The Blamer and His Moles
A man who doesn't know what he doesn't know is handing the security and well-being of America to associates whose fealty to the country and its values is questionable
Have you ever lived with a blamer? Had a kid who’s a blamer? Had a boss who’s a blamer?
If the answer is “yes,” you know how exhausting and repellent it is to listen to accountability being shifted.
Now we have a ruler who’s a blamer.
There is no big reveal there. Donald Trump ran as a blamer in 2016, presided over the United States as a blamer in his first term, sulked and blamed after he lost reelection in 2020, campaigned again as a blamer in 2024, and was returned to office to becom a blamer the likes of which, as he likes to say, no one has ever seen before.
After the horrific deaths of 67 women, children, men, and soldiers in the night sky over the nation’s capital last Wednesday, Trump politicized the first catastrophe of his new administration and took his blame game to a vastly higher level – a performance so unseemly, so lacking in empathy and grief, so partisan, so classless that it should have elicited a national gasp.
Shout if you heard one.
With his three hopping toads – Veep JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a wet-behind-the-ears pol and two former Fox News presenters) – the Blamer-in-Chief attempted, without a shed of evidence or even a grasp of the events as they actually occurred, to attribute the accident to the diversity, equality & inclusion (DEI) policies of his predecessor.
If there was ever a grown man who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, it’s … well, you know.
But Trump’s Press Room performance – reminiscent of his old shoot-from-the-lip days at the start of the pandemic – shouldn’t be a surprise. He is not going to magically become smart or presidential. Millions of fools who voted for him thinking his top priority would be to push down food prices, get the economy roaring, and make their paycheck-to-paycheck lives better got conned again.
Trump’s first two+ weeks in office have been largely about culture warfare and rank retribution. Rooting out DEI policies and pressuring Corporate America to do the same; pardoning or granting clemency to the traitors of January 6; banning trans Americans from the military; pulling the security detail for perceived enemies, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who said the Armed Services would not bow down before wannabe tyrants. Oh, and he ordered “HegFetch” to have Milley investigated.
Then the President moved to make life even more hand-to-mouth for the non-billionaires among us by imposing tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, America’s three largest trading partners.
But rather than clamping down hard on China, against which he has bloviated endlessly (even though Hong Kong moneymen bailed him out of near-bankruptcy in the 1990s), he set about imposing the heaviest tariffs on two of our closest allies: 25% duties on imports from Canada and Mexico. Now those tariffs are on pause while we negotiate with our neighbors.
On Tuesday, China struck back, even though it was scheduled to be hit with feather-pillow tariffs of 10%.
Certainly, that lower number has nothing to do with Trump puppeteer Elon Musk’s deep ties to China. Nothing to do with the $1.4 billion loan from state-controlled banks to Tesla to build a factory in Shanghai (since paid back). Nothing to do with Musk praising Xi Jinping. Nothing to do with Musk’s meeting before the Inauguration with Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng at which news agency Xinhua reported that X/SpaceX/Tesla mogul said that “Tesla is ready to deepen investment in and cooperation with China and play a positive role in promoting U.S.-China economic and trade interactions.”
So yah, China’s No. 1 boy is not only leading the hostile takeover/dismantling of the federal government, but he is also at Trump’s elbow softening the anti-Beijing stance that the President has, not without justification, staked out for decades. And thanks to new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a China hawk who bent like a pussywillow in a stiff wind, Musk and his “team” (whoever they are) have also been handed the keys to sensitive information about millions of Americans that Beijing would love to get its hands on.
Putin must have been momentarily seething with envy.
Vladie’s stooge, former U.S. Representative and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard – once a Democrat representing Hawaii, these days a Republican kneeling before Trump, and long the follower of some crazy cult – last week had a tough confirmation hearing for Director of National Intelligence. Twice in answers to questions by Republican senators, she refused to label Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States. In 2013, Snowden – now a Russian citizen and living in Moscow – leaked thousands of classified documents while employed as a contractor at the National Security Agency.
On Sunday, Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-Va.) told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation: “Ms. Gabbard, who actually had legislation to pardon Edward Snowden – she called him a brave whistleblower – couldn't bring herself to call him a traitor. I think is disqualifying just on plain judgment.”
But if there was any judgment floating around the Capitol, it all went out one of those now-repaired windows on Tuesday when the Intelligence Committee, in a party-line vote, moved Gabbard’s nomination forward. “Yes” votes included that of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a phony centrist who at least had the decency to cast a “nay” against HegFetch.
Over the past two weeks, Trump and his posse have galloped into Washington with six-shooters blazing. They blasted out presidential orders to squash DEI programs, sacked career prosecutors at the Justice Department, fired senior FBI agents, offered severance to millions of federal workers (20,000 have reportedly accepted), fumbled an effort to shut down government funding, cut off American aid to the most deserving on the planet, and rattled trade sabers by imposing tariffs. Oh, and HegFetch nixed military celebrations of Martin Luther King Day, among other events.
If you’re a MAGA-Man, that’s all mostly awesome. To those in red caps, the DEI and trans stuff was out of control, the hard-asses at DOJ and the FBI deserved a comeuppance, and trimming those so-called cushy jobs in the federal bureaucracy should have been done decades ago.
Sure, some believers may question why a second-termer made a rookie mistake by clamping down on federal outlays without thinking through the ramifications, but nothing (yet) can dampen the fly-over fire that burns for Trump.
For others, it’s almost incomprehensible that the President of the United States has handed over unbridled power to an unelected, foreign-born supplicant of Beijing and is poised to install a Russian sympathizer as the overseer of 18 agencies involved in espionage and cybersecurity.
Has there ever been any explanation why Trump would offer such a sensitive post to Gabbard? Musk spent almost $300 million to elect the President and other Republicans, so for the ever-transactional Trump, there is at least a quid pro quo answer to why Elon is being allowed to wreak havoc in Washington.
But why Gabbard? What did she do for the boss? Get out the cult vote?
It does make a body think twice about the Russia-gate “exoneration.”
The Awful & The Odious
Cabinet Cocktails
Pete Hegseth, the drunk & disorderly Fox News warrior and Christian-Zionist who is now leading America’s military, likes to kick back with a drink so bracing that it can make a man forget if he has pants on and a woman wonder where her blouse went.
He has assured Congress that he’ll be on the wagon while in office, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sit in a saloon and order one up while you contemplate the dismantling of American democracy.
It’s called a Holy Hell, and if you decide to pound one down, be sure to hand a friend your car keys first. Or ask Pete to ask Elon to send around a self-driving EV.
Holy Hell
2 full jiggers of Stolichnaya (the Russian version as befits a Ukraine-support skeptic; 3 jiggers if you’re making one for a hot GOP chick you just met)
½ jigger of chutzpah (as befits a soldier of Zion)
2 oz. of holy water
1 tab of crushed Adderall
5 or 6 cherries
Shaken, not stirred
Tulsi Gabbard, the onetime Representative from Hawaii; the onetime fan of Bernie Sanders; the onetime Democrat; the newbie MAGA Republican; the Vladimir Putin cheerleader; the Bashear al-Assad apologist; and the likely Director of National Security despite zero experience in Spook Land always seems to be grasping for something new. But when it comes to cocktail time, she’s more of a traditionalist.
Tulsi’s Moscow Mule
1 jigger of Stolichnaya vodka (as befits a Ukraine-support foe)
½ oz of crushed and strained Samoan papaya
2 oz. of borscht
4 oz. of ginger beer
2 drops of red dye No. 3 (stock up before it’s banned)
Serve in a tall glass with the whackiest garnishes you can find
Pam Bondi, the 1960s Barbie doll who is now America’s top cop, likes to sit on the veranda of her Florida mansion after 5 pm and tell war stories about letting Jeffery Epstein off and not prosecuting the Trump University scam when she was Florida’s attorney general. Lately she’s been partial to this original recipe that reminds her of the many things she and her teetotaling new boss have in common.
Bondi Blondie
1 jigger of the rare Trump Vodka
6 oz. of Florida orange juice
4 squirts of teeth whitener (hydrogen peroxide in a pinch)
Served over ice in a tall glass with a tiny Mar-a-Lago parasol
Scott Bessent, who landed as the first openly gay Treasury Secretary without so much as a whimper from Democrats, isn’t much of a drinker, but when he is celebrating at his soon-to-be-sold $22 million Charleston (S.C.) mansion, the “Pink Palace,” he’s partial to a twist on the Brandy Alexander. The Pink Alexander is kind of an inside joke since it refers both to the manse and to one of the lefty sons of right-wing antichrist George Soros, whom Bessent used to make even richer by running Soros Fund Management. Of course, those liberal days are done, tra-la.
Pink Alexander
Jigger of Remy Martin X.O. brandy
½ oz. of crème de cacao
½ oz. of cream
½ oz. of grenadine
½ Spoonful of the white of an egg (if you can find one)
Shaken and served in a Baccarat Véga Martini Glass
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the maverick on his way to overseeing the Health & Human Services Dept., with a mandatory and discretionary budget approaching $2 trillion, has had his share of booze (he’s a Kennedy after all), but his history of highs tends to involve needles despite his injection phobia. Still, if randy Robert is being social, he will sip from a rock glass containing a brown drink whose name evokes a couple of things for him.
Vax 69
2 jiggers of the blended Scotch whiskey Vat 69
Tiny scraping of a bear claw or whalebone
1 Cape Cod cranberry
Served neat (ice is for weenies).