Author: rosenjoe1@hotmail.com

The uncoordinated, mish-mash, change-when-the-wind-blows “policies” of the Trump administration are — to put it simply — the products of an ignorant, demented mind.  Here’s a roundup of today’s foolishness from the Trump Reich.

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President Donald Trump said he will consider pardoning the men convicted in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president said he plans to look at the cases of the four men who were either convicted or pleaded guilty on various federal charges stemming from the 2020 plot to kidnap the governor. Trump, when asked about potential pardons by a pool reporter, stated he believes the men were “railroaded.”

“I will take a look at it,” Trump said. “It’s been brought to my attention. I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job, I’ll be honest with you. It looked to me like some people said some stupid things, you know? They were drinking, and I think they said stupid things. But I’ll take a look at that, and a lot of people are asking me that question — from both sides, actually. A lot of people think they got railroaded. A lot of people think they got railroaded. And probably some people don’t.”

On a podcast last week, Ed Martin — who is now the DOJ’s pardon attorney after having his nomination withdrawn to be the lead U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — said he plans to take a “hard look” at pardons for the men. “We can’t leave these guys behind,” Martin told far-right podcaster Breanna Morello. He added, “In my opinion, these are victims just like January 6.”

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US court blocks Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs

Source: Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. federal court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs from going into effect, ruling that the president overstepped his authority by imposing across-the-board duties on imports from nations that sell more to the United States than they buy.

The Manhattan-based Court of International Trade said the U.S. Constitution gives the U.S. Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other countries that are not trumped by the president’s emergency powers to safeguard the U.S. economy.

The lawsuit, filed by the nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center on behalf of five small U.S. businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the duties, was the first major legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs.

The companies – which range from a New York wine and spirits importer to a Virginia-based maker of educational kits and musical instruments – have said the tariffs will hurt their ability to do business.

The lawsuit is one of seven court challenges to Trump’s tariff policies, along with challenges from 13 U.S. states and other groups of small businesses.

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Trump claims he is attacking Harvard to help American kids get into Harvard.  He’s lying as usual.

President Donald Trump has mostly justified his lawless attempt to restrict international students from attending Harvard University by pretending it’s designed to root out the antisemites, woke radicals, and dangerous terrorists supposedly nesting in their ranks. Now, however, Trump has a new rationale: It’s all about helping young, aspiring Americans, particularly those in the working class. “We have Americans who want to go there and to other places,” Trump told reporters over the weekend, adding angrily that many of Harvard’s international students are “bad” and are taking Americans’ slots: “They can’t go there because you have 31 percent foreign.”
Trump then tweeted:

Yeah, OK. If Trump really wants to facilitate the upward mobility of America’s working-class youth, here’s a better way to do it: Persuade his fellow Republicans in the House to drop their new budget’s changes to financial aid for higher education, which will restrict access to it for large numbers of working-class students, including many who want to attend—yup—trade schools.

At this point, there’s no need to pretend there’s a genuine public-interest rationale at work here. Everyone knows it’s all about getting universities to surrender to flatter Trump, or about executing a broader hostile MAGA takeover of liberal institutions. For instance, in an article reporting that Trump is now nixing Harvard’s federal contracts on top of canceling billions in grants, The New York Times notes almost in passing that Trump wants to bring Harvard “to its knees,” as if this is unremarkable, when it should be depicted as the power-crazed ravings of a Mad King.

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Fed minutes show rising unemployment, stagflationary risks

Source: The Hill

05/28/25 5:04 PM ET

Minutes from the May meeting of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate-setting committee show stagflationary risk to the economy as a result of new White House trade policies and higher projections for unemployment through the next couple of years.

Fed bankers weighed in with their outlook for the economy in the middle of Trump’s tariff blitz, prior to the trade truce with China earlier this month that paused mutually imposed triple-digit tariffs.

Officials felt that “the labor market was expected to weaken substantially, with the unemployment rate forecast moving above the staff’s estimate of its natural rate by the end of this year and remaining above the natural rate through 2027.”

The Fed projected in March an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent for 2025 and of 4.3 percent for 2026 and 2027. The May minutes suggest those numbers will be higher. Inflation projections were higher and growth projections lower than the ones put out in the March SEP. Inflation was expected to hit a 2.7 percent annual increase this year, and growth was forecast to be 1.7 percent.

Read more: https://thehill.com/business/5322348-fed-minutes-show-rising-unemployment-stagflationary-risks/

 

 

 

 

 

As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.

Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.

Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.

Mr. Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for Mr. Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees’ taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.

Still, weeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.

Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon for her.

It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.

Below are links to several clips from Trump’s May 25, 2025, commencement address at USMA.  This is painful to watch — not for Trump, who has no shame and who does not recognize his own dementia — but for what it must have meant to the USMA graduates and families assembled.  They rarely applauded him and when they did it was weak.  Unlike previous Presidents, Trump departed after his speech and did not stay to shake hands with the graduates.  Trump is deep into dementia.  Will the nation survive the remaining almost four years in his term, or, will he die in office, or, will his dementia become some deep that Congress will enforce the 25th Amendment?

 

 

Trump Unleashes Bizarre Commencement Speech at West Point

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-gives-rambling-speech-trophy-171502635.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— Trump creates another pump-and-dump opportunity for the billionaires in his cabinet and people close to him (including his kids). It’s pretty well documented that just before many of Trump’s market-killing tariff announcements people around him take profits by dumping their stocks when the market’s at a high, then buy back in when it hits bottom, typically the day before he backs off and the market rebounds. Yesterday, he did it again, this time threatening to impose a 50% tariff on goods exported from the European Union starting on June 1st. (Remember, he’s doing this entirely outside of the law and the Constitution itself, which gives the SOLE power to impose tariffs on Congress: he’s claiming “emergency” powers, but there hasn’t been an economic emergency in America since the last time he was president and he screwed up the response to Covid so badly that the market crashed worse than in 1929 and a half-million Americans died unnecessarily.) This follows the EU this week imposing substantial sanctions targeting 130 individuals and entities tied to Russia’s “shadow oil fleet” that’s been evading sanctions. Some Europeans are pretty sure Trump’s tariff “attack” on them is “payback” on behalf of Putin. And he keeps repeating the entirely false anti-EU talking point that Putin has repeatedly shared with him, saying this week: “The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States…” For the record, the EU was created to prevent another war in Europe after two of them in the past century. It’s a safe bet that once the Trump family and friends are safely bought back into the cratered stock market he’ll come up with some minor “win” with the EU that’ll let him back off this threat, just like he did with China, so the market will rebound and Trump’s insiders will buy back in. It bears repeating: This is the most criminally corrupt administration in the history of America.

— Well, so much for the lie that tax cuts for billionaires — including this $4 trillion one Republicans tried to pass in the dead of night — don’t do a damn thing for the economy other than running up the debt that we and our kids will have to pay off. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) is “a nonpartisan committee of the United States Congress, originally established under the Revenue Act of 1926. The Joint Committee operates with an experienced professional staff of Ph.D economists, attorneys, and accountants, who assist Members of the majority and minority parties in both houses of Congress on tax legislation.” The JCT just issued their detailed analysis of the GOP’s massive tax scam/gift-to-the-morbidly-rich and concluded that it’ll produce an increase in annual growth of 0.03%, an amount so small as to be meaningless. It will, however, ensure Republican politicians that the roughly 100 American billionaires who poured fully $2.6 billion into the 2024 election will show up in 2026 and 2028 to keep the gravy train rolling.

— “The orgy of corruption…” Most Americans have no idea what a “meme coin” is, but Trump sure knows. A few years ago he ridiculed them and called them a “scam,” noting that they have no value and are simply little digital pictures that are uniquely numbered on a blockchain. And he was right: they are not a form of cryptocurrency or any other type of money. They’re just little digital pictures that look like a photo of a coin that Trump says people can “collect.” And every time the $TRUMP or $MELANIA meme “coins” are bought or sold Donald and Melania make out like bandits: so far it appears they’ve made over a billion dollars selling these little pictures. Thursday night, Trump hosted the top 220 purchasers (who spent $148 million to buy his pictures) to a budget dinner (one attendee described it as the “worst food I’ve ever had”) at one of his tacky golf motels, and — in a clear and illegal selling of access — yesterday gave the top 20 purchasers a personal tour of the White House. It’s a damn profitable scam: CNBC reports that just 58 “wallets” (presumably including Trump, Melania, and those close to them) made over $1.1 billion in profits on the sale of the “coins,” while 764,000 “wallets” (presumably belonging to average Trump voters) lost money. This was not a campaign fundraiser: that money goes straight into Trump’s bank accounts. As Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, “Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about. We are here today to talk about exactly one topic: corruption, corruption in its ugliest form. Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor and is willing to pay for it exactly how to do that.”

— Trump amplifies his authoritarian attacks on media he doesn’t approve of, spitting on the graves of the Founders and Framers who wrote the First Amendment’s protection of the press and free speech into the Constitution. The progressive group Media Matters for America has been aggressive in notifying advertisers on Musk’s Xitter platform when their promos appear next to Nazi and other hateful content, and Musk and Trump are fighting back. This week the group was informed that the Federal Trade Commission is demanding that they turn over a massive trove of emails, text messages, and other communications the FTC suggests may contain proof of a “conspiracy” to hurt Musk’s company. Musk’s multiple lawsuits against the organization have led to budget cuts and layoffs, but Media Matters insist they’re not giving up because their fight is on behalf of the rights of a free and independent press. The group’s president, Angelo Carusone, issued a statement saying that the Trump administration has been “defined by naming right-wing media figures to key posts and abusing the power of the federal government to bully political opponents and silence critics. It’s clear that’s exactly what’s happening here, given Media Matters’ history of holding those same figures to account. These threats won’t work; we remain steadfast to our mission.” If Trump really is committed to going down the trail Putin and Orbán blazed and destroying any “opposition” media, this is probably just the beginning. Buckle up.

— Taking America back to 1950. The Trump administration is reviewing Confederate monuments for replacement, unraveling LBJ’s civil rights legacy, purging the government (and ordering purges across private business) of diversity efforts, undoing police reform efforts, and evicting brown- and black-skinned immigrants while opening the door to white-skinned ones. It all adds up to a major shift in the steady progress America’s made on racial issues since the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954 first ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, notes Axios, adding that, “Open racism, antisemitism, and white nationalism have flourished online” in this new environment. Nonetheless, people of good will and civil rights organizations are hopeful that this is a mere blip in the racial history of this country. As NAACP president Derrick Johnson told the publication, “Progress isn’t a straight line. It swings like a pendulum.” We can hardly wait for it to swing back toward tolerance and love.