What You Forgot about While Trump Was Burning Down the Economy

….and your retirement account

As trump lurched about from incoherent tariffs to 90 day pauses, and his sycophantic “advisers” dissembled and lied under the influence of their own bewilderment and confusion you may have forgotten about…

His “national security” team posting attack plans on an open-source medium --

…against federal law and putting pilots at risk – then lied about it, despite including a journalist on the thread…ensuring the lies would be uncovered.

Trump fires 6 NSC officials at the behest of Looney Laura Loomer, a conspiracist who has called the Sept. 11 attacks an “inside job.”

No, REALLY.

“Always we’re letting go of people,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he made his way to Miami on Thursday afternoon. “People that we don’t like or people that we don’t think can do the job or people that may have loyalties to somebody else.” – Associated Press: Trump fires NSC officials a day after far-right activist raises concerns to him about staff loyalty

His Sec of Homeland Security posing in an Auschwitz-like scene

…after the admin defied a judge and sent men to a Salvadorean prison without due process.

…and then admitted that a young Maryland father was sent there because of “administrative error,”

and, oh, well, nothing we can do about it…to make an omelet you have to break some eggs….

“The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing that it had wrongly deported an immigrant living in Maryland to a mega-prison in El Salvador despite a judge’s ruling prohibiting it, but said U.S. officials are unable to return the man to his family in the United States.” -- WAPO

Subsequently a Maryland court ordered the admin to “effectuate” his return, an order that the admin appealed to the Supreme Court, which ordered trump to “facilitate” his return. Let’s watch how hard they try to achieve this – which you know takes a simple phone call to the prez of El Salvador. After all, El Salvador was paid $6 million to take these prisoners off our hands.

Student visas are being revoked by the thousands, and some snatched by trump’s gestapo for…

writing an op-ed supporting Palestinian rights.

A Turkish student detained by federal officers as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb is the latest supporter of Palestinian causes to be swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants who have expressed their political views.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was swiftly moved out of Massachusetts, a demonstration of how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is sending immigrants who are taken into custody to detention centers or deporting them altogether before a federal judge has a chance to weigh in on their case and possibly halt the actions. -- Tufts student from Turkey threatened with deportation, latest Palestinian supporter swept up in crackdown…

Read more here, First They Came for Columbia, here Johns Hopkins says U.S. revoked visas for about a dozen students, and here The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education.

The whitewashing of history and the figurative burning of books continues apace:

Jackie Robinson's Army history scrubbed from Department of Defense websites.

Also temporarily wiped off the DOD website…were pages saluting the World War II heroics of the Navajo code talkers and the Tuskegee Airmen. Gone.– SF Chronicle…

and… …381 Books Removed From the Naval Academy Library—

…The list also includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust, and “How to Be Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are “The Making of Black Lives Matter,” by Christopher J. Lebron; “How Racism Takes Place,” by George Lipsitz; “The Fire This Time,” edited by Jesmyn Ward; “The Myth of Equality,” by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.

Of course there’s more, but they’ll have to wait for my next post.

But here is a little humor (??) to close with…

Speaking of tatoos and gang membership, what about our SecDef

“I was deemed extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington, D.C .: - PETER HEGSETH

“…the specific tattoo he said he was dinged for is an image of the Jerusalem cross. So this looks like one large cross with four smaller crosses in the corners. It is a symbol of Christianity, and its origins date back to the Crusades. Hegseth also has another tattoo relating to the Crusades, of the words, deus vult - Latin for God wills it. And that was sort of the battle cry to take back the Holy Land and to slaughter Muslims. Now, Hegseth says these are not symbols of white nationalism - that they are symbols of Christianity. And he is very big on this notion of a modern-day American Christian crusade. You know, one of his books is titled, "American Crusade."

But it is important to know that symbols and language tied to the Crusades are very present in some extremist movements. You know, this was a symbol on display on January 6. It was contained in the writings of neo-Nazi mass-shooter who killed scores at a summer camp in Norway in 2011. And it could signal a deep antipathy toward Islam. - Odette Yousef, who is a National Security correspondent focusing on extremism, in an interview on NPR.