Another week of bad things spraying us in the face.

Historically, Trump’s only close to redeeming quality has been that he spends a lot of time shitting on rank and file GOP politicians in such ideologically incoherent ways that it becomes self-defeating. But while there’s something vaguely pleasing in watching GOP senators beg him for scraps–does the king know what his counselors are doing in his name?–it’s cold comfort that Trump is golfing while Elon Musk burns the government. Compared to all the Nazi shit, there’s almost something charming about Trump nonsense like “checking Fort Knox ‘to make sure the gold is there,’” except that Trump is, of course, also doing plenty of actual nazi shit.

Trump sure do be golfing, though! The fact that he “has now played golf at his own properties on nine of his first 30 days in office” is par for the course (get it?), but at least it allows him to say dumb shit to rando saudis that contradicts his administration’s official legal positions. So that’s good, and won’t matter.

Neither will Musk doing ketamine and incoherently waving around a chainsaw at CPAC.

Speaking of images: this is an absolutely evil piece of media. I guess this is obnoxious, too, but producing torture porn ASMR of migrants is fascist sadism in a surprisingly literal sense. Trump’s goofy faux-bonapartism is offensive and rank–as is this dumb King shit–but it doesn’t really rate by comparison to the invitation to take pleasure in torturing a foreigner. Related, but more concretely, “trans people getting raped” is the obvious goal of moves like this, because the cruelty is the point, etc.

Or is the incompetence the point? (“The figures from Elon Musk’s team of outsiders represent billions in government cuts. They are also full of accounting errors, outdated data and other miscalculations.”) Musk is “cutting funding” by funding himself to do so, and Trump spending $200 million for an ad campaign telling Trump he’s great. Yes, I guess the point is not saving money: we have plenty of “confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems.” And the numbers DOGE releases are lies, and when caught, they just change them, because the point is not to save money but destroy universities, or whatever else it is.

Meanwhile, the push for AI is to create more incompetence: “what AI is best at producing is justifications. If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, “AI can do it.” 

Parks fucked! Public health fucked! The VA is fucked! Refugee resettlement orgs fucked! A pointless bloodbath at the FAA! Fear and chaos! There’s just an endless stream of these stories, along with some more niche firings. Also: Military families fucked. And now he’s in the IRS. God mode data access. Everybody gets spam from DOGE telling them to reply with their accomplishments or be fired and their Trump-serving bosses are like “uh, ignore that.” Seems good.

Trump declared that he has power over more stuff, based on saying so. His use of executive orders is almost completely obviously unconstitutional, but no one stopped him before so they won’t this time either. It makes me feel some kind of way to see Dejoy resigning–the guy Biden had no power to displace, because of reasons–and to know that the reason he’s leaving is that he wasn’t MAGA enough, and because Trump wants to kill the Postal Service’s independence, also, obviously not a thing he can actually do, until he does it, and then no one stops him.

Corruption? Shocked, shocked! Musk laying off the people that regulate his companies. And ok, “experts say the conflicts posed by Tom Krause’s dual roles are unprecedented in the modern era,” but, like, it’s getting pretty precedented at this point. Delaware just handing Musk money. Meanwhile, “Give us your minerals or we’ll fuck your satellites” is almost old-fashioned.

I will say this, though: using DEI to shunt spaceX people directly into the FAA is a new one. See also: DOGE is so woke it’s banning the word “woman.” 

The sooner I never have to know who Big Balls is, the better (the fire this time, please).

Trump’s secretary of labor is a right-to-work POS because of course he is. 

“Hegseth called Brown unqualified solely because he’s Black. Then they fired him… and replaced him with a white guy so indisputably unqualified that he requires a Presidential waiver” is one way to put it; “Of the Chiefs of Staff, vice chiefs of staff, and judge advocates general of the three branches, Trump fired all the women and Black people” is another. It’s unsurprising but still very annoying that most of the mainstream news coverage doesn’t put it this way, but it’s striking how being “against ANTIFA” and being “against DEI” are structurally the same sort of workaround, where you get to be fascist and a racist but also blame it on the left: Am I doing sieg heils and purging all the women and Black people? yes, and the left made me do it with their censoriousness.

Oh! ICE prosecutor a literal Nazi, Bannon did a “controversial salute” at CPAC (who, by not leaving, all received membership in the Nazi party), and even French nazis are like “dude, chill.” (Steve Bannon also “told a cheering CPAC crowd in Washington, D.C., this week that the J6 Prison Choir — composed of men jailed after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — would perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” Probably not true, but also, whatever, it’s only 50% as Nazi as the rest of that stuff).=

Meanwhile, JD Vance has nothing to do but pointlessly bicker on twitter with dickheads. (And speaking of powerful people being pathetic on twitter, here is Musk beefing with an Astronaut). 

Abolishing the Presidio is a niche one. That executive order kills some liberal hegemony global soft power orgs–the Inter-American Foundation, the United States African Development Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace–but shooting the Presidio is probably a mix of “fuck Nancy Pelosi” and also the freedom city freaks (see here, for the networked state thing).

My review of all of this is that it is: bad.