By Bob Gaydos

Jeanine Pirro … headed for the door?

   What in the world happened to Jeanine Pirro? Did she sober up? Come out of a blackout and realize she was pimping for Donald Trump and didn’t want the job?

    Odds are — literally — that she won’t be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia much longer. At least those are the betting odds on Kalshi, a prediction platform which is the way many people apparently now react to the news of the day. Not by expressing approval or disapproval of the news, but by betting on the outcome. Orwell was right.

     How you feel about the news really doesn’t matter, apparently, if you can make a few bucks guessing on which side of the bed Trump slept on last night. And the odds in Pirro’s case are that he didn’t sleep at all when she contradicted him on his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool story.

     In one of the more surprising challenges to Trump’s  view of everything going on around him, Pirro dismissed the case against a former U.S. Olympic athlete who had been charged with carving up the bottom of the no longer reflecting pool with a knife, supposedly causing significant damage. That’s what the court papers filed by Pirro originally said.

    But Pirro last week abruptly dismissed the felony vandalism charges against David Hearn, 67, saying that the damage to the newly renovated pool was caused by the contractor, a friend of Trump’s, who got the renovation contract with no bid. A $14.7 million restoration project to be specific.

    Pirro conceded in court that the damage had actually been done by a rush job by a contractor trying to get the work done for the Fourth of July celebration, not by vandals.

    In response to Pirro’s dropping the charges, Trump posted, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking?” (Yes, he put a question mark at the end of that declarative statement.)

   The reflecting pool, of course, has been one of Trump’s pet projects in his campaign to destroy virtually everything worth seeing in Washington, D.C. Also, of course, Trump does not react well to being contradicted in public, especially by someone who he has appointed to a job, and especially if she is a woman.

    That’s why the odds on Kalshi of Pirro announcing her resignation or being fired before Sept. 1 were at 97 percent Monday morning. The odds spiked 21 percentage points over 24 hours. There was a 94 percent chance, the site said, that Pirro is gone before January 1, 2027.

    None of this is surprising to me. What I am literally stunned about is that Pirro did it. That she dared to contradict Trump publicly in such a high-profile case. She tried to blame the Interior Department for her change of mind, saying they gave her incomplete information when she first filed the charges against Hearn. They stuck to the Trump story (and probably kept their jobs) and said she got all the information available.

     Maybe Pirro actually read all the news stories saying experts doubted that vandals could’ve done the extensive damage to the pool, but that the contractor rushed the job and used the wrong kind of paint. Maybe she knew from experience that the judge wasn’t going to buy her vandalism argument. Or maybe she didn’t like the bar scene in Washington anymore or she just found it too difficult to keep lying so publicly on a daily basis.

    Or, maybe she’s been offered a seat along with Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, in a cabal of former Trumpers sensing an opportunity to get out before the you-know-what hits the you-know-what. The onetime loyal MAGA trio is trying to form a populist third-party, breaking away from Trump, accusing him of “betraying“ his base.

    Where have I heard that before?

     I still like my coming out of a blackout theory.

By Bob Gaydos

 It’s all about connecting the dots. That’s what I eventually figured out early in my 23 years of writing daily editorials for The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y. Six times a week with a break on Saturday. What’s the issue, who’s involved, how does it affect readers and what, if anything, can they do about it. After a while, it became second nature.

     Long retired and, unfortunately, writing about two Trump administrations on my own deadlines, connecting the dots has been challenging. It’s more like following the ball in a pinball machine. Haphazard, slambang, unpredictable, without the fun. All followed by more of the same.

     But I think I’m starting to see some dots.

     Let’s start with Laura Loomer, Trump’s favorite and most avid crackpot fan. Responding to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that Qatar will be allowed to operate an Air Force Base in Idaho, Loomer said, “There isn’t a single Trump supporter who supports allowing Qatar to have a military base on U.S. soil. I don’t know who told President Trump this was a good idea, but it has made people not want to vote. … No foreign country should have a military base on US soil. Especially Islamic countries. … I don’t think I’ll be voting in 2026.” Loomer had previously disagreed with Trump’s accepting a $400 million airplane from Qatar as a gift.

       Next dot, Tucker Carlson. Trump’s favorite Fox News host, now an independent podcaster, took issue with comments made by Attorney General Pam Bondi following the killing of Charlie Kirk, a MAGA hero. In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, there was a flurry of commentary about him, much favorable (from MAGAs), but also a considerable amount that was critical of him. Bondi threatened that the Justice Department would “target” the critical ones, describing it as “hate speech.”

     Carlson, probably recognizing that his entire career depends on freedom of speech, said, “You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of [Kirk’s] murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever. Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think … There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”

        Dot number three (and probably the most unexpected), Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican congresswoman, part of an outspoken group that has driven a couple of speakers out of their jobs in the House of Representatives for not being loyal enough to Trump, has taken sharp issue with Trump, Bondi and House Speaker Mike Johnson over their refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files to Congress. Greene has gone so far as to volunteer to read any list of perpetrators’ names provided by Epstein victims on the floor of the House, since the law protects members of Congress from legal action for any comments made on the floor of Congress during debate.

       Greene also has criticized Johnson for keeping the House in recess while the government is shut down and refusing to swear in a newly elected congresswoman from Arizona, who would be the deciding vote requiring release of the Epstein files to Congress. Discarding the Republican talking points that the shutdown is the fault of Democrats, Greene also points to the fact that the budget presented by Republicans will cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and sharply raise the insurance rates for millions of others, including, as she points out, her own children.

      More dots: Trump mysteriously went to the Walter Reed Medical Center for his “annual“ check up, even though he had one In April, but no detailed report on his health was released. Just the usual, he’s OK, while rumors persist that he’s not and his daily public utterances are a word salad of self-praise and misinformation and obvious declining mental acuity. Other Republicans in the House, hearing complaints from their districts about losing health insurance, are privately grumbling over Johnson’s refusal to negotiate with Democrats on a budget. And Johnson, going straight from the Republican playbook, has taken to describing the coming No Kings protest as a “hate America rally.”

    Fear, panic, over-reaching and ignoring your supporters just to feather your nest and protect your own hide. The Trump playbook, but very poorly done. It was not a good week for Trump or MAGA. What would make it even worse, dear readers, would be for the No Kings protest to be the biggest pro-America rally ever.

    Dots all for now.