You’d think Christmas week people would settle down and not do much, wouldn’t you? But nooooooo. There are new outrages every hour. I can’t write about them all.

For example, if you had “Trump threatens to take back Panama Canal” on your bingo card, you’re ahead of me. Apparently Trump thinks itty bitty Panama is picking on the U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump has demanded Panama reduce fees on the Panama Canal or return it to US control, accusing the central American country of charging “exorbitant prices” to American shipping and naval vessels.

“The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, highly unfair,” he told a crowd of supporters in Arizona on Sunday.

“This complete rip-off of our country will immediately stop,” he said, referring to when he takes office next month. …

… If shipping rates are not lowered, Trump said on Sunday, “we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, quickly and without question”.

As far as I know, Panama isn’t charging U.S. ships any more than it charges other ships. The fees are a form of tariff, I understand. Also Panama needs to restrict traffic sometimes because of water level problems, probably related to climate change. BTW, Newsweek is reporting that the Trump Organization is fighting tax evasion charges in Panama. Gee, do you think there’s a connection?

And then, Trump brought back one of his comedy routines from the first term, in which he offered to buy Greenland from Denmark.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote in a statement announcing that he had chosen Ken Howery to serve as ambassador to Denmark.

If he’s concerned about security in the North Atlantic, you would think he would take a greater interest in NATO. And in maintaining good relationships with NATO countries. That would make sense. But it’s also believed there are billions of gallons of oil under all that ice of Greenland, which may be what Trump is really concerned about.

The Matt Gaetz ethics report is now public. Here it is. And I say the Justice Department has some ‘splainin’ to do.

Remember last week, when President Musk tweeted, or x’ed, a bunch of nonsense and blew up the bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded? Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect explains why:

Elon Musk blew up a near-complete bipartisan budget deal with an avalanche of tweets contending that it was too costly, luring Donald Trump into demanding that Republicans kill it. But Musk’s real reason—a story that David Dayen broke in the Prospect—was that the agreement included painstakingly negotiated limits on American tech investment in China. Had that provision passed, it would have been costly to Musk’s extensive Chinese Tesla operations and future AI plans.

Between Tuesday and Thursday, the budget deal collapsed. Trump, following Musk’s lead, threw in a new demand that the deal tackle the debt ceiling, always a politically tricky vote. But neither Democrats nor Republican fiscal hawks would give Trump that.

In the end, legislators of both parties wanted to get home for Christmas, and both houses overwhelmingly passed a simple “continuing resolution” keeping the government funded at roughly present levels through March, plus disaster relief and farm aid. Musk succeeded in stripping out the China provision.

I guess if you’re rich enough to buy a government you are entitled to bespoke legislation.

So have you heard the one about how Trump is suddenly opposed to the debt ceiling and wants to get rid of it? Yep, yesterday he called for Congress to raise, suspend, or even completely eliminate the debt ceiling, which (I’m sure you remember) is a limit on how much Treasury can borrow to pay debts. And Trump wants it gone before he takes office.

Republicans in Congress are now facing a crisis. For the past several years they’ve merrily demagogued the debt ceiling by portraying it as a limit on how much Congress can spend, not on how much Treasury can borrow to pay for debts already incurred. And then every time it has to be raised they play games and threaten shutdowns in exchange for cuts to programs they don’t like. A lot of Democrats have wanted to get rid of it for years, although apparently not enough Democrats. If the debt ceiling is eliminated, Republicans won’t get to play their favorite “holding the federal government hostage” game any more, or at least, they’ll have to work a lot harder to play it.

(The debt ceiling was created during World War I as a housekeeping shortcut. Before 1917, every time Treasury needed to borrow money to pay the bills, Congress had to vote on it. By setting a debt ceiling as a sort of blanket authorization, they saved themselves a lot of time. But now will the Freedom Caucus go to war over every vote to let Treasury issue some bonds, or whatever? The House is dysfunctional already.)

Jeff Stein writes at WaPo:

“Anybody that supports a bill that doesn’t take care of the Democrat quicksand known as the debt ceiling should be primaried and disposed of as quickly as possible,” Trump said.

Trump even went as far as pushing for the permanent repeal of the national borrowing limit. Democrats have long called for abolishing the cap, saying Republicans have used the limit as a weapon to force them to agree to spending cuts. Republicans have traditionally supported keeping the debt limit in place as a check on federal spending, although the limit bans borrowing, not spending. The government typically borrows to pay for spending that Congress and the White House have already enacted into law.

So what is going on in Trump’s demented head?

I take it Mike Johnson then started making noises about raising the debt ceiling but not abolishing it altogether. Today House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed this on Bluesky:

GOP extremists want House Democrats to raise the debt ceiling so that House Republicans can lower the amount of your Social Security check.

Hard pass.

— Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social) December 19, 2024 at 8:38 AM

Why is this happening? Alan Rappeport writes at the New York Times,

As he prepares to push an agenda of tax cuts and border security, Mr. Trump fears that a debt limit fight next year could interfere. His plans are expected to cost trillions of dollars, much of which will most likely need to come from borrowed funds. A drawn-out debt limit fight next year could force Mr. Trump and Republicans to bow to the demands of Democrats and could consume the congressional calendar.

“This is a nasty TRAP set in place by the Radical Left Democrats!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Wednesday night. …

By addressing the debt limit during the final weeks of the Biden administration, Republicans could prevent Democrats from weaponizing it against them once they are in power. And, as Mr. Trump has made clear, he could then blame Mr. Biden for increasing the borrowing cap.

And all this happened after Elon Musk detonated another bomb in Congress by demanding the death of an already made agreement that would have kept the government funded for at least a few months. Now we’re likely to have a shutdown right before Christmas, and you know how popular that will be. Paul Krugman writes in his substack column,

Musk is demanding — apparently successfully — that Republicans in Congress renege on a deal they had already agreed to, a continuing resolution that would keep the federal government going for the next few months. Why? Because, Musk says, of the outrageous provisions in that CR.

Except none of the items Musk is complaining about are actually in the bill. No, Congress isn’t giving itself a 40 percent raise. No, the bill doesn’t fund a $3 billion stadium in Washington. No, it doesn’t block future investigations into the Jan. 6 committee. No, it doesn’t fund bioweapons labs. …

…Second, you shouldn’t trust claims about the budget coming from Some Guy on the Internet. You might have imagined that the world’s richest man could have a couple of fact-checkers on retainer to help ensure that he isn’t making clearly stupid assertions. But nooo.

In a barrage of posts on X Musk pushed misinformation about a more or less routine, place-holding bill that was basically a way to keep the ship of state afloat until Trump takes charge. Maybe this was in part a power play, an attempt to make Republicans in Congress show fealty to a man who clearly imagines that he’s the real president — and Trump, by meekly endorsing Musk’s position, did in fact convey the impression that Musk is leading the guy who is supposed to be in charge by the nose. But this political theater will have real consequences, for America, for Trump, and for Musk himself.

People are already calling Musk the “co-president” and sometimes “the First Lady.” Krugman continues,

Maybe Musk himself doesn’t expect to experience any hardship, but put it this way: I’m glad that I won’t need to renew my passport any time soon, that I don’t expect to be trying to get through airport security for a while, and especially glad that I don’t rely either on food stamps or on small business loans. For all of these things have been disrupted in past government shutdowns.

Do Musk and Trump know any of this? Almost surely not.

Beyond the specifics, my guess is that antics like the potential shutdown will do much more damage to the Musk/Trump administration than they realize. (There’s also this other guy — JV Dance or something? — but he clearly doesn’t matter.)

First, since the election financial markets have clearly been betting that Trump will do very little of what he promised during the campaign — that we won’t really have a trade war, just some minor trade skirmishes, that we’ll have symbolic deportations rather than a mass roundup of immigrants, and so on. Markets have, in effect, discounted the disastrous consequences that would follow if Trump honored his own promises.

But a government shutdown in response to completely false claims about what’s in an innocuous short-term funding measure suggests that the peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply. Trump may really believe that foreigners will pay tariffs, that U.S. trade deficits subsidize the rest of the world, that there’s a reserve army of American workers available to fill the gaps deportation would create. I don’t want to put too much weight on the latest market fluctuations, but it is starting to look as if investors are questioning their own complacency.

And while you’re at Krugman’s new substack site, be sure to read Health Insurance Is a Racket.

Update: Just a few minutes ago some House Republicans said they have a new budget deal that they can vote on today. But no details have been released.

Update Update: And the new bill inspired a big “hell no” from House Dems.

Update Update Update: The new bill failed in the House, 239 no, 174 yes.

Also in the news: A Georgia Appeals Court disqualified Fani Willis from the Trump RICO case. I guess we all knew that was coming.

A Deep Dive: There’s a long and nerdy article at Lawfare about the Republican Party and whether the current MAGA version of it is a break from the past or a continuation of it. If you don’t mind long and nerdy, it’s worth reading.

.

First, do read Josh Marshall at TPM:

In a clearly choreographed series of announcements over the course of late last week, one tech CEO after another announced they were contributing $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee. This comes after the earlier endorsement controversies at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Then over the weekend ABC News agreed to give Trump $16 million and issue him a personal apology to settle his ongoing defamation suit. The critical factor here is that the suit — over George Stephanopoulos’ use of the term “rape” to describe the E. Jean Carroll jury’s finding against Trump — is not only almost impossible to win under current First Amendment law but over claims that are affirmatively accurate, as no less than the judge in the case confirmed.

Someone asked me over the weekend why I thought ABC settled the case on such adverse terms Were they trying to prevent embarrassing facts coming out in discovery? I told this person that while I didn’t know specifically and couldn’t categorically rule that out, I was basically certain that wasn’t true. The story here is basically identical to the $1 million initiation fees from the tech executives. Trump makes clear that he’ll make trouble for anyone who doesn’t make nice and let him wet his beak. 

There’s more, but you get the gist of it. And also see David Enrich at the New York Times, Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage. It begins,

The legal threats have arrived in various forms. One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or emails.

All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and F.B.I.

The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. Before and after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.

Trump is even threatening to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for erroneously predicting Harris would win Iowa.

Some of these news organizations might finally understand why all the “sanewashing” of Trump was maybe not a good idea. Freedom of speech and the press is about to be seriously challenged.

Elsewhere: Paul Krugman has moved from the New York Times to Substack. See Will Trump Be Called On His Inflation Lie? Krugman notes that the public turned against the Biden Administration in part for not bringing the price of groceries down fast enough.

Donald Trump centered much of his campaign on catering to this public perception, promising, for example,

From the day I take the oath of office, we’ll rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again … Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down fast.

And low-information voters believed him.

Now that the election is over, however, we’re seeing headlines like this:

This was totally predictable.

The “very hard” quote is from the Time magazine interview with Trump.

If the prices of groceries don’t come down, will your presidency be a failure?

I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will. 

And then Trump rambles for some time about the broken supply chain and shipping containers being left at docks unclaimed, or something. I’m not sure he understands what the supply chain is. And I don’t believe the supply chains are being disrupted all that much at the moment. But as Krugman says, even if the prices of eggs and gasoline and everything else shoot up like a rocket, Trump supporters will either deny he ever made the promise or pretend they don’t notice the price increases.

Even so, especially if Trump starts a trade war with Canada and the price of gasoline shoots up, I want somebody to manufacture lots of press-on stickers with Trump’s face and the words “I did this” that we can stick on all the gas pumps.

If you visit Krugman, also read Crypto is for Criming.

Also, too. I guess we were due for another school shooting. This one was at a K-12 Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin. Four dead, five wounded.

A bit late for that, Mitch. One of the most surreal things I’ve seen today is this piece by Mitch McConnell at Foreign Affairs. Mitch is practically begging Trump to not pursue isolationism but instead allow the U.S. to remain guardian of the free world. Hey, Mitch, he’s your monster. You helped create him. Now he’s loose in the world, and you’ve passed on every sensible opportunity to rein him in. What he does from now on is partly on you.

Pete Hegseth might end up in charge of the Pentagon after all. One of the senators expected to block him, Republican Joni Ernst of Iowa, has reportedly caved after threats from Trump. From the New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s hard-line backers paid for ads in Ms. Ernst’s home state, questioned her Republican bona fides on social media and even threatened to launch primary challenges against her in 2026 to push her toward supporting Mr. Hegseth as the nominee.

Some prominent Trump activists, including Charlie Kirk and Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing strategist, pushed to recruit Kari Lake, the former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona who grew up in Iowa, as a potential challenger to Ms. Ernst.

The onslaught of pressure put Ms. Ernst in a bind. Over two terms in the Senate, she has built a reputation for being a principled leader on matters of sexual assault and the military. As a combat veteran, she also holds strong views on the role of women in the military that clash significantly with those of Mr. Hegseth, who has said women should not serve in combat roles.

Sen. Ernst has not explicitly said she would approve Hegseth’s nomination, but it looks like she’s moving in that direction.

And then there’s this, from David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

Heritage Action is launching a pressure campaign against these GOP senators to support Trump’s nominees. It’s small, mostly nothingburger effort to allow Heritage Action to tout its pro-Trump bona fides, but it’s a reasonably good proxy for the list of GOP senators to keep an eye on:

• • Senate Majority Leader John Thune (SD)
  • Mitch McConnell (KY)
  • Lisa Murkowski (AK)
  • Susan Collins (ME)
  • Joni Ernst (IA)
  • Bill Cassidy (LA)
  • Thom Tillis (NC)
  • Todd Young (IN)
  • John Curtis (UT)

Mitch McConnell is 82 and intends to stay in the Senate until his term ends in January 2027, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he bails out sooner.

Republicans in Congress might have noticed yesterday’s report that during Trump’s first term, Bill Barr’s Justice Department was helping itself to congressional staff records looking for sources of leaked information.

Investigators also sought congressional staff members’ records to try to find the sources for a number of Washington Post articles. They included one about a secret surveillance court order against the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, others about a Russian ambassador’s conversations with senior Trump advisers, and another about the Obama administration’s efforts to fight Russian election interference. …

… Two Democratic members of Congress and 43 congressional staff members at the time of the 2017 articles had their communications records subpoenaed by the Justice Department. Of the staff members, 21 were Democrats, 20 were Republicans, and two held nonpartisan jobs in Congress. 

Just being a Republican won’t save you over the next four years.

Stuff to read: This is a big one — You Should Be More Worried About Trump’s Planned Military Purge by Don Moynihan. Trump is going to destroy the U.S. military as we know it if he isn’t stopped.

It appears the guy who assasinated the health insurance CEO has been apprehended. (Note to self: If I ever have to assasinate somebody, leave the country right away when it’s done.)

Here’s a transript of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. I haven’t gotten through it all yet. I got stuck in the tariff section. This is Trump:

I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you look at my — just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation. In fact, when I handed it over, they didn’t have inflation for a year and a half. They went almost two years just based on what I had created. And then they created inflation with energy and with spending too much. So I think we will — I’m a big believer in tariffs. I think tariffs are the most beautiful word. I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich. We’re subsidizing Canada to the tune over $100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion. We shouldn’t be — why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state. We’re subsidizing Mexico and we’re subsidizing Canada and we’re subsidizing many countries all over the world. And all I want to do is I want to have a level, fast, but fair playing field.

Now, that makes no sense at all. I’m not sure what he’s calling “subsidies.” Trade deficits, maybe? And “It’s going to make us rich?” I think he genuinely believes this.

So then Kristen Welker said, “Sir, your previous tariffs during your first administration cost Americans some $80 billion, and now you have major companies from Walmart, Black & Decker, AutoZone, saying that any tariffs are going to force them to drive up prices for their consumers. How do you make sure that these CEOs, that these companies don’t, in fact, pass on the cost of tariffs to their consumers?” And Trump said,

They cost Americans nothing. They made a great economy for us. They also solve another problem. If we were going to have problems having to do with wars and having to do with other things, tariffs — I have stopped wars with tariffs by saying, “You guys want to fight, it’s great. But both of you are going to pay tariffs to the United States at 100%.” And — they have many purposes, tariffs, if properly used. I don’t say you use them like a madman. I say properly used. But it didn’t cost this country anything. It made this country money. And we never really got the chance to go all out because we had to fight Covid in the last part, and we did it very successfully. And when I handed it over to Biden, the stock market was higher than what it was just previous to Covid coming in. It was actually higher. Tariffs are a — properly used, are a very powerful tool, not only economically, but also for getting other things outside of economics.

He stopped wars with tariffs? WTF? Does anyone want to guess where in his mis-wired brain he thinks he stopped a war with tariffs?

An even bigger worry is foreign policy. We got lucky in Trump’s first term. See Michael Tomasky, The World Is on Fire. And Trump’s About to Be President. Feel Better? at The New Republic.

The main question here for Americans concerns the fact that in six weeks, Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States. The surprising events in Syria serve as a harrowing reminder that there’s a big, complicated world out there and, pretty soon, Trump is going to be the single most powerful person in it—the “horse in a hospital” that comedian John Mulaney likened him to, though horses are far less corrupt. And the weird, and worrying, thing is that even though Trump was president before, we don’t really know all that much about his foreign policy instincts because he was never really tested on foreign policy in his first term.

Think about it. There were no major crises during Trump’s term. There were no 9/11 attacks, obviously, but even beyond that, there weren’t any major wars; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came after he lost reelection. There was no big uprising like the 2014 Maidan Revolution, or the Tahrir Square and Arab Spring revolts of 2011. The Middle East was comparatively quiet, especially to those of us who recall the fraught part of 2006 or the past year’s conflagration that followed in the wake of Hamas’s attacks in Israel. Assad’s butchery was an ongoing affair, but that’s not the same as a new broad regional conflict kicking off, which forces an American president to decide what moral face the United States is going to present to the world. Compared to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump had it pretty easy—it even fell to Biden to keep the commitments to wind down the war in Afghanistan and honor the hideous commitments Trump made to the Taliban, much to Biden’s detriment in public opinion polling.

Trump may honestly believe that the world behaved itself during his first term just because he was President. But the world isn’t afraid of him. The world thinks he’s a malleable buffoon. And Trump won’t have anyone around him with more sense than he does, as he did during his first term.

This is going to be a damn mess.

In another part of the interview, Trump said he was going to end birthright citizenship “on day one” with an executive action. Which, of course, he doesn’t have the authority to do because it’s written into the Constitution. Welker drilled him on this, and he wouldn’t back down. I don’t believe he understands the amending the Constitution thing.

Josh Marshall commented,

I’ve pointed out repeatedly that Donald Trump cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order. It’s right there in the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and that clear meaning has been confirmed and buttressed by 150 years of case law and attestations by the United States government. It’s very important to state these realities confidently and right in his face. The guy is constantly operating within the territory of his boasts and trash talk and it’s his opponents who end up letting him.

This doesn’t mean he won’t try to do this or that he won’t find judges who will back him up.

Yes, it needs to be said to his face. But there’s no one in his orbit now who will do that.  Naturally, some guy on Fox News is calling birthright citizenship a “loophole.”

Did I mention this is going to be a mess? I believe I did.

I guess the Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria is over. Tulsi Gabbard must be so disappointed.

I don’t pretend to be expert in the Middle East, Let me just direct you to Juan Cole’s analysis at Informed Comment. For another perspective, see Eliot A. Cohen at The Atlantic.

If you missed Chris Hayes on Friday, be sure to watch this bit from the beginning of his program on the heist-in-progress that will be the next Trump Administration.

Much conversation today about Trump’s interview on Meet the Press. I did not watch, but I understand he wants to change the Constitution and end birthright citizenship by executive order (?) and is still talking about mass deportations. Oh, and he wants everyone who was on the J6 House committee in prison. I may look into this tomorrow.

Trump has nominated Billy Long, a former U.S. Representative from Missouri, to head the IRS. I saw the name “Billy Long” and alarms went off. Sure enough, I’ve mentioned him before. This is from 2022, in a post about the specimens who were running to take over retiring Senator Roy Blunt’s seat: “Billy Long is the fellow who resembles a talking potato and who believes abortion rights are the leading cause of mass shooting.”

I’ll come back to Long’s theory connecting mass shootings to abortion. The more pressing issue is that he’s already pressured the IRS to strip the Humane Society of its tax-exempt status.

In 2011, Long signed a letter pushing the IRS to launch a probe of the tax-exempt status of the Humane Society of the United States, a nonprofit that focuses on animal welfare and opposes animal cruelty. The letter followed the Humane Society’s support of a successful Missouri ballot measure strengthening regulations on dog breeders.

The dog breeders in this case were unregulated puppy mills. This has been a contentious issue in Missouri going back years. These puppy mills keep female dogs in tiny, dirty cages so they can produce one litter after another. Often the puppies get sold through legitimate pet stores for a hefty profit. Here are the regulations that Missouri voters approved in 2011:

New regulations pushed by animal advocates, approved by voters and ultimately modified by the legislature limited the number of dogs a breeder could have at any given time. It also banned the stacked cages with wire floors that proved so damaging to paws, required breeders to offer sufficient space for dogs to move in their enclosures and mandated dogs get adequate rest between breeding cycles.

The puppy mills had been an issue going back years, as I remember, but the legislature resisted regulating them. The puppy mill owners had some clout in Jefferson City, and some of the legislators from rural counties didn’t think The Gubmint should be telling folks what to do with their animals. And, unfortunately, the state is still ground zero for puppy mills. Here’s a 2024 report from a St, Louis television station. I take it the laws aren’t really being enforced. And some in the legislature want to weaken the 2011 law.

Anyway, closing down puppy mills and seeing to it dogs are treated humanely is a major focus of the Humane Society. Billy Long thinks this is political extremism that needs to be shut down. Long also signed a separate letter in 2015 demanding the IRS investigate the tax status of the Clinton Foundation.

It’s clear Long won’t be shy about using the IRS to punish nonprofits he doesn’t like, which no doubt is why Trump nominated him. And there’s a pending House-passed bill that would give the Trump administration new powers to rescind the tax status of groups it deems “terrorist supporting organizations,” I’m sure Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Sierra Club will be labeled terrorist and denied tax-exempt status. This is serious.

Back to Billy Long’s issues with abortion — if you can’t access the Vanity Fair article I linked in 2022, here’s a Newsweek article for you.

Rep. Billy Long, who serves Missouri, made the startling claims on Columbia radio station 93.9 The Eagle. The 66-year-old said: “It’s a systemic problem. When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year. Now, we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri, so something has happened to our society, and I go back to abortion. When we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mother’s wombs, life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

Billy Long was born in 1955, Wikipedia says. If you want to check out the homicide rate in Springfield, Missouri, in the 1950s and 1960s compared to now, be my guest. I do know I’ve read that ownership of semiautomatic “assault” weapons was unusual before 1970 or so. It’s also the case that the homicide rate in Missouri has climbed since tne nutjob state legislature voted to eliminate any gun control law they could find. I don’t believe there’s another state that has laxer gun laws than Missouri. They tried to nullify federal gun laws, you might remember, but the courts eventually slapped that down.

So now it’s Pete Hegseth circling the drain, as it were. Along with being utterly unqualified to head the Department of Defense, turns out Pete has a serious and ongoing problem with alcohol that’s been confirmed — off the record — by Fox News employees. Someone also found an old video of Pete trashing Donald Trump. And while no GOP senator is on the record as being absolutely opposed to Hegseth, several are signaling as hard as they can that Hegseth doesn’t have the votes. It appears he has several interviews scheduled with senators today, which may not go well.

Even better, according to several reports, Trump is now consideirng replacing Hegseth with … Ron DeSantis? Seriously?

Mr. Trump is openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he defeated in the Republican presidential primaries and with whom he has had a contentious relationship. Mr. Trump likes the story of bringing on someone he dominated publicly, and he talked about it with Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday at a service honoring three Florida sheriff’s deputies who were killed in a car crash.

According to Wikipedia, Ron was in the Navy, where he achieved the rank of Lieutenant. He appears to have mostly done legal work for the Navy. He does have executive experience as a governor, which makes him more qualified than Hegseth. But of all people. The issue, of course, is that Trump’s candidate list consists of people he can control or dominate. Ron has two more years to be governor of Florida, but then he’s term-limited from running again. So he might be tempted to take the job, if it’s offered.

Oh, and Trump announced today he’s putting a cryptocurrency guy in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Of course.

At Salon, Heather Digy Parton predicts that in this coming term Trump will get over his shyness about cutting Medicare and Social Security. Trump has a history going back to 2015 of promising to not cut Medicare and Social Security. But his proposed budgets cut the programs every year he was in office, a detail that got through to very few voters, I’m sure. Digby continues,

That last budget was put together by the man Trump is bringing back as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and one of the principal authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought. It’s highly questionable whether Vought will be as circumspect about the plans to cut the programs this time or whether Trump will care because all of that was predicated on Trump’s need to run for office again. Without that hanging over their heads they have no need to hold back. Republicans have wanted to do away with those programs since they were first passed. This may be their chance to finally get it done.

See also Nicole Lafond at TPM, House Republican Wants Party To Boldly Own Plans To Gut The Social Safety Net.

Predictably, as soon as it became clear that Trump had secured a right-wing trifecta, whispers of “reform” to the programs returned, the language Republicans like to use to put a positive spin on their interest in slashing programs that benefit America’s most vulnerable, perhaps in order to justify tax cuts for the wealthy or, perhaps, for no real reason at all.

It started with reports of chopping-block conversations among congressional Republicans as they looked for ways to subsidize the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which primarily benefit those making $400,000 or more a year and are set to expire in 2025. Republicans began making noise about “reforms” to Medicaid and Food Stamps programs, which, of course, serve low-income Americans who need health insurance and can’t afford basic, nutritious food. 

So, yeah, they’re going to try.

To catch up on what’s been going on in South Korea over the past couple of days, see South Korean Leader Will Face Impeachment Vote Over Martial Law Declaration at the New York Times. Note also there’s something hinky going on in France. See No-confidence vote topples French government, plunges country into chaos at the Washington Post.

Regarding the Hunter Biden pardon — I can’t criticize Joe for this, and those throwing fits need to calm down and consider what sort of lower life forms are about to take over the Justice Department. It’s a sweeping pardon to protect Hunter from future political harassment and worse from the humanoid MAGA worms, or whatever they are. See also Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money and also Jasmine Crockett Has Blistering Message For GOP Pearl-Clutching Over Hunter Biden Pardon by Ben Blanchet at Huffpost.

Speaking of humanoid MAGA worm Pete Hegseth, Jane Mayer reports at the New Yorker that

Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. 

Yes, this is just the guy we need in charge of the Department of Defense. See also David Kurtz at TPM.

Many are still hyperventilating at the thought of Kash Patel as head of FBI. And it’s also a scandal that Trump intends to fire Christopher Wray just to replace him with a loyalist. As explained by David Frum at the Atlantic,

For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA. Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush presidency and into the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton fired the inherited official—the first time a president ever fired an FBI director—only because the outgoing Bush administration had left behind a Department of Justice report accusing the director of ethical lapses. (Clinton tried to coax the tainted director into resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton act.)

And so it continued into the 21st century. Except in a single case of serious scandal, Senate-confirmed FBI directors stayed in their post until they quit or until their 10-year term expired. Never, never, never was a Senate-confirmed FBI director fired so that the president could replace him with a loyalist. Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that there must be no return to the days when J. Edgar Hoover did special favors for presidents who perpetuated his power.

Trump fired James Comey to try to shut down the investigation into his ties to Russia, but he was persuaded there would be blowback. So his people gave the excuse that Comey was being fired because he mishandled Hillary Clinton’s investigation. Not that anyone bellieved that was why he was fired, of course. But now Trump isn’t even bothering with an excuse. Wray has two years to go in his ten-year term.

Also note that the same party that has been using “defund the police” against Democratics for way too long are about to completely gut the criminal justice system at the federal level.

And do read Tom Nichols, The Kash Patel Principle, at The Atlantic. No paywall.