Musk sure knows how to manipulate Trump to roll over like a dog wanting his tummy scratched

Donald Trump continues to ignore and violate multiple court orders regarding the funding of various congressionally mandated programs, while Elon Musk‘s DOGE teenagers continue to invade federal agencies, sometimes with armed muscle who appear to be pretending to be federal marshals. They are, in other words, acting like dictators in a profoundly unAmerican fashion, unlike anything any other president has ever done in the history of our nation, or in any other advanced democracy.

Trump also continues to sell access to himself at $5 million a pop for dinner, and is directing his police agencies, particularly the Justice Department, to attack those people and media entities he believes are his political enemies or who have called him out. Increasingly, this is resembling the early days of the Putin administration in Russia, including the media’s fearful or obedient unwillingness to explicitly call it what it is. Democratic leadership, meanwhile, continues to impotently cower.

— Is Trump seriously trying to seize Canada as our 51st state? Donald Trump claims to be a huge admirer of President McKinley. What is usually not noted in media reports, although TIME Magazine recently did a piece on it, is that McKinley, a late 19th century Republican president, slapped a huge tariff on Canada to try to force them to become our 45th state. At the time, Canada was a colony of Great Britain, which rebuffed McKinley‘s repeated attempts to seize the territory through financial force. Is this what Trump is up to with his tariffs? Canadian news reports claim Trump has tried discussing with Trudeau revisiting some of the late 19th and early 20th century treaties which define the borders between Canada and the United States. This story just gets weirder and weirder…

— Trump is seriously trying to screw Ukraine on behalf of Putin, and ‘Liddle Marco and the terrified Republicans in Congress are being forced to go along with it. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman noted on Joe Scarborough‘s TV program yesterday that he believes there’s some sort of a “dirty deal” between Trump and Putin around Ukraine. We may have just seen the first stages of it: Trump ordered the UK and the three other “Five Eyes” English-speaking nations (Canada, New Zealand, Australia) that share intelligence with the United States to not give any information derived from American intelligence sources to Ukraine to help them ward off missile or land-based attacks by the bloodthirsty dictator in Moscow.

Further demonstrating this treachery, Politico Europe reports that senior Trump aides are holding secret meetings about forcing elections that he hopes would push out Zelenskyy in violation of the Ukrainian constitution. The discussions are being held with Ukrainian politicians who are more favorable toward giving Putin large chunks of the country (and it’s mineral wealth) and preventing Ukraine from joining NATO or aligning itself further with the European Union. Friedman argued to Scarborough that he didn’t think Trump was betraying our democratic ally because Putin has something on him; he simply believes Trump hates democracy and wants to turn America — and, presumably, the rest of the world — into a form of kleptocratic strongman government similar to what Putin has created in modern Russia. That theory makes as much sense as any other, and Musk’s efforts to deconstruct the institutions of America in defiance of our laws and our Constitution add considerable credibility to Friedman‘s theory…

— Want to send a few bucks to Texas Congressman Al Green by way of supporting his defiance of Trump‘s lies at the State of the Union? Just click here for his ActBlue page. It’s worth noting that two members of the House of Representatives named Green have now heckled presidents during SOTUs: Al Green (Trump) and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who repeatedly heckled President Obama. Only the Black guy got censured by Republicans in Congress, however. (The GOPers were joined in that disgraceful, racist effort by 10 turncoat Democrats. If you’d like to reach out to any of them, there’s a link to their names and telephone numbers here.)

— Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito is at it again, lying in a dissenting opinion while laying out a road map for Donald Trump to violate our Constitution. The founding document explicitly gives the power to appropriate funds and spend money to Congress; this is an intentional check on the power of the presidency and the courts. You can read it in Article I of the Constitution itself, but don’t tell that to Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito. In his dissent, he ranted that a district court judge trying to uphold this simple understanding of constitutional law with regard to money Congress had appropriated for USAID had gone too far, writing: “Does a single district-court judge … have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.” Fortunately, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided this week with the three liberal justices to uphold the Constitution’s check on Trump’s power, but this is probably just the beginning of an extensive battle over the imperial presidency that Republicans have lusted for since the days of Nixon…

— Elon Musk sure does know how to manipulate Donald Trump: just spend a million bucks on TV advertisements flattering him and he’ll roll over like a dog wanting his tummy scratched.ABC News reports: “The ad begins by attacking former President Joe Biden, showing clips of him stumbling on the stairs while boarding Air Force One. A voiceover says, ‘After four long years of humiliation, of failure at home and embarrassment abroad, our long national nightmare is finally over.’” It will run heavily in Washington DC, and pop up in other media markets across the country (presumably including Palm Beach). If nothing else, this will almost certainly keep the multi-billion-dollar gravy train of federal contracts rolling into Musk’s companies. Even when his rockets blow up and force multiple commercial flight alterations to avoid the debris killing airline passengers, as happened this week. When five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that billionaires can throw unlimited amounts of money into the American political system, it’s almost impossible to believe they didn’t realize this sort of corruption would be the consequence…

— Crazy Alert!Is the Pentagon really going to decide that they can’t mention the name of the Air Force plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? Defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s hateful and bigoted orders forbidding references to Black history or queer people has run afoul of the name of that famous airplane, the Enola Gay. The Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber was named by Col. Paul Tibbets after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. But Hegseth’s order that our armed forces “remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)” has led the military to delete multiple photos and articles of and about the plane. Brilliant…