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Hello, and welcome to the DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkuff. I'm joined by Minestine. Our friend Riley Fassler is often being town because he started his vacation early. And frankly, I'm a little resentful.
I don't know if I'd you, Minna, like we have to sit here and we have to deal with more
“of this news and he's up there luxuriating, what is it 40 degree temperatures and rain?”
I'm more than resentful. I'm very resentful. Very resentful. Are you going away for the holiday? I'm actually in New York right now, visiting some friends.
I drove up at 9 o'clock last night, got in at almost 1/30 in the morning, so I'm about to enjoy the cold and rain, not too far for rain, I guess. Yeah, we're all being joined the cold and rain just in different cities. All right. Well, it's just to make sure that all of our listeners can get to enjoy their cold and
rain. Why don't we start? Perfect idea.
“House Republicans delayed a high stakes vote on and around war powers resolution after”
became clear, the measure had gathered enough bipartisan momentum to pass. The abrupt postponement sets up a definitive showdown for June 2nd when congressional recess ends and a mandatory legislative clock forces the House floor to vote. The conflict enters its fourth month, slipping congressional support highlights. The intense domestic strain on the war has killed at least 13 U.S. service members, wounded
hundreds and cost taxpayers, roughly around more than $25 billion.
Oh, way more, way more. I mean, they're very credible estimates that in the first two months alone, it costs $60 to $75 billion. I wouldn't be a bit surprised as of now, it's cost over $100 billion. And that has nothing to do with the increases in cost to average Americans, the gas station
down in the corner that I've drive by every day now has diesel at $6.99 and nine tenths, just waiting for that extra tenth to get it up to $7 a gallon, and that impacts food. There's already a food crisis around the world because people are unable to access phosphates and fertilizers that come from the petroleum products that come out of the Gulf. So this is a serious crisis that's cost us in many ways.
And yet, the Congress of the United States has for four months dithered, dallyed, and
ultimately delayed assuming responsibility for either declaring this war or shutting down
the funding for this war, doing any of the oversight role that it's supposed to play. And they continue to do that yesterday by essentially saying, okay, well, let's all go home, rather than suffering a loss. I'm not sure how that's going to work out for them when they get back because more and more opposition to the war exists.
And in fact, they're going to face a few problems, by opposition to the war. And what that means for funding opposition to Trump's larsiny attempt from the Treasury with regard to what he calls a slush fund, opposition to the ballroom. All of these things are hitting pushback on the hill because they're terrible ideas. Executed badly by bad people who don't care what happens to you.
Welcome to America happy memorial that we get what's next.
Kevin Worsh was sworn in, actually just a few minutes ago at 11 a.
of the Federal Reserve stepping into the role at a critical economic juncture.
“Worsh faces a daunting immediate dilemma, whether to raise interest rates to combat high”
inflation, driven past the Fed's 2% target by a hundred dollars a barrel oil from the U.S. is really war with Iran or risk his credibility by holding off to playkate a president who vehemently opposes rate hikes. Yeah, if he raises interest rates, Uncle Donald's going to have an aneurysm because he thinks this guy is there to do the one thing that Trump thinks can save the fall for
an economy in time for the old boat in November and that is lower interest rates.
Don't think it's going to happen because first of all the Fed is only one driver of one
“type of interest rates and already we've seen the sell-off in treasure is leading to interest”
rates going up and the other factors in the economy make it very difficult to do. He may try to talk it down, he may try to talk up the vitality of the economy. We shall see, but it is a real test for this guy who does have some background and some degree of credibility to see whether he is going to as Trump hopes place political loyalty first or whether he is going to place his oath and the responsibilities of an independent Fed first.
If the independence of the Fed is destroyed by Trump by the disappointment, it'll be one of the most damaging things that he has done as president and that's saying something since there are so many damaging Trump legacies. President Trump announced on truth social that the United States will deploy an additional 5,000 troops to Poland, abruptly reversing a widely criticized Pentagon decision from last week
that had halted a planned rotation of 4,000 service members. Trump explicitly tied the troop increased to his strong relationship with conservative Polish president, a nationalist ally whom Trump previously endorsed. The move significantly bolsters the American military presence on NATO's eastern flank or Poland currently hosts roughly 10,000 U.S. service members. Yeah, let's not delude ourselves in the thinking that we have anything like coherent strategy
with regard to Europe, with regard to our national security. We don't even have a functioning national security council. Clearly, whether it's in Ukraine or it's in Iran or it's in Venezuela, or it's in Cuba or it's with regard to Greenland, the United States military is just all over the place driven entirely by the impulses of the president and the interpretation of those impulses by the frat boy he's got running the Department of Defense. And we said that this also has an echo
to it, not just want to point that out. At the end of Trump's first term, he wanted to pull troops
out of Europe. And the place he wanted to pull the amount of most urgently was Germany. And Mike Esfer was the Secretary of Defense at the time, along with several generals, managed to persuade Trump not to move the amount of Germany and back home, which was Trump's intention, but rather to move the amount of Germany and will rotate them into Poland, which is to maintain the strength and move it closer to the Russian threat. And it seems like this exact same move
has now been replicated since Trump wants to pull 5,000 troops out of Germany. And it suggests to me that the military was real unhappy with Trump's impulse to draw down strength in this part of the world. Then, you know, don't blame them. They'd be right if they were unhappy.
“That's what I was going to say. People unhappy with a decision from the administration that blows”
my mind. Yeah, well, it happens every so often, and you'll just have to adjust. Because otherwise, we're so happy. Yeah, we love them. They're doing a great job. Really, great job, Don. I hope you have a nice weekend. I hope you get some golfing. No, not going to
Sun's wedding.
forward to this weekend is missing his Sun's wedding. I think not going to John Don Jr's wedding
“is one of the best things any American can do on this more out there weekend. I wasn't even”
interested in it. And that's an honor in and of itself. Well, that's true. That's true. But if you were invited, you wouldn't go. And that's big to your credit. Because he's one of the worst people that there is out, that this big game hunter, Don Jr, who likes to kill innocent animals in order to make himself feel like a man or to fill in that place in his heart that's all broken. Because his daddy won't even go to his own wedding. Because his daddy doesn't love him much. And we know
where that leads because Trump's parents didn't love him and look where we are. So, you know,
these kind of situations repeat themselves. And who pays the price? That would be us, folks.
“And that truly is the message of this show. Love your kids. So, we don't have to talk about”
TSA privatization. Which is what we will talk about next. Our next story. Members of the House Committee on Homeland Security expressed strong bipartisan support for protecting TSA officers from future government funding lapses, highlighting the heavy toll that political stalemate have taken on frontline aviation workers. The hearing originally intended to focus on the long-term modernization of the agency quickly shifted into a referendum on the Trump administration's
aggressive push to privatize screening operations at approximately 250 smaller U.S. airports. Well, that's not their worst idea at the moment. Because we do have Mark Wayne Mullins saying that what he wants to do is pull a lot of people out of airports, of democratic cities that he calls sanctuary cities in response to his dislike of the sanctuary city concept, which would effectively make travel in and out of those cities a living nightmare, make the shipment of goods in and out of
those cities a living nightmare. And industry professionals say there's no way to really shift the traffic out of those places. That plan looks like it would be implemented after the conclusion of the World Cup in July. So we're going to have to keep our eyes open this summer because it looks like Mark Wayne Mullins getting his likes under him and that we will have more roundups of more people in cities, more crackdowns in the immigration area, and more crazy ideas about how to manage
DHS and agency, which am I to add, shouldn't really exist. This is all part of the post 9/11 reorganization of the U.S. government that did some things. Personally, I just think don't make a lot of sense. One was creating the director of national intelligence, which is a typical U.S. government response to a problem. There wasn't enough coordination among the many intelligence agencies in the government, even though one of them, the central intelligence agency, was supposed to coordinate all of it.
So they said, "Hey, let's do it again louder and with more layers of bureaucracy." And so they added in this entity. It's got thousands of people in it. And in order to coordinate, what should have been coordinated by the mechanism that existed before. With DHS, they took a bunch of agencies and glombed them all together into a giant unwieldly bureaucracy that doesn't make any sense at all. It covers everything from the Coast Guard to TSA to border patrol and so forth.
And I don't know, someday we may have the same president and someday we may rationalize
some of these old re-orgs right out of business. I suspect that won't be the first move of a new
government in 2022, because there are existential issues of structural reform and saving democracy and saving the country and saving the people of this country from economic pain that will take
“precedents. But the to-do list of the next president, who boy, going to be a lawman?”
Well, we have one more story for today. A federal judge dealt a significant blow to the White House ordering AIDS to President Trump to continue complying with the Presidential Records Act.
The legal battle was originally ignited by a coalition of historians, journal...
government transparency advocates who grew alarmed that the administration's new
“department of justice policy would allow White House AIDS to routinely delete official electronic”
communications and shield presidential records from public scrutiny. The ruling explicitly blocks this controversial department of justice opinion, issue last month, which has had claimed the 1978 transparency law unconstitutionally encroached on executive authority. Yeah, I mean, it's a good thing that the court acted here. This is the least transparent administration in history. It hates anything that could lead to people knowing the truth about
what's going on in the government. Like, you know, in this slush-fun deal that they refer to as a deal, which is really just a theft. And if you want more on that, go listen to Norm Wrenstein and I, on yesterday's podcast, talking about Grand Wersley in its latest incarnation. But, you know, part of that deal is they don't have to tell who got the money or why they got the money or what process led to them getting the money. And they do that wherever they can.
This latest is clearly linked. So, the fact that Trump had some issues with documents. We know about that. And Trump's Crip and Crip's like to shred and burn and destroy, get rid of the evidence. And they essentially want to make sure that they're protected against future prosecution. And frankly, the scrutiny of historians by just destroying the evidence, which probably will reveal them to be incompetent, ignorant, racist, misogidist,
larceness, otherwise criminally oriented, possibly disloyal to the United States
“and loyal to foreign powers. Who knows? That's what they're trying to hide.”
Anything that we can do to make it harder for them to do that is good. However, if you think that the legal rulings on this will somehow keep them from destroying evidence, you don't know our president who loves nothing more. Everybody thinks his favorite hobby is golf.
It's not. In fact, that would argue golf is his third favorite hobby.
I think his second favorite hobby is obstruction of justice. And I think his first favorite hobby is climbing in order to get richer. And one leads to the other. And ideally, in the ideal world for Donald Trump, you set up a system where lots of money gets funneled away from the US government into your own bank accounts step one. That's the climbing he likes that. And there are mechanisms in place to protect their tracks, hide their tracks on that kind of thing. I keep them from being
prosecuted. That's step two obstruction of justice so that he can be playing golf while all
this happens, which is his third favorite thing. And if you could get all of those, that's his ideal.
“And I think that's probably his plan for this weekend. In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised”
if while his son's wedding is going on, somebody somewhere snapshots of the president who couldn't make it to the wedding on the golf course. And if only we could snap shots of all the other things that are going on in his name, I think people would be outraged. Anyway, hopefully you are someplace where there will be at least a little sunshine and a little bit of respite and a little bit of fun on this memorial day weekend. Hopefully it'll also take some time and listen to the podcast
that we've got for you that we've done this week or that we've done prior weeks. We will not be podcasting on Monday or streaming our content on Monday, but we'll resume it on Tuesday. So until Tuesday, thanks everybody very much. Thank you, Mina. Have a good weekend. Have a good weekend, rather than wherever you are, and have a good weekend, DSR family wherever you are. Bye-bye.
