Funny how the loudest guy in the room always needs the most lawyers.
Donald Trump spent Monday installing his former personal attorney Todd Blanche as Attorney General. The swearing-in was performed by Emil Bove, another former Trump personal lawyer who is now an appeals court judge. So let me get this straight. The man who hires his lawyers to defend him in court now has his lawyers running the courts. And nobody in the press wants to connect those dots? Ask yourself who benefits when the guy who signs your paycheck also signs your arrest warrant.
Then the Sharpie came out. Trump signed an executive order aimed at cutting childhood vaccines. He told the country that vaccines cause autism, that kids were getting inoculations “the size of soda bottles,” and that the measles-mumps-rubella shot could be “quite lethal.” This during a year when the U.S. has logged more measles cases than any year in a quarter century. Standing next to him was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who called all of this “gold-standard science.”
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsEighty-one percent of American adults told KFF they trust the MMR vaccine is safe. But the experts at CNN and the experts at CDC and the experts at every medical school in the country are all wringing their hands, and I’m supposed to believe they just now noticed the president says wild things? Where were these guardians of public health when the pharmaceutical companies were settling lawsuit after lawsuit and paying out billions in damages? Funny how that never makes the roundup.
Here’s what the CNN piece won’t tell you. The same establishment that spent four years telling you Trump was a threat to democracy spent the next four years quietly confirming his judges, approving his cabinet, and funding his government. They’re not scared of him. They’re scared of you figuring out the game.
Trump leaned on new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh about interest rates and then told reporters it would be different “if it was up to him.” The Fed’s independence is a fairy tale they tell freshmen economics students. Every president wants rates low before an election. The difference is Trump says it out loud, and the permanent Washington class clutches its pearls because the illusion of central bank neutrality is the only thing keeping the bond market from panicking.
Ryan M. Biller, U.S. Department of Justice (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHe called progressive Democratic primary winners “jihadists being elected all over the place.” A week after Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Crude? Sure. But the same media apparatus that is hyperventilating over that word spent the spring calling Trump voters a cult. So spare me the fainting couch.
The Strait of Hormuz? Trump declared it “opened now.” The Windward Maritime Intelligence Operations Center counted seven vessels crossing in 24 hours. Before the war, it was over 100 a day. Six months into a conflict he declared won after a few days. Only 21 percent of Americans in the CNN/SSRS poll said his Iran action helped the country. Seventy-three percent said he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s real problems.
And through all of it, the president looked into the cameras and said: “Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing. Nothing bad can happen.”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsYou know who talks like that? People who already know what’s coming and need you calm while it arrives. Every grifter who ever cleaned out a pension fund said nothing bad could happen. Every three-letter agency that ever ran an off-books operation said nothing bad could happen. The phrase is not reassurance. It is a tell.
The little guy is still getting played. The only thing that changed is the letterhead.