How professional grifter Trump is making out like a bandit — while America burns

26 April

President Donald Trump during a White House press conference on February 4, 2025 (Noamgalai/Shutterstock.com)

— The audience for Pam Bondi‘s performance yesterday — when federal agents swarm-raided a county judge — was not the general public. They don’t care if the story vanishes six or 12 or 24 hours into the news cycle, so long as vanishes. The real audience for their action was a very small number of people: the nation’s judges. They’ve pacified the Article I branch of government, Congress, and now they are in the process of pacifying the article III Judiciary branch. That will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways. That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Vladimir Putin style dictatorship.

In fact it appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor. If not his handler. And Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the traditional American infrastructure and nation and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world. And to get there, now that they have pacified Congress, they only have to seize control of the Judiciary and then nothing except we the people will stand in their way. And they know it.

First, terrorize Congress. Second, terrorize the media. Third, terrorize the judges and lawyers. (the final step in that process for them will be the Supreme Court, and if they can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary it will be much easier to terrorize the Court). And finally begin terrorizing the individual citizens until the process is complete and we are fully Russia and all dissent is suppressed. And they know that time is running out because elections are coming and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now and it is beginning to decline. This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges. If Trump can do this as quickly as Hitler or Putin did, it could happen very quickly, possibly even in the next few weeks. Buckle up.

— Are we just 2 weeks from empty shelves? We’re now starting to see the numbers on shipping coming out of China, and they’re ominous. While the Port of Los Angeles reports that traffic was up by 56% last week, reflecting hurried shipping orders in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs three and four weeks ago, their prediction for next week and the week after are drops of 11% and 33% respectively below the norm (not all the traffic into LA is from China).

Shipments from China will be down 64% next week, and roughly 40% of all ships from Asia are coming in partly empty or being cancelled altogether. The cost to bring a 40-foot container from China to the US has dropped, in just three weeks, from $5729 to $2,793, reflecting the collapse of demand. With 60% of all goods in Walmart and 50% of all goods in Target coming specifically from China, this will mean that in the next few weeks, as what would normally be arrivals from that country no longer appear in our ports, shortages and price increases will become major news stories and a huge hit on American consumers.

Purchases across online platforms (I’m hearing from Amazon and Walmart customers on my show) are already beginning to show significant delays. So, get ready: this is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better. If Trump hangs tough, hoping for China to give in, he’s going to get screwed by the economics of it, worsening his already-collapsing polling numbers. On the other hand, if he gives in and drops his China tariffs he risks paying a huge political price, particularly with his increasingly disillusioned base. It’s unfortunate that bad economic news that hurts us all may be good news for our democracy in that it weakens our fascist-in-chief, but there it is.

— Busted: Trump stuns Time Magazine with outlandish lies to cover up his trade deal collapse. Donald Trump has lied his entire life, but China’s President Xi is committed to not letting him get away with lying about his trade negotiations with that country. On Tuesday, Trump sat down with two TIME Magazine reporters and repeatedly lied to them, saying that he was negotiating with China and that he’d already cut “over 200” deals with other nations to resolve the trade war he declared roughly a month ago. In fact, as the reporters pointed out, he’s not inked even one single deal so far and, to make things far worse for him, China is actively using social media to tell the world that they’re not even bothering to talk with his people, must less President Xi calling Trump himself. We’ve had some terrible presidents throughout our history and some have done some terrible things; John Adams imprisoning newspaper editors, Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan conspiring with foreign countries to steal American elections.

But lying to the press and the people on such a routine basis — over 30,000 documented lies in his first term, and daily lies now — is something new in the American experience. Democracy can’t work when a nation can’t trust its leaders to tell them the truth on issues of consequence, which appears to be exactly Trump’s (and Putin’s) goal: the destruction of our republic from the inside, just as Khrushchev predicted.

— Are Wall Street insiders getting stock tips from Trump? And why is Apple moving their production to India instead of the US? Fox’s senior business correspondent Charles Gasparino told his viewers on Thursday that “senior Wall Street execs with ties to the White House” had informed him that they were getting tips from the Trump administration on trade talks that could (and do) swing markets. When Gasparino approached Treasury Secretary and billionaire Scott Bessent’s press team, they refused to deny the reports. Remember when Martha Stewart went to prison for six months because a doctor friend told her about the results from clinical trials of a new drug and she passed that info along to her stockbroker? Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe the astonishing level of corruption across this administration.

Of course, they have a hell of a role model to emulate in Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Apple reports they’re considering moving their iPhone production out of China in response to Trump’s tariff threats. But are they bringing it to Texas or Kentucky? Not a chance. India is the new destination, according to news reports. So much for Eisenhower’s “patriotic American companies”; that was so 1950s. The entire concept of doing good by the country that made you rich is long dead, the victim of the Reagan Revolution’s embrace of neoliberal free trade and doctrine of putting profits above people and patriotism.

— While America is burning (both economically and from climate change), professional grifter Trump is making out like a bandit. Are Americans paying attention yet? Can you imagine how Republicans would have responded if President Biden had announced that he and his son Hunter were going to start selling autographed pictures of himself for a few thousand dollars each and would be running the business out of the White House? And that the top purchasers — even if they were foreign nationals — would be having a private dinner with him and get a tour of the White House?

They’d be fainting in the streets, screaming in front of the cameras, and convening investigations, grand juries, and criminal prosecutions faster than a weasel in a henhouse. But when Trump announced this week that he was selling his meme coins — which are just serial-numbered digital images of Trump or his wife with no intrinsic value — and the top 220 “investors” would have dinner with him, not even one elected Republican stood up to object. This is how far the party has fallen; they’re all in on the grift, and many are looking for ways to cash in on it as apparently Marjorie Taylor Greene did when it was reported it looked like she was buying and selling stocks based on insider information.

— Fascism Alert! Bob Kennedy wants autistic kids and adults to be enrolled in a national “registry.” Can you spell eugenics? People across the nation, according to reports from autism advocacy organizations, are cancelling doctors’ appointments and even asking psychiatrists to burn their records out of “terror” that Bob Kennedy’s “registry” will someday be used against them. This after Kennedy gave a bizarre speech arguing that people on the autism spectrum (which may well include your correspondent here) can’t hold jobs, get a date, or participate productively in society. When, for G-d’s sake, did it become a good idea to give an attorney — instead of a physician or a scientist — the power to control the largest medicine-based science-based institution in the American government? This is simply eff’ing nuts.

— Geeky Science: Will dimming the sun shield the planet or backfire catastrophically? Scientists in the UK are on the verge of getting millions in government funding to experiment with blocking the sun through injecting reflective particles (including sea salt) into the upper atmosphere. The goal is to reduce the amount of sunlight/heat that reaches the Earth, but this is really the equivalent of trying to treat cancer with an aspirin: it may reduce the pain from the tumor, but does nothing to deal with that pain’s cause. The fossil fuel industry loves these “geoengineering” solutions, which also include carbon capture and storage, because they divert time, attention, and resources away from greening our economies, thus keeping their trillions in profits flowing worldwide. But they also risk whipsawing weather, destroying crops, and even poisoning cropland, among other possible outcomes (including, no doubt, many other side effects that we haven’t yet even considered). Let’s deal with the cause of these problems: carbon emissions. We already have solutions that will work; they’ll just take political will to implement.

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