Opinion

Horrifically underqualified and monstrous Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth should never have been confirmed by the Senate. Even Mitch McConnell, along with Lisa Murkowski and a "concerned" Susan Collins, voted no. Mitch almost always votes party first, but not this time. Now, every other Republican senator and Donald Trump are on the hook for allowing Hegseth's mismanagement to all but kill our brave and committed sailors.

On November 21 last year, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln set sail from San Diego to the Middle East, prepared for war as it always is, but unaware of the oncoming issue with Iran, one that began February 28 of this year. Thus it is that the first shots fired from aircraft based on the Lincoln occurred three months into its deployment, or roughly halfway before it would normally be scheduled to return to San Diego for rest, relief, repair, and restocking.

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

This month, we learned that Capital One Bank closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?

Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

While slouched at his desk in the Oval Office this month, Islamophobe — among many other phobes — Donald Trump told reporters that a friend had suggested he start calling his political opponents "jihadists."

He made clear he had one candidate in mind — Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan physician who won the Democratic Senate primary and would be the state's first Muslim senator.

Sometimes, I sit back in breathtaking wonder struggling to consider what more could possibly be written about Donald John Trump that hasn’t already been said a million times and in a million different ways.

And then, he does something else that leaves me – and any thinking human being – gasping for adjectives to explain the actions of the worst person America has ever produced by a margin so vast it defies calculation.

Among the multiple bombshells that dropped in DC this month, there’s one extra big one that we can’t allow to get lost in the raging garbage fire news cycle Trump somehow created so that no one would trust anything they heard from the media.

Sen. Ron “Chutzpah” Wyden (D-OR, and my Senator, hence my nickname for him) released his highly anticipated report on the Senate Finance Committee’s four-year investigation into the American and Russian banks tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring. The 67-page report specifically focuses on the failure of the Wall Street banks to blow the whistle on Epstein’s financial crimes, with one bank going as far as helping Epstein hide certain transactions to avoid suspicion.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House podium at the end of this month, and the stated reason is that she wants more time with her young children. I actually believe that part, and that’s probably the only truthful thing she’s said during her disastrous tenure.

I don't doubt for a second that being a mother to two small kids while working that job is brutal. But I don’t take anything she says at face value, and I know that’s a terrible thing to say. But Leavitt has said so many terrible things that the fact I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt is something she earned, over and over and over again.

One of the most worrisome signs coming into Trump's second administration was that he right off named Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff. Wiles is a lot of things, including an unrepentant and cynical supporter of the most corrupt and incompetent president in history, but she is most certainly not incompetent. Indeed, her mastery of the political dark arts is best proven by the almost non-existent turnover within this oil spill of a White House.

That lack of turnover even within this hall of horrors has proven invaluable at the podium of the press room, as Karoline Leavitt has mastered a mix of precocious genius with mean girl petulance in navigating the barrage of scandals in Trump's wake. Leavitt, like Wiles, remains essential to Trump's stability. Unlike Wiles, Leavitt still constitutes a risk, despite her MAGA magnificence, especially headed into the midterms.

With all but two Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement” that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners.

Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it.

Something you can always count on from the Trumpublicans is hypocrisy, because nearly everything they say is just full-on obtuse projection language.

There truly isn’t enough space on the internet to break down every example of Trumpocrisy that we’ve witnessed on the daily, but an overwhelming amount of right-wing smokescreening bloviation is centered around sex. I’ve spent far too much time wondering what our planet might look like right now if all conservatives were supported by their parents and taught that their normal and healthy sexual feelings can be expressed safely with a consenting partner.

We now live in a country where the Republican Party has fully given itself over to authoritarianism with the razor-thin confirmation of Todd “Trumpsimp” Blanche as Attorney General.

You can tell they’re all super proud of their vote, because they held it in the wee hours of Saturday morning. None of them were coerced in any way into voting, obvs, especially not “Dr.” Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who sounded completely defeated and not at all terrified during his performative announcement from the Senate floor.