Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez note the day:

On this day in 1992, a New York jury found mob boss John Gotti guilty on 13 counts, including murder. A key witness was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a former Gotti lieutenant who confessed to 19 killings and who would one day make headlines by endorsing Donald Trump. “We need a gangster,” Gravano said in 2024.

They write about Iran and it’s a banger:

Trump’s own administration – are actually buying his effort to declare victory in Iran and move on. “However poorly you think the war is going, it is worse,” one senior administration official said in recent days. A different senior US official bluntly stated: “Iran can declare victory, too,” adding that “nobody will buy our attempt to sell this as a big win.”

Still, if you are the US commander in chief, and you’re one month into a major war that you launched, the one communications job you have is to be able to go on live TV and project calm, confidence, and reasonably high energy to the American people, when you’re telling them how well the war is going.

On Wednesday night – April Fools’ Day, funnily enough – President Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do that. (He’s a former reality TV star; he is supposed to be good at doing TV.) Setting aside for a moment the typically incoherent jumble that pervaded his televised address, the American president delivered a jarringly listless, elderly-seeming speech that did little to inspire confidence – including in his own ranks.

During and after his address, an array of Trump advisers, administration officials, allies on Capitol Hill, and rich Mar-a-Lago buddies gave Zeteo their snap reviews of Trump’s message and delivery. (Yes, they asked for the cloak of anonymity, so as to not piss off God King Donald.) Virtually across the board, the president was panned by his own people, with some denigrating the speech as pointless, and others reiterating how much senior members of the administration never wanted this to happen in the first place.

One Trump administration official said the following on Wednesday night: “It reminded me of listening to Joe Biden speak.”

In Trumplandia, that is perhaps the worst possible thing you could say about anyone, much less the sitting president and leader of the GOP.

So today he calls Bruce Springsteen a “dried up old prune” and we hear that he’s going to fire Pam Bondi cementing the impression that his mind is actually mush. Biden never sounded so confused, much less were his policies totally incoherent. In reality the worst thing you can say about anyone is that they remind you of Donald Trump.

The best excerpt?

Before the speech, Politico reported that Trump intended to use his address to tell Americans the war is winding down. But the visibly deteriorating president didn’t seem prepared to pick a lane, and viewers were hard-pressed to find a message that didn’t sound like it was scrawled in a notebook by a serial killer.

I was unable to watch the speech in real time so I just got to it today. Oh my God. He is not well.

Josh Marshall’s pithy take is the best one I’ve read:

I think any press person who watched President Trump’s Iran cheer-up session speech on truth serum would have to concede that this was a speech he shouldn’t have given. He meandered. He looked bad and worn out. He had the requisite moments when his degenerate inner monologue creeps into the open: he said that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something for importer countries in Asia to deal with, that they should “grab and cherish” the strait, as though it were some underage beauty pageant contestant Trump was hungering to assault. What is important is that in political and public opinion terms, there was nothing new or newsworthy in this speech. They didn’t even manage to accomplish this in the narrow and cynical sense of saying anything new that could be a fresh point of public discussion. It was a rambling set of unconvincing excuses no one with any real concern or anxiety about this war (the only real audience) would find convincing. Why are you complaining, he asks? This war hasn’t gone on nearly as long as World War II! LOL.

Market watchers will note that the White House is now solidifying around the idea that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something importer countries will have to deal with, that it’s not America’s problem. That means that the economic fallout of the war will continue unabated. This is simply rebranding a massive strategic defeat as some kind of America First swagger. Of course, oil markets are global. It doesn’t really matter if the U.S. makes as much oil as it consumes. That’s not how prices work.

The “middle powers” as Mark Carney calls them have already banded together to come up with a solution to the problem without U.S. involvement. Trump will proclaim that as a personal victory but, in fact, it is the beginning of an alliance of erstwhile allies against our mutual adversaries — and us. Together, they are as powerful as we are.

What choice do they have? Any country that would elect that decrepit pile of bronzer and malice as their leader twice simply cannot be trusted to protect global security.

Gas prices are all Iran’s fault, claims real estate Developer-in-Chief

At an event the other day, I overheard someone complaining that the price of blueberries had shot up to $7. A visit to Trader Joe’s confirmed that. It’s now common to walk down the cookie aisle of a supermarket and see packages that once sold for $3-$4 now priced a $5 or more. And breakfast cereal? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Gasoline is now over $4 per gallon according to GasBuddy. Donald Trump last night claimed the price hike is “entirely the result of the Iranian regime” that closed the Strait of Hormuz after Trump attacked them.

At home, Americans’ patience has worn thin. Department of Homeland Security employees are working without paychecks for another week as Congress cannot get its act together (The Atlantic):

Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

[…]

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing  celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

TMZ has photos of the Scotland trip. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina took off for Disney World.

Gas and grocery prices will have many Americans planning staycations this summer.

One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

Sign Guy’s message for the week reads: ARE YOU WORKING TWO OR THREE ‘GOOD’ JOBS?

Lexus and Mercedes drivers don’t get it. Those who do shout, honk, and pump their fists. They feel seen.

Is this a tween mean girl or the president of the United States?

One of the things that worries me greatly these days is the fact that this man has been a dominant force in the culture for the past decade and I’m afraid this malignant attitude has become the accepted way for adults to publicly communicate. There are kids who have seen this behavior as normal nearly their whole lives.

Whether we like it or not, presidents are role models. My God.

Who’s next to be fired?

Headlines suggest that Donald Trump is not feeling as sheathed in a coccoon of warm, sychophants as he’s used to. This makes Captain Insecure agitated and unnerved. Answer? Fire someone.

AG Pam Bondi is in the headlines for just that reason (New York Times):

President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files, according to four people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Trump has floated the idea of replacing Ms. Bondi with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations by the president.

Mr. Trump has not made a final decision, and Ms. Bondi’s allies pointed to photos of her and the president traveling to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to dispute the notion that the president is planning to fire her.

Rumors are also flying about DNI Tulsi Gabbard (The Guardian):

Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

It is not clear that Trump will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.

Like the war in Iran he started, the firings could distract Trump from deciding what flooring and chandeliers to pick for his now-on-hold ballroom, suggests New Yorker cartoonist Matt Reuter.

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Matt Reuter. pic.twitter.com/sKGM1rKzK2

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 1, 2026

News Nation:

Trump was taking questions from reporters aboard Air Force One when he began holding up a series of architectural drawings and talked at length about the project he began pursuing early in his second term.

“We have all bullet-proof glass, we have drone-proof roofs, ceilings,” the president said as he shuffled through the renderings. “Unfortunately, we’re living in an age when that’s a good thing.”

Unfortuately, we’re living in an age dominated by billionaire tech bros and a president as incompetent as the people he hires to cover his ass.

You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible

Donald Trump addressed the country Wednesday night to provide an update on his war/not-war with Iran. In Trump’s view, what he’s dubbed an excursion (that’s incursion) is “nearing completion.” Yet he repeated threats to destroy Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, to hit Iran “extremely hard,” and to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” if it did not make a deal on ending the war/not-war. Except Trump presented no details of any proposed “deal.”

“Trump only repeated “the same statements he has been circulating for weeks,” Al Jazeera commented. “The US president did not provide details on how the war would actually end or what kind of deal he is seeking with Iran.”

David Rothkopf lambasted the address in the Daily Beast:

The U.S. president, looking addled and unsure of himself, unleashed a torrent of lies, untruths, misrepresentations, deceptions, and distilled nuggets of crapola so vast that it may well live up to the most Trumpian of descriptive phrases: “nobody has ever seen anything like it before.”

Compounding the fact that he managed to speak for almost 20 minutes without uttering nearly a single truth was the equally mind-numbing reality that, despite the White House having advertised his national TV appearance as a major address on the Iran war, nothing newsworthy crossed his thin, ever-so-lightly glossed lips.

His address was not so much a speech as it was a greatest hits compilation from his Truth Social account since the beginning of the current war in Iran, known to those who know as Operation Epic Fiasco.

With nothing new to say, Rothkopf writes, “the reason for this speech is that the opposite of everything Trump was saying was true and it is bad news and he wants to hide it.”

Iran’s fissile material is still there. The world is less safe than it was before Feb. 28. The world’s economy is shaken. Iran’s leadership is more hardline than ever and determined to wait out Trump’s shrinking attention span. As a Taliban leader reportedly said to the U.S. in Afghanistan, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

Trump appears ready to abandon his effort and leave others to clean up his mess:

And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.

“Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump advises in what sounds unnervingly like echolalia. Because Not. My. Problem. says the Great Deal Maker. U.S. adversaries including China and Russia are gleeful.

It would all be humorous if not for the death, destruction, and worldwide economic disruption. Again, not Trump’s problem. It’s never Trump’s problem.

The BBC’s “Friday Night Comedy” last week found some humor nevertheless, and made more sense of Trump than Trump. “What the fake is going on?” You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible.

@bbcradio4

Has Donald Trump been spreading ‘fake news’ about the war in Iran? From The Skewer’s Jon Holmes and host Andrew Hunter Murray, this week’s Friday Night Comedy looks at a fresh way of dressing the week’s news in the altogether and parading it around for everyone to laugh at. Friday Night Comedy | Listen on BBC Sounds

♬ original sound – BBC Radio 4

(Trump’s address came after his morning glare-a-thon at the Supreme Court — I got that wrong; he actually did attend, but only for Solicitor General John Sauer’s arguments that fell flat with most justices.)

So, a judge has put the kibosh on Trump’s hideous ballroom/temple/personal memorial saying that the Congress has to approve it. So far, there hasn’t been any sign that they’re anxious to do that:

Mike Davis, a conservative judicial activist who is close to the White House, said in an interview Republicans “need to” take action.

“Are they just going to let the ballroom just sit there in disarray … they’re just going to let the construction zone be a fucking disaster for the next three years?” Davis added. “Like, come on.”

But most Republicans who sit on committees with direct jurisdiction of White House and public property matters have so far been silent on whether they’ll shepherd through legislation to protect one of Trump’s top priorities. Doing so could put them in the crosshairs of Democrats, who have already made clear they think the ballroom is proof the president cares more about entertaining wealthy donors than passing policies to lower the costs of everyday goods — and who, in the Senate, have the ability to block any ballroom authorization measure from ever reaching Trump’s desk.

Just leave the wrecked hulk of the East Wing right where it is. It’s the most fitting Trump memorial of all.

This is how uneducated (or delusional) Republicans are:

McCormick: "We were horrible in Vietnam until we did Rolling Thunder Two, then we won. As soon as we do half-measures, we lose. The faster we get this over the better. If we seize Kharg island, it could be done almost flawlessly. If we have enough firepower, it would be very easy to defend."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-31T21:20:57.620Z

So now they think we won the Vietnam war? With Rolling Thunder, the 3 year long bombing campaign that resulted in absolutely nothing? It didn’t break the North Vietnamese will and ended as a strategic defeat of historic proportions. Just as Trump’s Iran debacle is going to be.

Spencer Ackerman points out the absurdity of this view. He lays out Trump’s and, more recently, Rubio’s fatuous attempts to say that the war has achieved its objectives and writes:

[I]t’s necessary to point out that Rubio has abandoned as unachievable the fantasy of regime change. And while any state would prefer to have an intact navy and its air force, Iran has just proven that its ability to project power resides in its missiles and its drones, rather than its conventional military. And seeking a “significant reduction” in anything is a tell that you know you cannot eliminate the threat from that thing, so you employ a vague term you can define as needed to save face. But most importantly, Rubio is making one gigantic elision: the state of the vital commercial waterway, open when the U.S. and Israel launched this war, now throttled by Iran, which blocks ships flagged to the U.S. coalition. 

“One way or another,” after the war, Rubio hand-waved, the strait will be opened. “We’ll achieve those objectives in weeks, not months, and then we’ll be confronted with this issue of the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “And it’ll be up to Iran to decide. And if they choose to try to block the strait, then they will have to face real consequences. Not just from the United States, but from regional countries, and from the world.” 

It’ll be up to Iran to decide is the only accurate thing Rubio said. Here we have the foreign minister of a belligerent power—the regnant superpower, no less—insisting that if the U.S. ceases fighting with the Strait of Hormuz closed, it’s still victory by the original terms the U.S. set out, no matter how thoroughly Iran has obviated those terms. Rubio has no choice but to persist with this absurdity, since otherwise he’ll contradict Trump, the only fireable offense he could commit. Whether or not Rubio believes what he’s saying, what he’s describing is a situation in which the U.S. quits the war, leaving other combatants—the sort that never manifest and would certainly never manifest within range of Iranian missiles— to impose “real consequences” on Iran. That’s not just a lost war. That’s a humiliation.

It’s not the first time we’ve lost a war but it’s certainly the first time we didn’t even have a real reason for starting it — well, other than the president is a delusional megalomaniac who thought it would be a cakewalk and blew up the middle east instead. What a horrific decision and what a predictable outcome.

This is an excerpt of a piece by John Ganz called “The Juggler”

Everything he writes is incredible.That he also sees the Trump dynamic in this way reassures me. Trump does think he is a rare genius, a great historical figure, blessed by God, perhaps gifted with magical powers. Many of his followers obviously agree. Nothing could be more dangerous.

I highly recommend that you subscribe to Unpopular Front if you have the means. It’s inspirational.

This is so bizarre and inappropriate that no other president would have even considered it. But it’s just another Trump atrocity hardly worth mentioning:

The Justice Department is struggling to decide how to respond to President Trump’s lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion from the I.R.S., as the department’s lawyers try to resolve by a mid-April deadline the profound ethical questions the case raises, according to two people familiar with the dynamic.

In late January, Mr. Trump took the extraordinary step of suing a federal agency that he oversees, accusing the I.R.S. of not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020. The suit immediately elicited questions about whether and how Trump administration officials would defend against a lawsuit filed by the head of the executive branch. The government has not yet responded to the case.

[…]

While former Justice Department officials see clear flaws in the president’s case, some Trump administration officials worry that assigning a lawyer to contest it would pose an unworkable conflict, given that such a person ultimately works for the president, according to the two people. Defending the case could also contradict a White House executive order that binds all government lawyers to the president’s interpretation of the law.

Another option under consideration is to try to delay the case, either by requesting more time to respond to the suit or by asking the judge to put it on hold until after Mr. Trump leaves office in 2029. Mr. Trump’s lawyers served the government with the suit on Feb. 18, giving the Justice Department 60 days to respond.

The Justice Department could also ask the judge in the Southern District of Florida presiding over the case, Kathleen M. Williams, an Obama nominee, to take other action to resolve the conflict of interest faced by the government’s attorneys, the people said. The judge could appoint an independent counsel to defend the case instead of the Justice Department, for example.

Settling the case would involve some of the president’s top aides, including one of his own former defense lawyers, approving a potentially gigantic disbursement of taxpayer dollars to Mr. Trump and his family, a possibility that is likely to provoke political blowback. Regardless, Trump administration officials expect that they will ultimately have to consult Mr. Trump himself on how the government should respond to his lawsuit, the people said.

Political blowback? Maybe. But It’s just as likely his cult will say he deserves it and we’ll all wring our hands about polarization and that will be that.

He says he will give he money to charity as if that somehow makes it ok to abuse his power to steal money from the taxpayers so he can make a point. And we can only imagine what “charity” he plans to give the money to. The ballroom? The Trump Presidential Library/hotel?