Fire hose of 'bad news': Something major is breaking behind closed doors

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it is the pace of poor public behaviors that seem so galling or the various justifications that come to light in defense of those actions. In either case, the constant fire hose of Bad News is proving exhausting.

This week we heard a wide variety of government statements towards “enforcing” the rules or citing invented law to break them that land somewhere between weird and awful. Together, such brazenness just heightens the desire to do away with Team Trump’s leadership.

–The 19-year-old sailor who went overboard from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln this month survived and was rescued. His story capped the growing discontent over conditions for sailors on extended deployment off Iran for a war that no one can explain or end – public blowback that prompted the return of the carrier to homeport in San Diego. But last week, rather than buttress mental health support, the Navy brought military charges against the sailor for malingering and being AWOL in the Strait of Hormuz.

If this is War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s management thinking about how to handle mental health crises, it’s time for new management.

–The Solicitor General, the Justice Department’s lead before the Supreme Court, apparently baldly lied to the justices in arguing in documents that Donald Trump’s gilded ballroom rebuild of the White House East Wing was “65%” complete. But The Washington Post found pay records that said the contractor, who is to be paid for the percentage of completed work, was far less than that. The difference is not inconsequential; Justice is arguing that the work is too far advanced to be stopped by injunctions or a legal finding that Trump had failed to seek or obtain required congressional approval. We might want to pull the Solicitor General’s ticket.

–A lawsuit in Pennsylvania finally coughed up the answer to how a chain of Trump-praised, “Freedom Fuel Network” gas stations in the northeast has been able to offer low-cost fuel. According to the lawsuit, New Jersey businessman Syed Kazmi, and his company, KRSM, took more than a million gallons of fuel from a Mansfield Oil terminal but never paid for it, selling it at the discounted price. The judge ordered that KRSM must maintain sufficient bank balance to pay its bills.

–A federal judge overruled the Trump administration’s policy that suspended immigrant visa issuances for nationals from 75 countries, finding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had exceeded his statutory authority.

–A military judge tossed the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in the attacks on the World Trade Center as forced, undercutting the case that will come to trial next June. Prosecutors specifically had gone to a military court because they knew that a trial in a civilian federal court would run into rights issues and force disclosures that the government, which has held KSM in Guantanamo for all these years, would rather avoid. The families of 9/11, wonder if there will be any finding of guilt, while the spotlight over this year’s memorial has once again settled on Trump, who plans to skip it because local authorities won’t allow him to use the site as a campaign prop. This is so convoluted, it is hard to know where to turn.

Depends on Who You Are

–Somewhere around the time the sun was setting over Lake America, there was the crazy-making path of Trump trying to use the Postal Service to decide who can vote, based on some mystery name-matches that are off by the vast majority of cases so far. The Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Postal Service to continue to write a rule to halt delivery of mail ballot applications or mail ballots if the Post Office decides that the prospective voter might be an undocumented migrant.

That lasted a day, until the Postal Service published its incomplete rules and multiple lawsuits were restarted on an accelerated schedule. It will take more time for the courts to go through the procedural steps than for the deadlines to send out ballots to go out – in at least a couple of states this week. Trump has no legal authority in state-run elections, but that is not stopping him.

–Then again, the courts seem to have their hands full trying to decide when Trump can act unilaterally or not, whatever the law says. Trump is now threatening to destroy the Kennedy Performing Arts Center if he does not get his way to putting his own name on a building he has emptied for two years.

–Beyond all of this, innumerable immigrants on their way to legal check-ins were nabbed for deportation again this week, with new reports of soaring deportation detainments reflecting no criminal records – all without adequate justification from Homeland Security. This week the roundup happened to include conservative darling Milo Yiannopolous, a deportation booster who had overstayed his own tourist welcome by eight years. I would bet that arrest was a hit in the White House campaign to drive away populations unduly black, brown and poor.

–Vice President JD Vance was continuing his anti-fraud campaign around the country, happily disgorging findings of dubious origin about estimated possibilities of abuse in Medicare and Medicaid services by states led by Democratic governors. But he was silent about a Florida state grand jury report that concluded that Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, Casey DeSantis.

–Law enforcement by the FBI reflected a curious turn. CBS News reported that director Kash Patel, under pressure to recruit as much as 10 percent of the investigators to replace those whom he has fired or seen walk out, has changed FBI recruitment standards to ignore various crimes to remain eligible recruits. An internal memo said paying for sex, stealing from employers, or animal cruelty in the past should not disqualify those who arrest others for such crimes. Just make sure they are loyal to Trump.

It was just an average, slow August week of Equal Justice Under the Law in Trump’s ‘Golden Age.’

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.