Um… yeah. We knew that already.

The point obviously never was eliminating supposed waste.

It was, blatantly, a purge, meant solely to get rid of anyone who wasn’t a Trump sycophant, anyone who was currently or ever had been involved in investigating the myriad lies, scams and crimes of Trump and his cronies and/or anyone who might stand in the way of their future lies, scams and crimes.

Did you really not know that? Where have you been the last few months?

And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.

Even MTG is more principled and rational than Trump.

…Congress to claw back…

That would require courage and determination, which means it’s not going to happen, because those are qualities Congress no longer possesses.

Surely now at least some few of the people in authority who have ignored Trump’s grossly obvious unfitness for office will do something, right?

Right?

Of course, what she actually means is that people have been brainwashed in a somewhat different way than she would’ve preferred, but at least she’s right about the brainwashing part. Since she’s incapable of self-reflection, that’s not going to mean anything to her or change anything for her, but still… for someone as willfully and angrily ignorant as she is, that’s almost sort of impressive.

This illustrates one of the many oddities about Trump.

With any other president, we had policy debates and stated goals and decisions made and implemented.

With Trump, we just have this string of essentially arbitrary threats, promises and rhetoric, and alongside that is a string of essentially arbitrary policies arbitrarily enacted and rescinded and followed and ignored, and there’s no necessary correlations between any of it.

It’s another of the things that I think Trump does simply because he’s a delusional toxic narcissist, a genuinely stupid person, and emotionally a toddler, and another of the things that the would-be autocrats - the billionaires and the CEOs and the religious right and the Republicans and the rest of the greedy and power-hungry scum - take advantage of him doing.

his chances of raising money and looking like a leader

Note that raising money is the first thing mentioned.

And note that winning elections isn’t mentioned at all.

Which neatly sums up what’s wrong with the DNC.

But the Trump administration is refusing to reassure them they won’t be subject to retaliation.

That would be because they will be subject to retaliation.

Trump is nothing if not petty and vindictive, and as with all the rest of his many and profound flaws and failures, he’s molding the rest of the government into his gross and detestable image.

And as with the rest of his brazen assaults on legal and ethical standards, nobody with any authority will do a single fucking thing about it.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be so ethically bankrupt that your response to your company’s failure to safely implement a new technology isn’t to redouble your efforts but to lobby to get the safety standards lowered and to try to hide your crash data.

I don’t see how it could make any difference.

He’s already an idiot, a delusional narcissist, and a compulsive liar, so it’s not as if he could become even more detached from realitybthan he already is. And his supporters don’t care (and likely don’t even notice), since they’re even dumber than he is.

And it’s not like he"s going to forget his platform, since it’s pretty much just hating immigrants and LGBTQ, dicking over poor people, singing his own praises and scamming as much money as possible, and that’s all as natural and automatic to him as breathing…

Really, there’s just not much cognition going on there in the first place - it’s more in the nature of infantile immediacy and animal instincts - so I can’t see how any loss of it would matter much.

Oh look - a grotesquely incompetent and unqualified Trump appointee. I haven’t seen one of those in… an hour or so. Maybe even an hour and a half.

Israel is a rogue state.

Heathers changed my world in more ways than one.

To the degree that fascism has a distinctive economic system, one of its most notable qualities is a combination of private ownership of the means of producton with government/corporate partnership and a “revolving door” by which powerful individuals pass back and forth between business and political leadership positions.

I propose a new term - “malscurrocracy” - government by evil clowns.

Mm… yeah. I should’ve stipulated that nobody is doing anything to stop him (or even really to slow him down).

The Supreme Court and virtually the entirety of the Republican party - federal, state and local - are actively aiding and abetting him, which, yeah, does count as doing something.

Just the latest in an ever-growing string of obviously corrupt acts involving this obviously corrupt politician.

In less than a year, the US has gone from a nation that at least punished the most egregious corruption to a nation in which the highest elected office in the land is held by the most brazenly and openly corrupt politician in modern US history, and nobody is doing a thing about it.

The US is circling the drain.

That’s a seriously creepy face.

There’s a bubbling cauldron of naked rage not quite managing to hide behind those clamped-down features.

That’s always been the basic GOP agenda - they’re just more brazen about it now, since they have an unapologetic wannabe dictator taking the lead.

But particularly from Reagan on, their exact strategy has been to win angry, stupid people over with bigotry, fear and hatred, then spend their time in office fucking over the common people (including the angry, stupid ones who voted for them) in order to expand the privilege of the wealthiest few.

They - and the angry, stupid people who vote for them - are the reason we’re where we are today.