Pensito Illustration His appointees are usually good at one thing: Trump pleasin’.
But agencies like FEMA require capable leaders, it stands to reason.
We don’t need some bloke
Who covers his ignorance with a joke,
Like FEMA head David Richardson, who doesn’t know it’s hurricane season.
“What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. …. I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion. …. It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks. Just lay back.”
— James Carville told Mediaite that the Trump administration would “collapse” within 30 days and advised Democrats to sit back and let it happen.
A new Economist/YouGov Poll finds President Trump’s approval rating and personal popularity falling over the past two weeks. This week’s poll finds Americans are less likely to approve of Trump (46%) than to disapprove (48%), and less likely to view him favorably (46%) than unfavorably (52%).
Trump and Musk think federal employees are shirking,
But we think their approach is disconcerting.
Don’t you think it’s funny
That they think we’re saving money
By paying 40,000 people for eight months of not working?
“President-elect Donald Trump is preparing nearly 100 executive orders for when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20,” the Washington Post reports. “Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma), appearing on Fox News, said Trump relayed plans to take action on immigration and energy, among other issues, during a meeting with Republican senators in Washington on Wednesday night.”
Pensito Illustration
By resigning as FBI director prior to the end of his 10-year tenure, Christopher Wray has thwarted Donald Trump’s plans to install the odious Kash Patel as FBI chief.
New York Times: “By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a ‘legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.’”
“Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.”
“Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1.”
“Within the party Ronald Reagan once led so capably, it is increasingly fashionable to suggest that the sort of global leadership he modeled is no longer America’s place. … But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.”
L’il Marco Rubio secretary of state? That’s adorable. Stephen Miller because — not despite — he’s horrible.
As Trump fills his cabinet,
We ain’t seen nothing yet,
But rest assured — it will be another Basket of Deplorables.
About the secret things the CIA does, they’re not going to tell ya,
They don’t want to jeopardize the mission or it could be a failure.
The CIA is happiest when operating covert,
But Trump just converted them to overt,
Saying he’s deploying the Central Intelligence Agency “undercover” in Venezuela.
“Tuesday’s results back up my oft-stated argument that the November 2024 election was a highly focused repudiation of President Biden, the Biden-Harris Administration, and, by extension, Vice President Kamala Harris, not the top-to-bottom repudiation of the Democratic Party that many have made it out to be.”
“Sharia law seeks to destroy and supplant the pillars of our republican form of government and is incompatible with the Western tradition. The use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers to promote Sharia law likely contravenes Florida law and undermines our national security.”
— Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, introducing an Islamic law scare into the public discourse via an X post magnifying claims that state universal school choice dollars were paying for instruction in Sharia in Tampa charter schools, reported Florida Phoenix.
Companies said they laid off 153,074 employees last month, the most since 2003, according to a report the consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas published yesterday. That’s nearly triple the number of jobs cut in September, and it puts the total for the year through October at almost 1.1 million jobs lost—44% more than in all of 2024. Most of October’s redundancies came from just two industries. Warehouses were the biggest job cutters last month with 48,000 layoffs, followed by 33,000 in tech. Amazon, UPS, Paramount, and Target were just some corporate names that announced layoffs last month.
“Most of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom have high-stakes business before the administration, ranging from billions in government contracts to federal investigations into their companies,” the Washington Post reports. “More than half of the companies that donated are facing or have recently faced federal enforcement actions tied to alleged wrongdoing that includes engaging in unfair labor practices, deceiving consumers and harming the environment.”
“President Donald Trump littered his new ’60 Minutes’ interview with a wide-ranging assortment of false claims, the vast majority of them previously debunked,” CNN reports. “We counted at least 18 inaccurate assertions.”
“Millions of low-income Americans are losing access to food aid as the nation’s largest anti-hunger program goes dark for the first time,” Politico reports. “Congress failed to reopen the government before funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ran out Saturday. A federal judge, in an eleventh-hour decision, directed the Trump administration to use emergency funds to pay for food aid in November — but even that wasn’t enough to prevent the immediate lapse of benefits, which officials say could take weeks to resume.”
“The U.S. economy will lose between $7 billion and $14 billion due to the federal government shutdown, according to a new report released by Congress’s nonpartisan bookkeeper,” the Washington Post reports.