Trump announces ten billion dollar involuntary taxpayer donation to his Board of Piece

Of the action:

President Donald Trump‘s “Board of Peace” gathered in Washington on Thursday for its long-awaited first meeting, with the next stage of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza in focus.

It was an event teeming with “the greatest world leaders,” financial and troop pledges and promises of global conflicts settled, which he cast as a coda to his presidency.

The board would not only achieve peace in Gaza but also intervene in “hotspots” around the world, Trump said. “We will help Gaza,” the president said. “We will straighten it out. We will make it successful. We will make it peaceful. And we will do things like that in other spots.”

Its members would be able to “do things many other people couldn’t conceive or think of,” he added, calling this first meeting featuring representatives of at least 40 countries, including heads of state, “one of, if not the, most important day of our careers.”

The president also said $7 billion had been committed by board members for reconstruction in Gaza and announced a $10 billion commitment from the United States to the Board of Peace initiative, a sum he said was small compared to the cost of war.

“It’s two weeks of fighting,” he said. “Sounds like a lot, but it’s a very small number.”

Trump did not say where the $10 billion would come from and the White House did not respond to an inquiry from NBC News.

I assume Jared Kushner will be handling this transaction under the standard 2 and 20 hedge fund structure.

This is a pretty good summation of Trump’s first year, from voice of the centrist establishment Jeffrey Goldberg:

I understand that a review-even a short and partial review-of the past year might seem dismally repetitive. But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew.

So, in brief: Trump has dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime-illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

The presidential pardon power is one of those aspects of the constitutional system that’s only tenuously defensible if you assume the president isn’t simply a crook. At this point that horse is three counties over.