The Daily Reid: the truth about Oz

There's a man there who claims to be a wizard ... but he has no magic to offer.

There’s a moment in The Wiz (or “The Wizard of Oz” if you’re old school…) where Dorothy, Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow are confronted with the alarming truth that the wizard they’d invested so much time and terror trying to meet and please — even embarking on a dangerous mission to kill a powerful, wicked witch so he would grant them what they so desperately believed they needed — was no wizard at all…

Watching Republican kiss-asses try to explain Donald Trump’s erratic trade war, which has sent markets spinning and ratcheted up the economic anxieties of millions of Americans has indeed been Oz-worthy. With straight faces, speaking soberly into their clipped on microphones, they pretend that his wild tariff swinging is based on rational policy decisions and “strategery.” It’s rather like watching the dancing citizens of Oz flip from green to red to yellow apparel on the loud speaker whims of the being they believe to be the Great and Powerful Oz.

In reality, of course, he was just meek and phony Herman Smith (played so brilliantly by Richard Pryor), second rate politician from Atlantic City, New Jersey, who could never get elected to office, due to his incompetence — but who was showman enough to rent a campaign balloon, which when it floated into the magical land of Oz, caused the beings there to mistake him for a kind of God.

But unlike Dorothy and her friends, maga Republicans can’t accept it when their Wizard is unmasked. They just keep pretending he’s magical.

Sorry, fellas. The ladies and the quirky Brit have it right. There is no plan … no savvy backdoor negotiating strategy. Trump is just a dumb guy who someone must have told at some point in his desiccated life that Gilded Age and pre Great Depression tariffs were awesome and will allow the wealthy to avoid income taxes. There is no strategy. Trump screwed up the economy because he likely doesn’t know any better and doesn’t particularly care who he hurts. Some of the finance bros are actually being forced to admit it…

But most Republicans, including the Great Men of Wall Street, admit nothing. They have been making this same mistake with Trump for decades. Perhaps because he is rich, and white, and male, they presume he has some special savvy. They (along with many in the mainstream media) seem almost desperate to believe that the erratic, frankly crazy things he says and does are part of some secret, brilliant strategy they just haven’t figured out yet. I’ll note that media and Wall Street types rarely make that presumption with women or people of color. Or Democrats, even when they are white, and rich and male…

But with Trump? These supposedly savvy people presume he’s playing 4-D chess when ordinary mortals are playing checkers. And so the elect of our capitalist empire keep betting on Trump — the failed Atlantic City casino developer, who turned a $500 million birth fortune into a $916 million sinkhole. They just keep acting as if this time, surely, he’ll turn out to be a good bet. Though even when they lose big, the richest ones still seem poised to gain in the long run, maybe by scooping up the detritus Trump leaves behind of our economy. Trump certainly seems to think so…

Would that be considered market manipulation, or no? Because he definitely turned off the tariffs (except the ones on China) not long after posting that…

The biggest loser

The bottom line is that and over and over again, throughout his life, Trump has skated by, despite consistently demonstrating incompetence, petulance, and a penchant for lies, lasciviousness and fraud. He has stiffed banks, contractors, small businesses, states like New York, and countries like Panama. He has even flopped with golf courses … and many of those he didn’t sell off lose millions of dollars a year. And yet, banks keep lending to him. People and corporations keep investing in him. And tens of millions of people voted for him, even after his policies left a half a million Americans dead from covid — the worst outcome of any Western country — while leaving our economy in shambles.

Despite all of that, Magamericans keep scooping up his silly meme coins and they’re probably still buying his tariff-price-hiked merch with the dwindling incomes he’s leaving them with. The result: Trump gets richer and richer, while Americans get poorer, sicker, and crazier.

So many Americans want to believe in Donald Trump. Poor ones, middle class ones, rich ones and billionaires, too. Why? Only God knows. Maybe because he’s been on television? And they want to believe in the people he hires, which also makes no sense.

When he’s not tanking the economy, Trump is still fixating on the 2020 election (which he lost) and directing the Middle Age Barbie posing as “attorney general” to open investigations into anyone who made him mad when he was president the first time. That includes Chris Krebs, whose job it was to determine if the 2020 election was stolen — which it wasn’t. And Miles Taylor, who … checks notes … wrote a mean op-ed.

He’s obsessing about buying Greenland (sorry, with what money??? Maybe with the proceeds from firing everyone at the Minority Business Development Agency, gutting museums and libraries and the Department of the Interior??? Or gutting cancer research??? while ordinary Americans express more fear about the economy than they did during the pandemic???)

Are we great again, yet?

Polls show 73 percent of Americans say they are financially stressed, and tariffs are the main cause.

And no wonder: the Center for American Progress think tank has pegged the cost of Trump’s tariff war at $4,600 per U.S. family per year.

Trump’s approval rating has collapsed. Not that he cares, since he’s likely planning to just stay in office for life…

Meanwhile on a “God is still in this” note — a judge says Trump will have to face the Exonerated Five in court as they accuse him of defamation.

And doge may finally be facing an audit, per the folks at Wired.

But the bottom line in this rotten era is the reign of chaos, corruption, a seeming return to a patronage government and a descent towards open kleptocracy in America.

He’s also continuing to fire off executive orders essentially trying to extort law firms that did things he doesn’t like, like representing those who sued Fox News and MyPillow for what Stephen Miller brags could be as much as $1 billion. One might call it “gangster government…”

The plain fact is, Donald Trump has never been a wizard. He’s always been exactly the way he is now, only somewhat more articulate. And the confidence that so many millions of Americans, including rich Wall Street bros who should know better, has never been warranted. Maybe Americans just wanted to be suckered, so they’d have an excuse not to elect a woman president. I mean, this is a guy who thinks we can make entire iPhones here and have them not cost $10,000 at retail. China to Trump: do it yourself:

And aside from the ridiculousness of Trump the man, and the existential damage he’s doing to people’s ability to afford their lives, there is the deeply insidious nature of his regime.

Notes on the disappeared

The Supreme Court finally woke up and ordered Trump to return a man the regime admits was wrongly deported to the Salvadoran gulag … well kind of…

The Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

In an unsigned order, the court stopped short of ordering the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, indicating that courts may not have the power to require the executive branch to do so.

But the court endorsed part of a trial judge’s order that had required the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Mr. Abrego Garcia.

“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the district court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the district court’s authority.”

The case will now return to the trial court, and it is not clear whether and when Mr. Abrego Garcia will be returned to the United States.

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from his social media.

So basically nothing. And what about the many other disappeared men, including the soccer coach and the hair dresser and the construction workers and the others who were shipped to a notorious hell hole with no due process? How exactly will these men be brought back? And how do we know if they are even alive? And what of those being snatched based on protests and thoughts Trump or his donors don’t like? And what the hell is this???

The descent into evil in America has been swift. But the fake Wizard just keeps plowing ahead. Because he must Keep His Promises, including mass deportation — but there’s really no way to deport 11 million or so people — the regime is now applying pressure to make people’s lives so miserable, they choose to deport themselves. From the New York Times:

Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were allowed into the country under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now, the administration is taking drastic steps to pressure some of those immigrants and others who had legal status to “self-deport” by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with six people familiar with the plans.

The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits.

The effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead. As a result of being added to the death database, they would be blacklisted from a coveted form of identity that allows them to make and more easily spend money.

Earlier this week, the names of more than 6,300 migrants whose legal status had just been revoked were added to the file, according to the documents.

The initial names are limited to people the administration says are convicted criminals and “suspected terrorists,” the documents show. But officials said the effort could broaden to include others in the country without authorization.

Their “financial lives,” Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, wrote in an email to staff members, would be “terminated.”

The move is the latest in an extraordinary series of actions by the Trump administration, pushed by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to harness personal data long considered off limits to immigration authorities in order to advance President Trump’s vision for a mass migrant crackdown. This week, several top officials at the Internal Revenue Service moved to resign after the tax agency said it would help locate undocumented immigrants.

In another previously unreported development, Mr. Dudek in February reached an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that would provide the last known addresses of 98,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for deporting undocumented immigrants, other documents and interviews show. Personal information held by Social Security had been closely guarded under previous administrations, according to 12 current and former officials who said the agency had not engaged in such widespread data sharing with immigration authorities before.

By using Social Security data to freeze out immigrants, the administration is conscripting a broadly popular agency — one that exists to send benefits primarily to retired Americans and people with disabilities — in its effort to unwind what Mr. Trump has derided as the “open border” policies of his Democratic predecessor.

The new enforcement role for Social Security is raising fears that faulty data could result in people, including American citizens, mistakenly or improperly being placed on the list, upending their financial lives, according to interviews with current and former employees.

As Michael Jackson sang as Scarecrow: “you can’t get even. You can’t get out of the game…”