30 Barbies: Not good at parenting or at the maths. By Hal M. Brown

 In the past few days we’ve had Trump or his minions prove that they probably failed their math (or as the Brits say “maths”) in grade school. 

Let’s start with the most ridiculous:

Who gives their kid 30 dolls?

Then we had this story:

As of May 2024, there are 291,000 migrant children who arrived in the US as unaccompanied minors who were set free and never given a date to appear in immigration court — meaning there is no way to track their whereabouts.

That is in addition to the 32,000 children that Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities released into the US with hearing dates but then failed to show in court, according to the 14-page report — which tracked a period from October 2018 to September 2023.

One federal whistleblower said that she believes many of these vulnerable kids could already be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers.

Over a five year period 32,000 children didn’t appear in court when they were supposed to. One, count them, one federal whistleblower said they could be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers. What the hell does “many” mean? Sure, they could be. But then again, how does she know? 

How about this one?

Trump’s Cabinet members, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, spoke in glowing, sycophantic terms about their boss. But Attorney General Pam Bondi took it a step further, claiming that Trump had actually saved the lives of around two out of three Americans. Bondi cited recent fentanyl seizures as the reason for this supposedly momentous accomplishment.

What about DOGE, you might ask?

MONEYWATCH

DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says.

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new estimate from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.

The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.

PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.

Then there’s the word Trump says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. Trump hasn’t claimed that his tarriffs have saved the government, and you, one red cent. I have to hand it to him for not trying to spin that falsehood.

Oops…. refer to my first example. He’s admitting indirectly that the tarrifs are actually costing money for parents doing their Christmas shopping.

There are a few numbers that Trump can’t ignore. These are those coming from the Stock Market. He has a way to admit that the numbers are bad but has a way to spin them.

Trump insisted that Joe Biden — who has been out of office for three months — is to blame for the stock market's plummeting in response to Trump's sweeping tariffs.

As for the rest of the economy:

Whether it is Trump’s ability to estimate crowd sizes or characterize vote counts (remember his non-landslide landslide), his ability to play fast and loose with numbers is a model for his sycophants to emulate to curry favor with him. They just make up impossible numbers to show how well they are doing their jobs and he smiles and nods in approval.

I suppose one could say that it is human nature to see what one wants to see or not see even if it contradicts common sense. After all, as I wrote about yesterday, Trump looked at a fake photo of Abrego Garcia's hand and didn’t see that that it was a really bad photoshop with the added M,S, and 3 off-center.

I did a better job putting MAGA there and I am an amateur:

Back to the dolls. Even Trump’s two dolls is probably double the number of dolls a sensible parent would give to their child for Christmas. Unless they are giving their child a Barbie and a Ken most would give their child one doll. We don’t know how many dolls Trump gave Ivanka for Christmas. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave her an entire set of Barbie fashionista dolls. 

What better way to teach her how to look the way he wants her to look.

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Fake Photogate: Trump's MS-13 Garcia hand tattoo shows how far he's willing to go to gaslight us. By Hal M. Brown (He's either gaslighting us or gaslighting himself.)

 

This may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t.

Below is how Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s hand really looks:

Here’s what Trump says it looks like:

This so obviously a photoshop that it beggers the imagination that anyone thinks he really has the letters M,S,1, and 3 tattooed on his hand. One would think one of the DOGE incel boys could have created an image that actually looked real.

I am not an expert by any means but while it took me a half hour of trial and error, I managed to erase MS13 and to add my own letters to the image Trump displayed. As impossible as it would be, I wish Garcia had MAGA tattooed on his hand. Unfortunately, there’s no Spanish word for Maga, although there are in other languages (reference).

Polifacts explains why nobody in MS-13 would have the other tattoos which Garcia has on their hand. Futher, Snopes elaborates on this saying that some of the tattoos are real but that the image is altered.

We have two possibilities here. One is that Trump just took it on faith that the photo someone gave him was real. Nobody knows whether he really believes Garcia is, or was, a member of MS-13. The other is that he knew the photo was fake and he decided to lie about it. I am not sure which explanation is worse.

On April 3rd I wrote about all of the possible “gates” we could attribute to Trump (here).

We could add another gate to Trump’s reign in the White House: Fake Photogate.

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For now Trump is working more or less within the law. He's appointing loyalists as interim US attorneys. At some point he may not bother with lawyers at all. By Hal M. Brown -- Why bother with the fiction of having a legal system when you have armed goons to do your dirty work?

 

HUFFPOST called it ATTACK OF THE TOADIES on their main page yesterday. Their article was titled The Henchmen Strategy: What Trump Is Doing To Make The Law His Own with the subtitle The Trump administration has appointed numerous interim U.S. Attorneys — and it's all part of his quest to twist law enforcement agencies into his personal legal task force.

I am waiting for him to stop bothering keeping up the appearance of actually having a judicial system. It is simply inefficient and wasteful for him to spend money on even ve paying US Attorneys and their office staff. I assume most of the offices are prime real estate properties too and they could be sold. This money could be put into hiring more loyalists in ICE and the other federal law enforcement agencies. I doubt even the most loyal Trump toadie lawyers would be willing to join ICE even if they got to carry big guns because they’d have to take a pay cut from their current salary. ICE agents pay averages $30 an hour.

If, as I predicted would happen in my April 27 Substack Trump could combine DOGE and ICE and we could have an American Gestapo armed with both guns and computers. If this happens they will need far more personnel. There would be able to locate many more enemies and they wouldn’t have enough fright-mongers to sic upon them and drag them off to only the Trump annointed and perhaps God, if He’s paying attention, knows where.

I see a time down the road when Trump won’t need any lawyers at all. I doubt Trump knows that the phrase “let’s kill all the lawyers” orginated with Shakespeare.

It is spoken by Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part 2. Trump loves his lickspittle lawyers and hates the lawyers who rule against him. Whether judges or other lawyers they have been a thorn in his side. I am sure he would like to, figurately speaking or not, kill all of those lawyers. If he had a way to eliminate his troublesome lawyers but it involved sending alllawers to kingdom come he’d probably give the order. With Trump loyalty to him works only to a point. Bye bye Bondi, Alina Habba, and Ed Martin. Trump could mandate that practicing law was illegal.

As for his own lawyers, starting with Pam Bondi, who as Attorney General, is the top lawyer in the Executive Branch and going down the ranks of his other lawyers, one of these days he may realize at 2:00AM while he’s playing with his tweet machine that he no longer needs any lawyers. This incudes those on the Supreme Court. Does anyone really believe he actually likes Clarence Thomas?

Why should be bother with keeping up the fiction that the country has a judicial system. When he’s already burned the Constitution to a crisp why does he need three equal branches of government? Hell’s blazes, why does he even need two? 

He could outdo Putin, who has his own toadies in his bicameral Federal Assembly. He could just declare himself absolute monarch and get rid of Congress and the Supreme Court. He could turn the Capitol into a Trump Hotel and the Supreme Court building into a glitzy Trump store selling his latest gold geegaws.

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Trump told The Atlantic that he runs the country and the world. Take him seriously. Hitler could have said the same thing. By Hal M. Brown -- Jennifer Rubin expresses optimism but also reminds us of how long it took to defeat the Nazis.

By the end of the day today anyone paying attention to the news on all but Trump TV will know about the interview Trump gave to The Atlantic and the two grandiose Trumpian things he said. 

The one that The Atlantic had on their cover and RawStory featured in their article about this (here: 'I run the country — and the world': Inside Trump's bombshell sit-down with The Atlantic) makes the second look hoohum. That was about his teasing the idea of running for third term.

This is an excerpt from Rawsotry’s article with the two parts I think are the most telling in bold:

“'I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,' Trump said in a phone call. “'You know, what I do is such serious stuff.'”

“The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive," he added later. "I had all these crooked guys, and the second time, I run the country — and the world.”

The reporters asked Trump about a rumor they'd heard about him tasking the Justice Department to examine whether he could legally run for a third term, which he denied but left open as a possibility.

“'That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?'” Trump said, laughing, according to the report. “'Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter [democratic norms].'"

He noted that supporters often shout out for him to seek a third term, but he expressed a recognition that wasn't a possibility.

“'It’s not something that I’m looking to do, and I think it would be a very hard thing to do,'" he said.

Taking the second statement about shattering democratic norms first, this tells me that Trump knows very well that when democratic norms are shattered democracy is destroyed. What’s left is autocracy. Who, then is in charge? He is, of course. What does that make him? It makes him a dictator.

What Trump said sbout running the country is true. Despite what optimists want to believe about all the defeats in court, his dismal showing in the polls, and the large anti-Trump protests, he is still running the country. For example, Jennifer Rubin lists numerous Trump failures in “Trump is worse off than he was 100 days ago. The battle for democracy, however, is not yet won.” The subtitle about the battle not yet won contradicts the illustration shown below.

We see a faded odd looking MAGA hat with weird orange straps in three pieces on a dirt road with tire tracks over it. 

Presumably this hat thingy represents Trump and Trumpism.

Rubin is more realistic in what she writes. She begins:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. 
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

– Winston Churchill, 1942

We therefore cannot tell if the last week or so leading up to the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, decency, and truth has definitively shifted momentum toward the pro-democracy movement or just temporarily sidetracked Trump’s march to autocracy. If and only if pro-democracy forces draw the right lessons, cement their alliances, and pursue their MAGA assailants relentlessly will recent events come to be recognized as the end of the beginning of the fight to preserve the American experiment.

She goes on to describe 10 failures or setbacks Trump has had. She concludes with something I have written about:

In short, Trump lost the first 100 days, but democracy has not won the war. Had the Allies not gone on to prevail on D-Day and win WWII, their victory in North Africa in 1942, which inspired Churchill’s memorable observation, would have been viewed in retrospect as a bump in the road on the way to Nazi victory. Without persistent, ongoing opposition, recent victories on multiple fronts cannot end the MAGA threat.

Regular readers of my Substack know I have written about the Nazi blitzkreig and how Hitler invaded Europe, and then how long it took for the Allies to build their military might to the point where they could start the D-Day assault. The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 marking the beginning of World War II. Churchill made his comment on November 10, 1942. 

Trump has four years to consolidate his power, two if you want to believe the Democrats winning control of Congress will make any difference to him. 

At present Trump has armed agents doing his bidding. He has already used ICE, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies to arrest people he sees as enemies. Consider what happened yesterday when DEA agents and other law enforcement were used in Colorado (link)

The real test of whether he has Hitlerian or Putin power will be if he tries to use the military on US soil by declaring martial law to stop protests and round up and imprison protestors. He could attempt to do this by declaring martial law. This is what Wikipedia says about martial law in the United States.

Assuming the military went along with this we will have a true totalitarian country. There will be no coalition to mount a D-Day to save us.

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