| Nov 1, 2025, 8:04 PM (18 hours ago) | |||
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Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump's celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration. But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them. Although two federal judges yesterday found that the administration's refusal to use reserves Congress provided to fund SNAP in an emergency was likely illegal and one ordered the government to use that money, the administration did not immediately do as the judge ordered. Trump posted on social media that "[o]ur Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP," so he has "instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible." Blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, Trump added that "even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out." His post provided the phone number for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's office, telling people: "If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW!" "They were careless people," Fitzgerald wrote, "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." This afternoon, Ellen Nakashima and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported that the administration is claiming it does not have to consult Congress to continue its attacks on Venezuela. The 1973 War Powers Act says it does. In 1973, after President Richard M. Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution to reassert its power over foreign wars. "It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations," it read. The law requires a president to notify Congress in writing within 48 hours of the start of hostilities, including the legal grounds for those hostilities, the circumstances that caused them, and an estimate of their scope and duration. The law requires the president to get the approval of Congress for any hostilities lasting more than 60 days. On September 4, 2025, Trump notified Congress of a strike against a vessel in the Caribbean that he said "was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities." The letter added: "I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution." Monday will mark 60 days from that announcement, but the administration does not appear to be planning to ask for Congress's approval. It has been reluctant to share information about the strikes, first excluding senior Senate Democrats from a Senate briefing, then offering House members a briefing that did not include lawyers and failed to answer basic questions. The top two leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jack Reed (D-RI), have both said the administration has not produced documents, attack orders, and a list of targets required by law. Representative Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Nakashima and Robertson: "The administration is, I believe, doing an illegal act and anything that it can to avoid Congress." T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the Office of Legal Counsel under Trump, told a group of lawmakers this week that the administration is taking the position that the strikes on unnamed people in small boats do not meet the definition of hostilities because they are not putting U.S. military personnel in harm's way. It says the strikes, which have killed more than 60 people, have been conducted primarily by drones launched off naval vessels. Brian Finucane, who was the War Powers Resolution lawyer at the State Department under President Barack Obama and during Trump's first term, explained: "What they're saying is anytime the president uses drones or any standoff weapon against someone who cannot shoot back, it's not hostilities. It's a wild claim of executive authority." If the administration proceeds without acknowledging the Monday deadline for congressional approval, Finucane said, "it is usurping Congress's authority over the use of military force." |
| Nov 1, 2025, 6:51 PM (19 hours ago) | |||
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Wag the Dog, Fetch the JetHow Kash Patel turned a taxpayer-funded love story into a national-security press stunt—and proved Kyle Seraphin right in record time.
If you were writing this as fiction, your editor would send it back with a note: "Too on the nose. Tone it down." But no, this is real life under the Trump restoration, where the FBI director moonlights as a tabloid protagonist and "national security" has been reimagined as a PR stunt with taxpayer-funded special effects. It began with an airplane. A $60 million FBI Gulfstream, to be precise, a jet intended for high-stakes counterintelligence operations that somehow found itself making repeat trips to Nashville, Tennessee, home of Kash Patel's 26-year-old country-singing girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins. Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin noticed the pattern: Penn State, Nashville, back again. Patel's girlfriend performing on stage; Patel's taxpayer-funded aircraft idling on the tarmac. He posted the data publicly. And just like that, poof, the FBI's flight tracker vanished from public access for the first time in its history. When the flight records surfaced, the internet did what it does best: it turned federal misconduct into a meme. Analysts joked that Wilkins must be an undercover agent, because really, who else would volunteer to spend that much time with Kash Patel? If she is a spy, she deserves the Medal of Valor for deep cover endurance. Wilkins fired back online, accusing Seraphin of "grifting" and "fake outrage." He responded like only a man who's paid his own rent could:
It was a crisp little morality play, until, like clockwork, CNN broke "exclusive" news of a foiled ISIS-inspired terror plot involving AK-47s, online chats, and something called Pumpkin Day. Timing so perfect you could hear the wag of the dog's tail from orbit. This wasn't intelligence work; it was improv theater. According to CNN's Ken Dilanian and the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig, senior DOJ and FBI officials were livid that Patel had gone public with an ongoing Michigan investigation, before a criminal complaint existed and before agents even confirmed what the plot actually was.
Seraphin had actually called his shot days earlier, writing that Patel would need to 'announce a big international arrest to distract from his optics disaster.' He even said it would come from an investigation that pre-dated Patel's tenure. Within hours, CNN delivered exactly that, a ready-made headline about a thwarted ISIS-inspired plot, complete with a 'Pumpkin Day' flourish so absurd it could've been storyboarded. Patel got his distraction; the Bureau lost its credibility. The suspects? A handful of online-extremist twenty-somethings radicalized in chatrooms. The threat level? Unclear. The damage? Immediate. As former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman told MeidasTouch:
In other words: Kash Patel, the man now wearing the FBI's badge, just compromised his own agency's case to change the conversation about his girlfriend and his jet. He didn't just wag the dog, he threw it off a cliff and claimed it was self-defense. Litman warns, this isn't an isolated blunder, but a pattern. Patel and Trump's inner circle have been systematically dismantling the FBI's credibility, gutting career leadership, outing confidential informants, and turning federal law enforcement into a cosplay franchise. Even Bill Barr, who spent four years defending the indefensible, reportedly said Patel's name would go forward "over my dead body." That's when you know you've crossed the event horizon. The real cost isn't Patel's jet fuel. It's the chilling effect on the agents still trying to do their jobs. Imagine spending twenty years cultivating a source inside a cartel or terror cell, only to have your director leak the operation on live TV because his flight log went viral. Imagine explaining to a dead informant's family that it was all for optics. We are, again, living inside the rerun, a government of stunts, a justice system of sycophants, and a national security policy driven by impulse control issues and the algorithm. Patel wanted to distract the press from his scandal. Instead, he spotlighted the rot: a regime so drunk on spectacle that even the FBI's sacred silence has been auctioned off for a headline. And perhaps that's the most fitting metaphor for Trump's America 2.0, a country run by men who think the world is their stage, the Constitution their prop, and the truth just something you can edit out in post. If this is what counts as national security now, the terrorists can take a long weekend. |
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