All right, I get that Trump hates the World Health Organization, though I'm not sure why. It's Trump. But apparently withdrawing isn't enough. Effective immediately, nobody at the CDC is allowed to communicate with anyone at WHO in any way. Huh?
Then, this evening he paused all disbursements of federal grants and assistance—whatever that means—except for money that goes directly to individuals. He claims this amounts to $3 trillion, which is a fantasy, but it's a lot regardless. What's the point? What does anyone gain from all these weird pauses in funding aside from ending disfavored programs maybe a week or two earlier than otherwise?
And then he announced he was going to put tariffs on all chips from Taiwan. Apple is going to love that.
During Trump's first week I felt like I at least understood what he was up to. This week I'm feeling sort of flummoxed. What's the point of all this?
There is a Wormtongue somewhere...
Putin? Stephen Miller?
Russell Vought.
Trump is speaking in tongues?
Setting the stage for mass chaos that leads to violence in the streets so he can then be free to call for martial law to punish anyone that opposes him.
“I’m an Emperor now, and when I act, I create my own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—I’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”
Donald Trump (after Karl Rove)
No way that Trump knows what "judiciously" means or is capable of correctly using it in a sentence.
Except you don't really create new realities. Certainly there are large numbers of people who will believe anything that comes out of Trump's mouth. If tomorrow Trump said the sun was green, millions of people would insist that the sun was green. But that's not changing reality. And you still can't fool all of the people all of the time. Or even most of the people all of the time. One thing I'm absolutely certain of: the narcissist in Trump will overreach because he thinks he can fool all of the people all of the time. Just give him time. And from the look of things, it won't even be a very long time.
This. Trump is farcically overreaching--even if the things he wanted to accomplish were good ideas (and they are not), he's setting himself up to be judged by ludicrous benchmarks like how much Panama Canal and Denmark he is able to seize, or whether or not Canada becomes a state.
I happened to be talking with a hardcore MAGA and I mentioned why I thought annexing Canada would be a great idea because you'd be adding 10 new states with 20 Senators, 30+ Congressmen and upwards of 50 electoral votes, the overwhelming number of which would be Democratic. I wish I had a camera ready at the time.
Ha! Yeah, the whole annex-Canada thing would ensure that somebody like Trump never becomes president again. Even if it were to be just *one* state, Canada is like adding another California.
Not if you add Canada in the same way we added Puerto Rico: as a territory with no voting rights whatsoever. (We never did this to territory with 30-40m people in it, but there’s a first time for everything, and if we’re already annexing Canada against their will, stripping them of voting rights against their will seems like just a small step in the same direction.)
Exactly. Amazing to me that some of us are still trying to limit his reach to the political norms of the 1990s.
🙂
Canada would likely be only 5 states. The Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies and British Columbia. I doubt that BC would be allowed to keep that name, though.
+1
Plato was high.
"What's the point of all this?"
1) He's an idiot, of the particular sort that is strongly convinced that he is actually smart and that anybody who disagrees with him is, in fact, the real idiot.
2) He's an authoritarian.
3) Consistent with both (1) and (2), he will do stupid, destructive, stupid things both because he isn't capable of making constructive decisions and because he thinks that making things happen simply because he wills them to happen is a Good unto itself.
This, but also:
I don't see any actions published on 1/27 or 1/24 that does any of what Kevin mentions.
Uhh, what?
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/trump-administration-halts-health-communications-freezes-research-grants/
Here: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/27/trump-freezes-federal-aid-omb-00200891
There’s a link to a copy of the memo, sent by the acting director of OMB, ordering a halt to ‘Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs’.
Thanks. I was looking at the published presidential actions. Which this isn't, technically speaking.
So he is just blathering on in posts, but doesn't do the work to make it official?
Great--how many people will be fired for following the law and not posts...
" he will do stupid, destructive, stupid things both because ..."
That is plain stupid.
Trump will do destructive actions because he wants to destruct things, in particular he wants to destruct the consitutional order, so he can be a "strong" dictator like Putin etc.
I fully agree with you that Trump is an autocrat and that he admires Putin and wants to emulate him; I also fully agree that he is dangerous.
Where we part company is over your insistence that all of the very, very dumb things that Trump does and says are actually some sort of secretly crafted brilliant nth-level chessmoves designed with the endgoal in mind of Trump doing a big tiananmen square.
Dude's an idiot. He is not lex luthor-with-a-combover. It's a mistake to discount the threat he poses, but it is also a mistake to ascribe some sort of deep strategy to every stupid thing he does.
The real mistake lies in believing that the distinction you’re drawing—between Trump being a bumbling idiot and a master strategist—matters in any meaningful way.
The danger he poses isn’t contingent on some grand, calculated strategy. It’s in his relentless pursuit of power, his disregard for norms, and the fervent loyalty of his base.
The idea that he will inevitably go too far is deeply misguided. Trump’s unpredictability and willingness to trample over democratic principles make him just as dangerous regardless of whether his actions are strategic or impulsive. Fixating on this distinction risks underestimating the severity of the threat he represents.
".. Trump does and says are actually some sort of secretly crafted brilliant nth-level chessmoves .."
".. deep strategy.."
That is a strawman, and is really dishonest when you answer me, because I am not ascribing him "deep strategy" or "brilliant chess move".
What he is is a very skilled bamboozler, which succeeds to bamboozle large sections of the population to support him, and other parts of the population to think that he is an idiot/moron and therefore not dangerous.
You can see how it works on this blog, when people keep writing that he is just a cover of the Billionaires, even though he clearly runs the show.
I too think he’s an idiot, but that doesn’t prevent him from absorbing Putin’s view of the future, Risk IRL, with imperial powers dominating their respective spheres of influence through fear and threats. Very appealing to a bully without moral scruples, and one needn’t be a genius to embark on that path — look at Putin’s staggering miscalculation re Ukraine.
If someone does a bunch of weird, seemingly unrelated, actions , but all of these actions conicidentall have the identical effect, maybe it's not coincidental.
Almost everything Trump has done it make us sicker, dumber, weaker, and move violent, while destroying or credibility. Coincidence?
Another part of this bamboozlement is to overwhelm the media. Look at the Colombia story. He created the "crisis" by sending an unannounced military plane with deportees, and then when the standoff was resolved, the WH released a typically Trumpian statement, which the TV news dutifully repeated as if it were fact.
The real story is far more complicated, as you can read in this Heather Cox Richardson Substack post:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-27-2025
Two interesting points that jump out: all the deportees on the planes in question were arrested UNDER BIDEN. And the deportees were not sent back to the US, the rejected plane landed in Honduras and the deportees were transferred to a Colombian government plane for a flight to Bogota.
These facts certainly obscure the Trumpian declaration of "victory" and the almost universal headlines about how Colombia "backed down." It took me 10 minutes to find this all out, but the media reports just ended with the White House statement. Why? Because the reporters and editors are overwhelmed with shit.
And the US press barely covered the Brazil deportees story.
See for example:
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20250126-brazil-outraged-after-us-deportees-arrive-handcuffed-colombia-to-refuse-us-deportation-flights
I expect it's about summoning a horde of supplicants to the white house, hats in hand, ready to make "deals."
That's part of it. But some of it is probably consistent stupidity (Trump has been ranting about trade deficits for decades); some of it is random stupidity.
Example: the Greenland stuff is because during his first term some cosmetics magnate that Trump quite probably was crushing on suggested buying Greenland, Trump liked the idea, and then got angry when the Danes said "um, no, not for sale"; Trump threw a tantrum and canceled a scheduled diplomatic meeting and has on some level been nursing this perceived slight ever since. (He probably also has no idea what a mercator projection is, either). Dollars to donuts Trump himself probably doesn't remember that that's how all this started.
Other examples of this randomness abound, but without as robust a public paper trail tracing back to the original random idiocy seed crystal: Trump's repeated insistence that a ficitonal cannibal is somehow both "late" and "great," his continued claim that "forest" countries rake their woods, his certainty that China controls the Panama Canal, etc. Why does Trump think these things? Because he's a delusional moron.
+1
Don't rule out cognitive decline having a role in this. Washington, DC attracts people with agendas like flies to horse manure. Trump very likely has lost or is losing any innate ability he might have once had to differentiate things that make political sense from things that don't. So he is perhaps vulnerable to the various hustlers he surrounds himself with. Who knows what the extremists in his midst are urging him to do?
I copied this from a Digby article. It was posted by Trump on Truth Social. It seems to me that tomorrow’s headlines should all be “Trump loses marbles!”:
“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”
I was wondering why our water pressure suddenly went up.
Mystery solved!
It explains the tanks too, I suppose.
WTF? They found the giant faucet?
If there is consistency underlying his rhetoric, it's an amalgamate of his own selfish nature and Bannonism: that the US will withdraw from global institutions, agreements, or domestic contracts, etc., unless they directly serve a tangible (money or in-kind) benefit for the US or more specifically, him.
People think his hyperbolic threats are part of his bargaining strategy, but more than that, they are actually just a natural extension of his personality to make outrageous, outsized statements to shift perceptions.
That's the kind of person who would have a bespoke gold toilet in his domicile and emblazon a 34 year old 757 with his name in bold, with gold-plated seatbelts. Then, shaft the people who built these things for him.
Bottom line: the convicted felon believes the entire world is a zero-sum game.
This time around, however, there are no guide rails inside the administration and very few outside it. Just embrace the rapid buildup of chaos and let it explode onto him.
I think it's two different things. You have the Project 2025 playbook running, in which The Felon is just a puppet with a pen and there's a power struggle to manage him. Then there's the imaginary world of petty grievances playing on repeat in said Felon's head. His team is probably trying very, very hard to not have him blow up their hard work and plans.
They will not succeed.
If anyone learned anything from the first term, it was the he is unmanageable.
Who says they learned anything?
+1
Your first paragraph is as good an explanation of the Trump administration as I have ever seen.
As far as trump himself is concerned, he's never given a flying fuck about governing, or cared to know anything about either how federal spending ramifies throughout the economy and society in ways very few people ever think about but that are vital, or how federal participation in information-sharing benefits different interest groups here and whole societies abroad. He doesn't care about any of that.
He does care about getting back at anybody he thinks may have slighted him in the smallest way, and happily uses his authority to, for example, pull off the bodyguards of people who are credibly thought to be hunted by assassins.
He also cares about being the focus of all attention and finding ways to demonstrate that the sun shines out his ass-- in WWE terms he doesn't mind being the heel, in fact likes it, because it's more compelling and he thinks it makes him look tough-- so he'll take heart-stoppingly dramatic actions that are sold to him the right way. This shit was easy for a few Grima Wormtongues like Vought to sell him on.
What they're selling him on in substance is Richard Nixon's ghost, rising from its grave and shaking its chains. The ultimate goal is that no federal money will ever be spent without specific approval by a political officer inserted in every agency or office that disburses money. (If you want to call these officials commissars, go ahead, tomaytoe, tomahtoe, lol, whatever.) Just as Nixon tried to do in days of yore.
The Wormtongues' ultimate bet is that the SCOTUS majority of Nixon disciples, who have all believed with all their tiny souls that he was unfairly and unjustly resisted by entrenched bureaucrats and railroaded out of office, will rally around the battle cry of presidential absolutism just as Godfather Dick and apostle Ed Meese preached it. This is the moment the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo have been moving the chess pieces all these years to achieve.
In the meantime, they'll get their kicks watching everybody panic. They're carpet-bombing the agora with cluster bombs of hornets' nests and watching everybody scatter. And yukking it up.
*chef's kiss*
Oh, about tariffs on Taiwanese chips-- the way he was talking about that makes me think he wants to grab the Chips Act money to use for his precious tax cuts instead.
The chips tariffs are just nuts. The US will have to buy the most advanced chips from TSMC for years while we try to advance our chip making technology to their level, and US customers will be paying those tariffs, while Europe will not. That’s not shooting yourself in the foot, it’s shooting yourself in the head.
Keeping the distraction machine going because he knows he’s playing a losing hand on what the tariffs and deportations will do to the economy, plus he knows he’s got to actually negotiate a deal on the debt limit and extending his tax cuts and that’s going to be tough. So he wants to look “strong” while he can.
Beating up on Columbia certainly made him look tough. I'm sure the people in Luxembourg are wondering if they're next.
If someone tells him about the contemptuous behavior of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick in just the right way, he'll probably demand an invasion. And he'll wield his Sharpie and just us exactly where it is in Europe.
He's more Idi Amin than Hitler. Is he serious, is he crazy, is it all a put on? Who knows, but keeping everyone off balance is part of the point.
Simple: "It's a madhouse! A madhouse!"
Sadly, Charlton Heston would have been a MAGAt.
"I'll give you my sharpie when you pry (or take) it from my cold, dead hands"
Our president is insane.
My theory is that they are setting up a spoils system. The supreme court has basically made bribery legal and now the federal government will start doling out funds based on payouts and votes. The educated class has broken hard for the democrats--now they have to either pay or be ground down.
Trump is just the distraction clown. The smart people are behind the scenes.
You think the "smart people" put Hegseth in DOD, Bindi in DOJ, and Patel in FBI?
This kind of thinking is part of the explanation why Trump succeed. Even people that can clearly see he is a POS don't realize how dangerous he is.
You need morally bankrupt people at the top to move the graft forward and keep the underlings in line who might have a conscience or sense of patriotism. No, the smart people are Miller, Musk, Thiel, etc., and the Opus Dei delusionists. Funds will start going to red states and be denied from blue states. It might even get more granular than that, Meta might share people's Facebook posts and decide who gets federal grants.
All the smart people need to tell Trump is that we are punching the people in the face who are against you and he is onboard. Since he isn't very smart, he will get confused in the details and say bizarre shit but if you look at the patterns, it will make sense.
You are badly deluded.
Trump drives all of this, the rest are just hanging on.
What’s the point? Corruption. If you want the US government to do something for you, pay up. Plus I’m sure lots of his supporters think these grants and spending are waste fraud and abuse. Bring it on.
All this makes a lot more sense if we just remember one key thing: Trump is galactically stupid. Eye-wateringly stupid. Explaining the role of the WHO or California's water infrastructure to him is like trying to make a dog grasp the mind of Newton.
He doesn't like the WHO because, as everyone knows, if you don't have an organization to detect early outbreaks of possible pandemic viruses, they don't exist. Just like testing for COVID produced increasing cases.
What? My dog does calculus, doesn't everyone's?
lucky! My dog dropped out midway through trig; now it just sits at home, smoking pot and playing the guitar.
Trump: I'm going to destroy the federal government
(commences destroying the federal government)
Kevin: I don't understand what Trump is doing.
Didn't they literally tell everyone what the Trump Admin is up to? It's called flood the zone with BS.
It's about sending a message to the civil service that the President is in charge of government policy, not them. Unlike last time, if he issues an executive order it will be immediately followed both in letter and intent. To the extent it is not, those that disobey will be terminated from eployment.
This is the only way government can work in a unitary executive system. Unelected bureaucrats cannot be allowed to undermine the will of the people. It would be equally as dangerous if the civil service was full of right-wingers that subverted a Democrat president.
Not the only way. For decades we have followed a model in which merit-system civil servants bring or acquire subject-matter expertise, study and analyze issues, and provide policy-makers with alternatives, evaluations and rationales. The accusation by the right-wing that some cabal of deep-staters pushes an antidemocratic agenda, is another case of their accusation being a confession of what they intend — replacing experts with ideologues.
An adversarial system is a recipe for dysfunction, particularly when the militants are determined to roll back the Enlightenment.
"This blatantly illegal. The fired civil service will make out like bandits in the wrngful dismissal lawsuits and the tax payers will take it in the neck.
But he isn't uncharge of the Civil Service. He can't offer them money to quit early because he doesn't control the funds. The Civil Service is authorized by law Trump has to obey those laws.
Oh, yeah? https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/28/politics/federal-worker-buyouts-trump-administration/index.html
Laws are for little people, especially the nonwhite ones …
He's pummeling us -- all of us: his party (to the extent they still need to be pummeled), the opposition, business, our institutions, the people -- into accepting his authoritarian rule and rampant corruption.
And 50+ percent of American voters
Having watched this guy for 10 years so they knew what he’d do
were okay with all this
The majority voted against Trump.
A plurality voted him in.
Fox News (I know, right?) had the actual story behind this: Some Federal water pumps were down for a few days for maintenance and are now back online.
I'm not holding my breath to see whether The Times or WaPo actually cover this story, but it should be front page above-the-fold news: "Trump Hallucinates Federal Troops Invading California!"
Link to Fox News story: https://bit.ly/3PTQLRi
Isolate us from the rest of the world. What a great idea. Hopefully we don't experience another pandemic in the near future.
You can't practice disaster capitalism without the disaster.
Corruption, mr. Drum. In order to get payed for leaving the spigot on, you have to prove you can turn it off.
This is all illegal. The courts should over turn it and Congress should impeach him for it, but the courts are already bought and congress won't impeach for a share of the take.
Pavlov's dogs come to mind - disruption only ever seems to help him so he keeps shitting where he's sitting. He gets attention, opponents are confronted with more nonsense, systems that might restrict him break down and are overwhelmed.
It isn't clever, and the U.S will suffer a great deal for putting a narcissistic moron in their increasingly imperial presidency. Individuals should not have a great deal of power, no matter how much you want one too, because eventually some idiot or enemy will hold the office.
The true villains are the Republican party which has lied and cheated to enable him, and you've got them, because by and large, this is the U.S. It's soul on display.
Cruelty is the point.
Just always repeat that when you don't know what the fuck Trump is doing:
Cruelty is the point.
He's a brain damaged toddler. There is no rationale here. He thinks it makes him look strong to churn out all these orders, and make people fight them in Court.
And the media loves it. They describe how strong he is, even though none of this stuff is likely to survive a legal challenge. The only question is whether he's going to obey an order from SCOTUS, but we won't know for a while. Certainly the Republicans won't impeach him for ignoring a court order or cutting off food stamps.
They already declined to impeach him for inciting an insurrection. He might as well insure that he gets his/Project2025’s bills passed by sending some opposition Congresspersons to Guantanamo. That’ll be OK by Johnson and Thune.
He doesn't care about project 2025.
The people he will send to Guantanamo (or kill ) are any serious Decomcrat candidate that runs against him/his-stand-in-toady in 2028.