It has been some week and it’s only going to get stranger from here on out. We had the surprise of the first American Pope. Poland got its first Pope in 1978 when it was in political chaos and perhaps the first American Pope in 2025, when the U.S. is in chaos, happened for similar reasons. Historians are already drawing parallels. And we saw Jeanine Pirro become the next Pete Hegseth, and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. push a non doctor for Surgeon General, while Trump lashed out inexplicably and fired the Librarian of Congress. (What could she have possibly done?) Friday night is traditionally a controversial news dump time but if Trump can top himself this week, I will be intrigued to see how. Meanwhile, adding a bit of comic relief to all this is Kakistocracy Karoline.
No person in the history of the US has made more money off being president and running for president. It’s not even close. Trump testified in his NY deposition that the value of “his brand” went from $3B to $10B the day he got elected in 2016. That was BEFORE most of his grifts. https://t.co/3yqIYUmlDe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 9, 2025
What is tragic here is how the press corps just sits there like dumb beasts of the field. They’re afraid to open their mouths and counter what Leavitt says, which is so easy to do. All anybody needs to say is how much money the $Trump and $Melania bitcoins have made. That is clearly Trump acting in his own interest. Or mention Melania’s $40M Amazon Studios documentary. What, that is meant as a public service? It’s a blessing that First Lady is not a paid position because if it was, then we’d have two deadbeats defrauding the government by not showing up and doing their jobs.
Leavitt is in the catbird seat because she knows that she can say basically anything from the podium and it will go unchallenged. And so she does her North Korean anchor persona, knowing full well that there will be zero blowback.
Maybe after Trump is gone there can be some legislation that prevents banning reporters from the White House. The fear factor needs to be removed. It would be good to think that there is some silver lining to all this and that a post-Trump world can be a saner, more fair one.
Nobody saw fit in a pre-Trump world to punish the press for things like what they put in their own style books — but that is exactly what happened to the Associated Press when it didn’t immediately co-sign on Trump’s Gulf of America lunacy. The press corps functioned very well in a pre-Trump world because it was a land of ladies and gentlemen’s agreements. Trump can’t function in that kind of a scenario because he’s a tyrant. He can only function in a one-way street modality where he’s calling all the shots.
The only rational way to address this is legislatively, so that the press corps can operate within the full protection of the First Amendment and not have to be cowed by a bully. As resentful of the press as Richard Nixon was, he never dared to attempt what Trump does on his least vengeful day. Nixon knew where the lines were drawn, more or less, and when he crossed them he did so deliberately. Trump doesn’t know that lines of decorum even exist.
