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Trump Does Gaza
And on the 16th Day, Donald Trump took a break from threatening Greenland and Panama, launching bogus trade wars with Canada and Mexico, lowering the price of eggs and his co-president’s ongoing enshittification of the federal government, to announce…
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza strip, and we’ll do a job with it too. We’ll own it. And be responsible for dismantling all the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site … create an economic development that will supply unlimited jobs and housing for people of the area … I do see a long-term ownership position [for the U.S.].”
Or, as Anthony Scaramucci put it rather succinctly: “We went from crony capitalism to crony imperialism in 16 days.” Because, surely, this is what the voters really wanted when they put Trump back in the White House. And who among us is not vibrating with excitement at the prospect of a new Trump Tower, Trump Golf Club, and Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Med rising from the rubble of an ethnically cleansed Gaza?
Before we get into the rank crackpottery, let us take a moment to give credit where credit is due:
Congratulations, plaudits, bouquets, and a well earned pat on the back to all of the “Lets-teach-a-lesson-to-Genocide-Joe” activists out there; and a hearty well-done for the MAGA folks who railed against endless wars. Because what’s more America First than this, my good lads?
And, surely, these guys must be feeling especially good this morning:
**
Alas, it is not all sand, sun, and spray tan in Trump’s new Mideast Imperium.
“There’s probably a couple of kinks in that slinky,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) who, ironically enough, is himself an invertebrate slinky.
European countries joined Arab nations Wednesday in rebuking a shock announcement by United States President Donald Trump that he wants to take control over Gaza and forcibly displace its inhabitants to neighboring countries including Jordan and Egypt.
Trump’s remarks that the U.S. should “own” Gaza and turn it from a “demolition site” into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” sparked immediate blowback from Palestinian officials, their regional allies around the Middle East and key European capitals.
Trump is not, however, without his fans. Vladimir Putin is positively giddy over the prospects of his girl, Tulsi, winning confirmation as Director of National Intelligence and a trade war between the US and Europe:
“I assure you: Trump, with his character, with his persistence, he will restore order there quite quickly. And all of them, you will see — it will happen quickly, soon — they will all stand at the feet of the master and will wag their tails a little. Everything will fall into place,” Putin told pro-Kremlin journalist Pavel Zarubin, who presents the primetime “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin” program on the Rossiya-1 state TV channel. The comments were reported by state news agency RIA Novosti and translated by Google.
Meanwhile, back home at our constitutional crisis…
Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions.
**
In their excellent newsletter, Executive Function,Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith ask, “Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence? Is the administration laying the groundwork for test cases in an effort to expand executive power in the Supreme Court?”
Bauer and Goldsmith examine a third possibility: that “the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.”
The third possibility sounds histrionic, which is not our usual posture. But it appears to be the view of Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who is one of Trump’s “most influential advisers,” who will be voted on for confirmation in the Senate soon, and who will play a central role in Trump’s executive orders, if he hasn’t already.
Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.
“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.
[The] number of daily Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, trumpeted each day on X, are still about where they were at times under President Barack Obama. Many of those detained have no violent criminal history and thousands have been quietly released for lack of detention capacity. Drugs and illegal immigrants are still slipping across the border each day.
It’s hardly “the largest deportation program in American history,” that Trump promised to launch on Day One of his administration.
Massive head-fake...more bright, shiny objects dangled in front of the public and the media: Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, and now, Gaza. All in the service of distracting from the ongoing coup in Washington, led by Elno and his Muskification teams of wunderkinder plowing through safeguards, laws, and the Constitution.
Don't be fooled, people, eye on the ball, and it ain't Gaza, ffs! Next to fall: TROs issued by federal courts, thence ignored by the fascists.
Gaza? Give me a break! This from the guy who couldn’t even fix a few bridges with his “Infrastructure Week”! He didn’t so much as fill a pothole. Just more distractions while Elon’s little Nazis screw with our retirement accounts.
Massive head-fake...more bright, shiny objects dangled in front of the public and the media: Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, and now, Gaza. All in the service of distracting from the ongoing coup in Washington, led by Elno and his Muskification teams of wunderkinder plowing through safeguards, laws, and the Constitution.
Don't be fooled, people, eye on the ball, and it ain't Gaza, ffs! Next to fall: TROs issued by federal courts, thence ignored by the fascists.
Gaza? Give me a break! This from the guy who couldn’t even fix a few bridges with his “Infrastructure Week”! He didn’t so much as fill a pothole. Just more distractions while Elon’s little Nazis screw with our retirement accounts.