing classified information with the Americans after Trump takes over. It’s all gonna go straight to Putin.

Aha! An article came out on CNN that explains this madness. People, Donald J. Trump is a troll! He’s trolling all of us with these picks. And yes, I’m serious.

Trump’s short-lived former first-term communications director Anthony Scaramucci told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the president-elect’s personnel selections were purposely meant to “own the liberals.” Paraphrasing Trump’s intent, he added: “‘Let’s pick some triggering people.’ And those are the triggering people.”

Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman agreed, telling CNN’s Manu Raju of the Gaetz selection: “It’s just kind of like a god-tier, kind of trolling, just to trigger a meltdown.”

CNN.
In effect, Trump is saying–Wait, maybe not “in effect.” He may well be saying exactly this: “Let’s own the libs and all the fuckers who convicted me and made fun of my very manly diapers and Watch. Them. Squirm.”

I hope the Senate reaches up past its collective rectum and finds enough of a conscience to refuse to confirm Gaetz and Gabbard. A silver lining here might be that Gaetz would be out of Congress AND the White House, for a little while, at least. Maybe. Oh, who am I kidding? He’d make Gaetz Chief Butt-Polisher or Catsup Czar or something.

That’s basically what my poll above is about: how is he trolling the country?

But they don’t lose the report, so what stops them from releasing it?

If he was catsup czar, I wonder how long he’d last.

“Gaetz? I had to fire him.”

“Why, Mr. Trump?”

“He was late bringing catsup for my hamberders.”

First job for the Department of Government Efficiency: making the Catsup Czar and the Ketchup Tsar the same person.

This actually makes perfect sense to me. He’s running the best reality show of his life and he’s going to milk it for all it’s worth in the next couple of months.