Eric Trump at the Bitcoin Conference This is simply jaw dropping. They aren’t even pretending anymore. The presidency and Donald Trump’s personal finances are fully merged: Eric Trump flew across the world to headline a cryptocurrency conference in the United Arab Emirates this week and told thousands of enthusiastic attendees that he and his father, the U.S. president-elect, were effectively working in tandem to push crypto, a business sector the family is directly invested in. The message was notable because it contrasted drastically with the promise the family made when Donald J. Trump entered the White House four years ago, to keep business and government operations separate. Eric Trump said he had even phoned his father — “Pops,” he said he calls him — to celebrate when the price of Bitcoin hit $100,000 after the president-elect announced he intended to appoint a crypto-friendly lawyer as the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the industry that the family now profits from. “You’re going to have the most pro-crypto president in the history of America,” Eric Trump told the crowd.
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Will the Real Americans in Trump country put their money where their votes are or will they fight as hard as they usually do against Democrats when they make even the slightest attempt to have kids eat vegetables or go outside to play: The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same. To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill. To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
And spaghetti against the wall Political skulduggery is born here and raised elsewhere. The North Carolina GOP should advertise. When Republicans won control of North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, the new 5-2 court quickly reversed a previous ruling and ordered a new redraw of the state’s congressional districts. The new map turned a 7-7 partisan balance in this evenly divided state into an 11-3 split favoring Republicans. Results borne out on Nov. 5 will be felt on Capitol Hill and across the nation. Down-ballot races matter. A lot. A month after Election Day, political power struggles continue in North Carolina. The GOP supermajority in the state House will attempt today to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill marketed as “disaster relief” for western North Carolina. Branded “a sham” by Cooper, the bill “appropriated no new money for areas hit by Helene, nor created the small-business grants requested by local business leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.” But the measure does strip powers from Democrats elected on Nov. 5 to the state’s executive branch.
Do Republicans build anything? Temperatures here are expected to fall steadily over the next 24 hours. There is also a wind advisory.* How do I know? The National Weather Service. Where do you think The Weather Channel and other weather information sites get their information? From a bevy of satellites owned or operated by NOAA, NWS’s parent organization. I rather like having that info free and at my fingertips. I rather like that air traffic controlers from the FAA keep my flight from colliding with others in the sky nearby. But our Republican friends are not into that so much. Nor into public education, as we’ve long known: Cultists’ push to charterize, voucherize, or tax-credit scholarship public education out of existence — supported by a religious right profiteers have co-opted — is a betrayal of the country’s founding vision. Public education is the largest portion of annual budgets in all 50 states. The cult sees public schools (and children) as resources to strip-mine. Donald Trump nominating vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. to head the U.S.
If it feels as though the new Trump administration is taking shape at warp speed, that’s because it is. It’s unusual for a new administration to be announcing all these cabinet and staff nominations in such rapid succession, but that’s part of the Project 2025 manifesto to hit the ground running as fast as possible. And they’re using the Steve Bannon tactic of flooding the zone to keep the media and the opposition off balance. Trump’s getting awards from Fox News, gallivanting around Paris with his best buddy, naming one billionaire after another to his administration and giving his family members anything they want. He has even named his son’s (apparently) ex-fiance Kimberly Guilfoyle to be Ambassador to Greece. And for any recalcitrant Senators who still believe they have a say in any of it, he’s bringing the hammer down. Take for example the case of Nebraska Senator Joni Ernst, a former female combat officer who had some serious reservations about Trump’s choice to be Secretary of Defense.
Why? Because he believes the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination. Of course he does: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes the CIA had a role in assassinating his uncle, President John F. Kennedy — part of RFK Jr.’s motivation for pushing his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, for deputy CIA director, Axios has learned. According to Axios, that request is causing a great deal of “drama” but no details. If Fox Kennedy were named deputy to John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for CIA director, she’d be in a position to dig into what the CIA knows about the assassination — and potentially could urge the release of documents. Podcaster Joe Rogan and others have been agitating for that. “The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder and in the cover-up,” Kennedy said about his uncle’s death in a podcast in May of last year. He also said that there is “convincing” but “circumstantial” evidence that the CIA was involved in his father’s death, as well.
Some of them agree wholeheartedly that their Democratic colleagues should be put in jail. The Bulwark reports: “With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark. “If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.” “It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.” I don’t know wtf Boebert is babling about — nobody in congress has “politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives.” But she’s extremely stupid so who knows what’s in her head?
Paul Krugman’s quit his NY Times column and although he hasn’t said it in so many words, it’s most likely because he felt constrained from saying what he wants to say the way he wants to say it. He does have a newsletter and he’s already bringing the fire: Once upon a time a Republican president, sure that large parts of federal spending were worthless, appointed a commission led by a wealthy businessman to bring a business sensibility to the budget, going through it line by line to identify inefficiency and waste. The commission initially made a big splash, and there were desperate attempts to spin its work as a success. But in the end few people were fooled. Ronald Reagan’s venture, the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control — the so-called “Grace commission,” headed by J. Peter Grace — was a flop, making no visible dent in spending. Why was it a flop? There is, of course, inefficiency and waste in the federal government, as there is in any large organization.
Instead of making Trump fire him, Christopher Wray let Trump off the hook and has politely bowed out and resigned today. This is not how this is supposed to work. The whole idea of the year term was to keep the FBI director out of partisan politics while not allowing him to create a J. Edgar Hoover-style fiefdom of its own. As with so much else, Trump cares nothing about intentions, traditions or norms and the fact is that he has the power to fire him so there was never any doubt that he would do it. Everyone in America exists to serve him. Here’s the usual classy response from Trump:
As it turns out most Americans don’t care all thatm uch about abortion rights after all. And that means they don’t care all that much aboutwhether some women lose their health or their lives for lack of ability to obtain one. I wish I could say that shocks me, but it doesn’t. When the price of eggs is higher than it was four years ago nothing else really matters. Here’s how it’s going in the courts: The case now before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, centers on whether federal emergency room mandates — enshrined in EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — preempt state abortion bans when they conflict. EMTALA requires that emergency rooms stabilize patients in crisis. Idaho maintains that they don’t overlap, that the ban’s exception for preventing the woman’s death covers all emergencies.