Week 69
By 
This week, Donald Trump went to China and was put in his place, which he thought meant getting a tour of the special gardens reserved only for very special people. Xi Jinping knew otherwise. How Trump was met at the airport (schoolchildren, not Xi), how the meeting was covered in the news (page 3), and Xi’s warning about Taiwan all conveyed a single message: that Trump is a patsy.
Trump colluded in this by effusively praising Xi and saying he wasn’t so sure about sending arms to Taiwan. His comments to Bret Baier on Friday night were fully incoherent.
Paul Krugman’s comments are worth reading.
The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, although the latest from Iran is that ships from friendly nations will be allowed through, and some with oil destined for China have indeed gone in that direction. Trump is said to be bored with that part of it and is thinking again of sending a special operations team to “get the dust” known to others of us as enriched uranium, which is not in the form of dust. He truly is in a place that he can’t get out of.
I wrote about special ops and the later revelation that the uranium is probably in 10-ton containers.
Back at home, Jared Polis did as he was told and commuted Tina Peters’s sentence for tampering with voting. The ABA trashed DEI standards to find favor with the administration. In their campaign to make clear that gerrymandering is only bad when done by Democrats, the Supreme Court rejected Virginia’s plan.
We learned that the FBI Director and nine of his closest friends went snorkeling around the USS Arizona.
And, oh yes, Trump’s people announced a plan to sack the Treasury to send free money to the January 6 crowd of pedophiles and other lawbreakers.
It is hard to keep up. Trump has a hyperactive team. I have a hard time figuring out how they do as much as they do, although a lot of it doesn’t take that much work. The trip to China, for example, was reported to include no China experts, just the industry people who were happy to bring their own agendas and preparation. Trump had a few words that someone had written on paper, but otherwise he just had to remain standing, which he did better than I expected.
Follow the court-watchers for the details of the lawsuits. Chris Geidner (LawDork, Bluesky), Roger Parloff (Lawfare, Bluesky), and the Just Security tracker.
Let’s stay away from hypotheticals, as usual. Post your pets.
139 more weeks to go. What are you doing?
Previous weeks: Week 10, Week 20, Week 30, Week 40, Week 50, Week 60, Week 61, Week 62, Week 63, Week 64, Week 65, Week 66, Week 67, Week 68