By Bob Gaydos

Elise Stefanik … pondering her future

  Poor Elise Stefanik. She just got Trumpified out of the dream job of her young lifetime, the crowning glory if you will of all that scraping, bowing, butt-kissing, lying, conniving, scheming and surrendering of personal dignity required to become the Orange One’s nominee as Ambassador to the United Nations, and no one noticed because the rest of the Trump cabinet shared classified war plans on a private chat line that they are forbidden to use for such purposes and somehow managed to include a bonafide — as in ethical and trained — journalist on the chat, which has the Trump team all in distract, lie and point fingers mode because many average Americans can understand a breach of national security even when their Social Security office is closed and a lot of people want Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even though Trump said he was told no classified information was included in the unsecure chat of the bombing of Yemen’s Houthis, which, it being a warlike act, one might expect the chief executive to be in on the action, and the group was caught with their collective pants down when the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine, followed up his original story on being mysteriously included on the chat by publishing the entire thread since Trump said it wasn’t classified, although having the sense to redact the name of an undercover CIA agent that Tulsi Gabbard, director of intelligence, happened to drop into the chat, although she couldn’t remember much of anything when members of Congress asked her about it, which was reminiscent of Trump’s response when he couldn’t remember signing an order citing an old wartime act to justify shipping a couple of hundred migrants, who may or may not be members of a Venezuelan gang, to a brutal prison in El Salvador, despite the order of a federal judge not to do so, said judge now serendipitously being the one also assigned to a case in which a private watchdog group, American Oversight, is accusing the Trump Administration of breaking the law, because all intergovernmental communications are required to be preserved, while the beauty of the Signal chat app the war group used is that it eventually deletes all conversations, making it hard to be held accountable, which is why, of course, the aforesaid judge has ordered all members of the chat to preserve everything on their phones and as he is already ticked at being given the runaround by Trump’s lawyers on the deportation matter, was in no mood for any more nonsense on a serious national security issue, which is why hardly anybody knows that poor Elise Stefanik of upstate New York, who did a victory tour of the Adirondacks and fired most of her congressional staff to become part of Trump’s cabinet, is now being told to be patient, go back to Congress even though you’ve lost your leadership position, be a good soldier  and run again for Congress in two years, because we are afraid that we can lose your seat, even though you and Trump carried the district easily, if somebody new runs for the Republican Party, and we only have a couple of seats to spare to control the House of Representatives and heck, you understand it’s all politics, and if we lose control in two years, we can’t do any of the neat crap we’ve been doing — firing people, threatening Greenland — and then you’ll probably never get to be UN ambassador anyway, so please and thank you, Elise.

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PS: You think it’s easy covering these people?

By Bob Gaydos

The unmistakable Trump signature.

 “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it.”

   That was Donald Trump last Friday on the South Lawn of the White House as he left for another weekend of golfing.

   The “it” that he denied signing was a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act to round up and swiftly deport 261 migrants, men and women, his administration says are members of a violent gang from Venezuela. No warrants, no charges, no evidence, no hearings … off to a brutal prison in El Salvador.

    Trump had been asked about the proclamation because a federal judge had ordered the government to hold off on the deportation and provide some legal justification before proceeding, all of which had been ignored.

   District Judge James E. Boasberg asked why the proclamation was “essentially signed in the dark” so that flights could begin immediately. The judge was furious at being stonewalled in court by lawyers for the White House on when they received his orders and why they didn’t turn the planes around. Also, why this ancient law was resurrected as justification.

     So, a rare reporter doing his job asked the person who signed the proclamation when he signed it.

     Not me, said Trump, who holds the title of president and would customarily be the person to sign such an order.

   “Other people handled it,” Trump said. “But Marco Rubio’s done a great job. And he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

     Interestingly, Trump’s well-known signature does appear on the digital image of the proclamation available for viewing with the Federal Register. More directly to the point, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said Trump did actually, personally sign the proclamation.

     Cheung tried to deflect from his discrepancy with his boss by saying Trump meant he didn’t sign the actual proclamation, which was declared in 1798. No one was buying that baloney.

      So what’s going on here? There are several options. 

      Whether Trump actually signed the proclamation or not, at this point there is no satisfactory answer to that question.

      — Trump signed it and forgot. Hardly reassuring for someone occupying the Oval Office. Invoking a wartimes act to deport a couple of hundred people with no legal justification being presented is lawlessness personified. If he forgot, then there are legitimate questions about his mental capabilities. It’s the kind of thing he always accused Joe Biden of. Given Trump’s ramblings on other occasions, his mental capacity seems more than suspect. Someone in Congress should ask for a competency test.

  — He signed it and lied about it because of all the negative publicity arising from the judge’s growing anger over White House lawyers refusing to comply with his order. Trump passed the buck to Marco Rubio, just like he always passed the buck to Rudy Giuliani. Closest person always gets tossed under the bus. Trump never takes responsibility for unpopular actions. This is not good news for Rubio, who apparently agreed to trade his genitals and backbone for the title of secretary of state.

  — Cheung lied. An autopen was used to provide Trump’s signature, because staff members thought either he wouldn’t understand the ramifications, or would confuse the issue, or they just didn’t want to waste time to try to track Trump down to get a signature when the planes were on the runway. Or, they didn’t feel it was necessary to get his actual signature, just chalk the whole thing up, like all the other stuff, to the campaign. Page whatever. Getting rid of bad immigrants. He’ll be fine with that. Get the autopen! This is the one I suspect is true.

    —  Who’s in charge here?

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PS: No bullet ever touched his ear.