Mostly Monday Reads: The Chaos Journal

“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on!  It’s been a week of WTF moments.

Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?

President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.

The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.

In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.

The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia

As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit

According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.

We know someone who can sum this up nicely.  This is how Hillary put it this morning.

Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStack this morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)

Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.

Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.

Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.

The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.

In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:

“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.

As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering.  That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat.  The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.

Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup?  There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.

Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.

“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”

Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.

In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.

“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”

Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.

“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”

My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.”  It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.

Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.

He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.

He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.

He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.

He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.

He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.

He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.

To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”

Except that’s not entirely true.

What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.

I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.

I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.

Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.

With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.

But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.

The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.

Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.

An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:

• The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.

• The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.

• The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.

• The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.

The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.

If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”

“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.

There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”

Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.

We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”

The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”

Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”

Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”

Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.

So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”

It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country.  It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.

This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”

Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.

The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.

The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”

The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible.  “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?

The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.

To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.

Please use the link to read the details.  The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.