In 1981, President Ronald Reagan famously expressed his anger at his own budget director by metaphorically "taking him out to the woodshed." This week, you might say that Donald Trump took Kristi Noem "out to the gravel pit."

Sorry, but we just couldn't resist. Trump was finally forced to fire one of the members of his cabinet, and it just couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Which is also pure snark, of course, because Noem was one of the most odious members of Team Trump by far (which is saying a lot). She even got yelled at this week by a fellow Republican for the heartlessness of the story she included in the book she wrote about herself, where she took the family dog out to the gravel pit and shot him dead. For good measure, she also shot a goat. Because of "leadership," or something.

This week, Noem wasn't mercilessly killed in a gravel pit, she was instead metaphorically defenestrated. She had reportedly been on thin ice (thin ICE?) for a while with Trump, after the immense political blowback from federal immigration agents summarily executing American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis. This week saw Noem testifying before two congressional committees (one from each chamber), and although she put on a typical Mean Girls performance, it apparently wasn't enough for Trump.

Noem ripped into her questioners, as is now common with Trump cabinet officials (see: Pam Bondi, et al), but she apparently made a few mistakes. While being grilled by a fellow Republican (more than one of whom expressed their dissatisfaction with her doing her job during the hearings) about the $220 million in taxpayer money she spent creating "cosplay" ads -- of her in various costumes, role-playing her toughness -- Noem directly answered a question about whether Trump himself had approved such spending. She said he had. This is the cardinal sin in Trumpworld -- even hinting in any way that Donald Trump could possibly be to blame for anything -- and Trump was reportedly not amused. There may have been other things that set Trump off during her two days of testimony, but this was apparently the last straw for Trump.

So he announced he had created some made-up policy initiative and that Noem would serve in some made-up job title running it. Absolutely nobody was fooled by this -- Noem was fired, plain and simple. Trump announced she will be replaced by current Senator Markwayne Mullin, who makes bags of hammers and boxes of rocks look like Mensa members (to be blunt). Can't wait to see how he runs the Department of Homeland Security, but at least he won't be out there dressed as a cosplay cowboy or soldier (one assumes).

This was all the most enjoyable news of the week for Democrats (which we thought we would lead with today, just because). But the biggest news was not enjoyable at all, for anyone (or shouldn't have been, at any rate), as Donald Trump started a new war of choice with Iran last weekend. We have to say that the column we wrote last Friday predicted this, but we certainly weren't the only ones worried about Trump's new love for starting wars anywhere he feels like.

True to form, Trump not only decided to start a war completely on a whim (his own press secretary admitted he merely "had a feeling" Iran was about to attack us), but he's been making it up as he goes along (which has led to many cringeworthy statements from him, as he flounders to comprehend what he has unleashed). The rationale for going to war shifts every time Trump is asked about it. Trump is not exactly instilling confidence in the American people, to put it mildly. Instead, he is instilling incoherence.

The White House even laughably sent talking points out to Republicans in Congress instructing them all not to call it a "war." This is the same administration who has unilaterally tried to change the name of the Defense Department back to the Department of War, it is worth mentioning. Both Trump and Pete Hegseth proudly used the word "war" on a daily basis this week, but somehow other Republicans were supposed to tie themselves in Orwellian knots to avoid using the word. It was all reminiscent of Vladimir Putin, at the start of his illegal invasion of Ukraine, insisting that nobody in his government call it a "war."

There simply is no "endgame plan" at all. Trump apparently expected the Iranian people to somehow rise up and overthrow their government within days, which did not happen (not even slightly). Then he flirted with arming the Iranian Kurds, which would start a civil war within the country that could lead to it splitting into several countries. The direct costs to the American public of waging this war are increasing by the day (estimates now range from $1 billion per day to $2 billion), but Trump's Fantasyland view of the war still does not include what is supposed to happen to end it (or what the country will look like afterwards).

Meanwhile, the indirect costs of the war are hitting hard, as the price of gasoline is already through the roof. Trump simply doesn't care. He's not even shy about saying things like: "I don't have any concern about it," and: "if [gas prices] rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit."

The national average of a price of a gallon of gasoline at the pumps has risen -- in one week -- from $2.94 to $3.40. And you have to refresh your browser when checking the sites that track such prices, because it just keeps going up on an hourly basis (when we started writing this article, the price was $3.35, which rose to $3.37, and then to $3.40 -- but it still may have not hit its highpoint even for today). After Week One of the war, prices at the pump here at home have already risen a whopping 46 cents per gallon, and they show no sign of peaking any time soon. If your car is getting low on gas, it'd be a smart thing to go fill it up now, because by tomorrow it'll probably cost a lot more. To say nothing of next week.

The stock markets are down too, and they fell even further when today's jobs report showed America had lost almost 100,000 jobs last month alone. So it is no surprise to find out that the American public does not support this war at all -- which isn't too surprising when you consider that Trump isn't even interested in attempting to make the case for it.

Pete Hegseth and the White House even had the gall to complain that the media was covering the six American soldiers who have so far died in this war. Seriously? Dead American soldiers are just supposed to be ignored by the media? So much for all that vaunted Republican "support for the troops," eh?

Even Trump's MAGA base is divided over this war. It has brought to a boil the simmering disagreements within the movement over whether we should support the current government of Israel or not. Some MAGA influencers (Tucker Carlson, most notably) are denouncing the war as a betrayal of all the "America first" promises Trump made. Others are falling in line with whatever their Dear Leader says. Trump seems to be getting a little testy about this divide in his base, but there's not much he can do about it at this point (as we said, this core disagreement has been simmering for quite a while now).

Nobody has any clue what all of this means politically, beyond the obvious observation that Trump and the Republicans are almost certainly going to get less popular the longer gas prices stay elevated. Which may not bode very well for them in the midterms. Even before Trump's war of choice was launched, Republicans were facing some stiff political headwinds with the economy, and recently (since about November), gas prices had been one bright spot in all the other economic struggles average families face. That is not going to be true any more.

There was one other big political story this week, as the midterm primary season kicked off in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas. But we've been writing about it (the Texas Senate race, for the most part) all week long, so we're only going to mention it in passing here before we move along to this week's awards.

The most amusing outcome from the Texas Senate primary is the angst it is now causing among the MAGA base. Their preferred candidate, Ken Paxton, came up short in his run to dethrone sitting Senator John Cornyn, but the story's not over yet. Due to a third candidate on the ballot, neither Paxton nor Cornyn managed to get over 50 percent of the vote, so they'll face each other again in 12 weeks in a runoff.

Donald Trump decided to horn in on the contest and told the two candidates that he would be endorsing one of them soon, and that he expected the other to gracefully withdraw from the race. But Paxton immediately rejected this idea, which is pushing Trump towards endorsing Cornyn -- which he really doesn't want to do (since Paxton is much more MAGA-ey than Cornyn). This schism within the Republican base might even mean the Democratic candidate has a healthy shot of winning (and finally making the impossible dream of "turning Texas blue" at least a semi-reality), so it'll all be lots of fun to watch play out over the next few months.

But as we said, we've spent a lot of time writing about all of that already this week, so let's just move along, shall we?

 

We have no idea who was behind the idea, but we have to say we were amused to hear of the "Jeffrey Epstein Walk Of Shame" which spontaneously popped up on the sidewalks of Washington this week:

A number of Donald Trump's allies have been recognized on the "Jeffrey Epstein Walk of Shame," a pop-up display in the nation's capital highlighting ties between prominent figures and the late convicted sex offender.

The display, which MS NOW's Emily Hung flagged just a short walk from the White House on Sunday, includes "Hollywood Walk of Fame"-like stars in the form of stickers on the sidewalk in Washington, D.C.'s Farragut Square.

The stickers include QR codes that, when scanned, link to articles on a person's connection to Epstein or to documents from the Justice Department's library of files on the late convicted sex offender, Hung noted.

Prominent names were featured, including: Larry Summers, Howard Lutnick, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Formerly-Known-As-Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton.

We have to say, we're a big fan in general of guerrilla art, and this seemed more effective than most, so we have to give at least an Honorable Mention to whomever came up with the idea. Well done!

We also have to give an Honorable Mention to James Talarico, who defeated progressive firebrand Jasmine Crockett in this week's Democratic primary in the Senate race in Texas. Talarico, however, probably has a better chance of actually being competitive against whichever Republican (Paxton or Cornyn) who winds up with the nomination, so he at least deserves recognition here in the awards this week.

But we're going to give the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week to Senator Chris Van Hollen, who may be contemplating a 2028 presidential run. We say this because of the bill he announced this week, which would revamp the income tax system in a major way and reverse the way Republicans have been cutting taxes for decades. Instead of slashing taxes for those at the top, Van Hollen wants to raise their taxes and completely eliminate income taxes for most people at the bottom. Here's his plan in a nutshell:

Under [Senator Chris] Van Hollen's proposal, workers making at or below a "living wage" -- $46,000 for taxpayers filing individually, or $92,000 for married couples filing jointly -- would not have to pay federal income taxes. Tens of millions of additional middle-class workers would also receive a tax cut under the proposal, but they would still have to pay taxes. The measure would be paid for by a new surcharge on millionaires that would raise roughly $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

Fifteen Senate Democrats are co-sponsoring Van Hollen's proposal, though it has no chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Congress. The number of tax filers with no federal income tax would increase from 37 million under current law to 66 million under Van Hollen's proposal, according to Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.

"This bill, in addition to being the right policy, sends a very strong message that we stand for working people who are sweating every day to make ends meet. That's a group of Americans that Donald Trump somehow appealed to," the senator said in an interview.

This is an incredibly fresh new idea. And it's a good one. Rather than the usual "bait and switch" of Republican tax cuts, which always promise big cuts for all but only ever seem to deliver them for the wealthiest of the wealthy, this would produce tangible benefits for tens of millions of American taxpayers, in one fell swoop.

This wouldn't be just tinkering around the edges of the tax code. It would be a huge change that would be incredibly easy for people to understand. Single? Your first $46,000 of income is tax-free. Married? No income tax on your first $92,000.

Donald Trump sold the snake oil of fake populism, but this would be some real economic populism. It would be a big change for the better, for tens of millions of people.

Of course, as the article says, it has virtually no chance of becoming law any time soon. Even if Democrats have a stellar midterm and retake both houses of Congress, it's highly doubtful that Trump would go along with such a scheme. It would probably require a Democrat in the White House to actually enact.

Chris Van Hollen knows all that, and if he can use such an idea to ride all the way to the White House himself, well... more power to him. Democrats need to think big when proposing a new agenda, and this certainly fits the bill. So for introducing such a sweeping rewrite of the nation's income tax system, Van Hollen is our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week.

[Congratulate Senator Chris Van Hollen on his Senate contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

 

Jasmine Crockett's loss in the Texas primary for U.S. Senate certainly disappointed a lot of Democrats, who would have preferred a feisty Democratic candidate rather than one who preaches the politics of love. But we have a much better candidate for this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award.

Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, has been under a lot of pressure from Donald Trump for a while now. Trump, apparently unaware of how such things work, tried to pardon one of his election-denying followers who was convicted of state crimes in Colorado and sentenced to jail (where she now sits). But the only person who can pardon such crimes is the state's governor, of course.

Polis is now hinting that he might at least commute the prison term, although he hasn't gone as far as suggesting a full pardon yet. But the news was not exactly welcomed by other Democrats in the state. Here's the basic story:

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado offered the clearest signal yet late on Tuesday that he might commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the last high-profile Trump ally still in prison for crimes stemming from President Trump's 2020 election loss.

Mr. Trump has waged an all-out assault on Colorado while pressuring Mr. Polis, a Democrat, to free Ms. Peters. He has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, promised to shutter a federal atmospheric research center in Boulder and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado.

Commuting Ms. Peters's sentence now might appease Mr. Trump and stop those attacks, but it would set off a furious backlash among Democrats and imperil Mr. Polis's political future. Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Colorado have spent months urging the governor to resist the pressure from Mr. Trump.

And here's some of the Democratic reaction to the news:

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis' latest comments about the prison sentence of Tina Peters are "worrisome," his Democratic colleagues said, and any attempt to commute the former Mesa County clerk's prison sentence would be "a big mistake" as well as a "gross injustice."

Colorado Democrats, as well as the Republican district attorney who prosecuted Peters, issued a flood of statements in response to Polis' latest musings. That included the top Democrats vying to replace the term-limited governor, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser.

"Tina Peters knowingly broke the law, undermined our elections, and was rightfully convicted by a jury of her peers," Bennet said. "At a moment like this, we can't capitulate to a lawless Administration."

Weiser, whose office helped prosecute Peters, securing her conviction on seven counts, said: "Reducing the sentence of convicted former clerk Tina Peters for tampering with election equipment would be a grave miscarriage of justice and dangerous for free and fair elections."

As of this writing, Polis hasn't actually done anything yet. But even for floating this trial balloon, he still gets this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week. He can try to explain it away however he wants, but if he follows through he will be seen by Democrats everywhere as knuckling under to Donald Trump's bullying. Right now, when Trump is politically weak, that would send exactly the wrong signal.

[Contact Colorado Governor Jared Polis on his official contact page, to let him know what you think of his actions.]

 

Volume 831 (3/6/26)

Once again we are pre-empting our discrete talking points to deliver up a rant. This is a rant designed for Democrats to use, because it is designed to be a convincing argument for midterm campaigning. Democrats need to point out not just that Trump attacking Iran was a monumentally stupid idea, but why. They need to point out how we are all going to pay for this misadventure, and not just through our tax dollars being misspent on it.

Bring it home. Make the connections. And lay the blame where it belongs.

 

The costs of Trump's war of choice are being paid by all of us

This is going to be a very costly war. In fact, Americans are already paying for Donald Trump's reckless war of choice in Iran. We're paying something like one or two billion dollars a day in direct military costs, financed by our tax dollars, but these aren't even the most visible costs to Americans.

Have you been to the gas station, since the war began?

Since the start of this year, the average national price of gasoline has risen an astonishing sixty-five cents per gallon -- and it keeps going up, day after day, as the war continues. And we've only been at war for a single week. So where will the price of gas be next week? Or next month? Your guess is as good as mine, but the safe bet is to just say: "a lot higher than it is now."

When asked about the price of gasoline this week, you know what Donald Trump had to say? "I don't have any concern about it." There you go, folks. He does not care about you, period. Here's what else he had to say about gasoline prices: "If they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit." He added that costs "haven't risen very much."

Think about that, the next time you gas your car up.

The national average price of gas now stands at $3.40 per gallon. It was $2.94 right before Trump started this war, and as low as $2.75 back in January. But Trump doesn't care. These are the highest gas prices of Trump's second term, but to him it's no big deal.

Since his second term began, Trump has just flat-out lied about gas prices. He told America only months after he took office that the price of gas had magically fallen to $1.99 a gallon, even though that was not remotely true anywhere in the country. He kept telling this lie over and over again, in the hopes that people would believe it. But as prices at the pump continue to skyrocket, now he just shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn't care.

Oil is now trading at over $90 per barrel -- the highest price in years -- and it hasn't peaked yet. It just keeps going up. Jet fuel is already up 58 percent since the war started, and airfares will be rising soon to reflect this. Natural gas prices are up, which is going to make electricity and home heating more expensive Diesel fuel has risen even faster than gasoline, which is going to raise trucking costs for everyone. Inflation is going to head upwards too, since all products are affected by transportation costs one way or another.

So my question now to all those people who voted for Donald Trump would be: "Is this what you voted for? Do you really want to pay a lot more for gasoline just so Trump can pretend to be a tough guy and wage a pointless war that nobody wanted?" How many people -- other than oil company executives -- have been thinking to themselves: "Hey, you know what would be great? If the price of gas spiked up 65 cents a gallon! That would surely make America great again!" Personally, I don't know anyone who has been thinking that.

Trump keeps boasting that the American economy is now doing great -- he calls it "the best ever!" You know what I say to him? Words are cheap, but groceries are not. Prices have not come down, even though Trump promised time and time again that they would -- starting on "Day One." Well, it's been more than a year now, and we're still waiting. Inflation is still bad and it's about to get a lot worse.

The Supreme Court even helpfully provided an offramp for Trump to back down on his tariffs, but he stubbornly refused to take it. Instead, he doubled down on his trade war. Tariffs are a tax on you, but Trump simply does not care. To him, "tariffs" is "his favorite word in the dictionary." Think about that when you shop for food, because you are the one paying those taxes -- while farm bankruptcies are up by 46 percent due to Trump's trade war. Not only did Trump not do anything at all to bring prices down, everything he's done has instead raised prices for you and your family. And he refuses to change course.

He says this is all to save American manufacturing jobs, but the numbers don't back him up. In fact, America has been steadily losing manufacturing jobs, ever since Trump took over. We lost 12,000 factory jobs just last month, in fact. So his big goal for all his tariffs has been a total failure.

Speaking of jobs, today we got yet another negative jobs report, showing America actually just lost almost 100,000 jobs in a single month. If you add up every single month in Trump's second term, you only get a net gain of 116,000 jobs. That's for over an entire year, folks. That's pathetic. Five of those months showed America losing jobs -- this month was just the latest. And yet Trump brags that the American economy is the best ever.

When Joe Biden was president, adding 116,000 jobs was just an average month for him. In some months, Biden saw double or even triple that number of new jobs added. Not during a period of "over a year," but just for a single month. In Biden's four years in office, he didn't have one single month where the country lost jobs. Not a single one. Trump has had five, so far.

But Trump doesn't care. He's much more concerned with what the drapes in his new ballroom will look like. Trump is building a ballroom for all his Epstein class buddies to party in, because that is what is important to him -- not you. Public comments on his ballroom ran 97 percent against the idea, but Trump simply does not care. So I ask again: "Is this what you voted for?"

Trump campaigned on the fact that he was going to be a man of peace. He denounced "forever wars" and swore that he would never start one on his watch. He claimed to want to bring about peace in the Middle East and swore that he would end all the wars on his first day in office. Well, it's been a year and the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows no signs of stopping. And now Trump has decided to spend billions upon billions of dollars in a new Middle East war, and he only offers up the vaguest of reasons why he started this new war. In fact, his reasons change pretty much every time he is asked about it. He simply has no clue why he started the war, what the objectives of the war should be, how long it will last, whether American troops will be necessary on the ground, or what the endgame should look like. Trump is completely clueless on all of those things.

Is this really what you voted for?

Marco Rubio let the cat out of the bag by admitting that America was dragged into this war because Bibi Netanyahu decided he was going to bomb an above-ground meeting of Iran's leaders. The aftermath of such a strike would have meant Iran attacking American military and civilian targets, so Trump just decided he better go along with Bibi and bomb Iran first. Is that really "America first"? Getting dragged into a war because leader of Israel forced us to back him up? I don't know about you, but I must have missed that part of Trump's campaign speeches when he was running for office.

Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawai'i, summed things up pretty well this week on social media. He posted: "This war is costing a billion dollars a day. In one fucking month we will spend more over there than we needed to save healthcare for more than 2 million Americans. They literally are taking away your food and your healthcare for this regime war of choice."

Those are the choices that Donald Trump and the Republican Party aiding and abetting him have made. So much for "America first" -- because they are happy to spend billions upon billions on a war nobody wanted which was launched for no defensible reason, rather than spend money here at home to help out the American people. Consider that as their Big, Ugly Bill causes more and more rural hospitals to close their doors. Consider that as millions of people are denied food assistance. Consider that as you see your medical insurance costs rise so high that you can't afford it anymore. These are all conscious choices that Trump and the Republicans made. They've got money to burn when it comes time to bombing some foreign country for no reason whatsoever, but they pinch pennies when it comes to helping out Americans.

I mean, seriously... is this really what you voted for?!?

-- Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground