Author: Jon Ponder

During her April 23, 2025, show, Rachel Maddow provided a run-down of the Trump regime’s destructive, mistake-ridden first 100 days. In describing the Trumpists’ authoritarian takeover of the country, she took us on a wild ride through the regime’s long list of blunders:

• Oops! Freezing all federal funding/grants, then rescinding the order within 48 hours due to confusion and legal challenges.
• Oops! Accidentally listing the wrong person as acting head of the FBI on the White House website and letting the error stand.
• Oops! Accidentally sending names of hundreds of CIA officers in an unclassified email to the White House.
• Oops! Announcing a policy that inadvertently halted all mail from China, then reversing it.
• Oops! Accidental firing and attempted rehiring of nuclear security agency staff.
• Oops! Misstating savings on a contract by billions of dollars.
• Oops! Reversing a decision to remove legal aid for migrant children after public outcry.
• Oops! Cutting, then restoring, the program for 9/11 first responders.
• Oops! Elon Musk, Trump’s top campaign donor, sending out mass layoff threats to federal employees, then walking it back.
• Oops! Cutting and then restoring burial services and cancer support for veterans.
• Oops! Accidentally eliminating Ebola prevention measures, then reversing.
• Oops! Cutting and then reinstating hires for the Veterans Crisis Line due to an “administrative error.”
• Oops! Deleting and then restoring thousands of federal contracts in error.
• Oops! Announcing mass firings of federal employees, then denying it happened.
• Oops! Posting hundreds of federal properties for sale, including agency headquarters, then removing the listings without explanation.
• Oops! Publicly releasing unredacted Social Security numbers and private information of hundreds, including Trump’s own lawyer, in JFK assassination files, then scrambling to mitigate.
• Oops! Accidentally texting war plans to a journalist.
• Oops! Admitting to mistakenly deporting a Maryland man to an El Salvador prison.
• Oops! Tariffs inadvertently affecting remote islands, including one inhabited mainly by penguins.

At the end of the segment, Maddow suggested that we should keep this long list of Trump’s failures in mind as the mainstream media sane washes and glosses over of the chaos in its reporting on Trump’s first 100 days.

Salon.com: Rep. Andy Ogles, R.-Tenn., is the latest House Republican to make a splashy grab for President Donald Trump’s attention, introducing a proposal to amend the Constitution and allow the 78-year-old to try for a third term.

In a statement, Ogles claimed Trump “must be given the time necessary” to enact his legislation and praised the president as the “only figure in modern history” who could properly lead the country.

“This amendment would allow President Trump to serve three terms, ensuring that we can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs,” Ogles said.

Ogle specifically excludes Obama and any other presidents who successfully served two consecutive terms. However, in the extremely unlikely event that this amendment gets the required two-third votes in the House and Senat, this provision is so illogical that it would almost certainly be struck down, setting the stage for a 2028 match up between Trump, 82, and Barack Obama, 67.

“Turns out the President Musk thing was off base because Stephen Miller is really running the country,” Ron Filipkowski wrote recently on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “These are Miller’s ideas and Miller’s executive orders. Trump is just signing them and talking gibberish about what’s in them.”

No one who followed Trump’s claims during the election can be surprised by the firehose of ultra-right executive orders spewed by the new administration in its first few days. They were cribbed out of the Heritage Foundation’s anti-democracy “Project 2025” manifesto, which has been rebranded as “America First,” borrowing a name from a 1930s U.S. fascist movement associated with celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh.

The only surprise is that the morbidly obese, 78-year-old Trump. the laziest president since Reagan, has had the energy to do it all. The suggestion by Filipkowski, an attorney associated with the Meidas Touch Network, that Miller is doing the heavy lifting makes sense.

The Resistance to the coming fascist state under Donald Trump unofficially kicks off at his inauguration on Monday with the notable absence of key Democratic figures who would normally appear on stage with an incoming president.

Hell Freezes over

Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, is going to be bitterly cold in Washington, D.C. WTOP reports that there is a chance of snow on Sunday and predicts gusty winds on Monday, with a high temperature of just 20 degrees.

Ex-Presidents Out at Lunch

Of course, Pres. Biden and Dr. Jill Biden will be on the podium, as will former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, along with his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush and his wife Laura. However, Michele Obama has opted not to attend.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi will not attend the inauguration, and it is not because she recently broke her hip.

[…]

In Shock Doctrine, her seminal work on the rise of authoritarnism in the contemporary world, Naomi Klein shows how fascists undermine democracies in order to replace them with authoritarian states by creating and exploiting economic chaos. In the disruptions that ensue, they seize power.

In advance of his inauguration next month, Trump is saying plainly that he is very intentionally bringing economic chaos on day one. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do.”

Salon.com: Donald Trump, who won in part due to inflation that peaked two years ago, campaigned on a policy of making everything from vegetables to televisions more expensive, suggesting a plurality of voters either did not understand tariffs — and the rippling economic impact of raising taxes on imported goods — or simply did not believe the Republican candidate would follow through.

In a Monday evening post on Truth Social, the president-elect reaffirmed that yeah, he’s serious.

[…]

After months, even years, of sane-washing Donald Trump, the New York Times reported on Saturday that Donald Trump has been delivering “rambling” and “fantastical” speeches at campaign rallies this year. But with just a month to go before the 2024 general election when many Americans are voting early, it is may be too little and too late to make a difference.

New York Times: New York Times (Paywall): “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful’ body. He relishes ‘a great day in Louisiana’ after spending the day in Georgia.”

“He expresses fear that North Korea is ‘trying to kill me’ when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.”