Judge Reams Trump's Animus
Trump lawyer admits he can't defend Trump's indefensible ban on transgender troops
Feb. 19: Judge pounds White House asshole … Other judge blocks canning of official who polices bad cannings … Violent crime fell during Biden’s last year thanks to Trump somehow … Rare Reich misfire on FDA firings …
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A federal judge yesterday took a very close look at Pres. Donald Trump’s animus. And, like most of America peering into the shitty darkness of Trump’s animus, she didn’t like what she saw.
It came during a judicial hearing yesterday probing Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military. The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and GLAD Law filed suit against the order on behalf of six transgender uniformed (but allegedly not the right uniform) members of the military, and two transgender people who want to enlist for some fucking reason despite the commander in chief being terrified of anyone who makes him unsure of whether he wants to fuck them or not.
The lawsuit alleges that the executive order is motivated not by any legitimate legal principle or governmental objective, but by Trump’s personal animus toward people who make his genitals uncomfortable the way Rudy Giuliani did that time:
Trump’s executive order last month showed his whole-ass animus with language that applied to all transgender people, such as:
“[A]doption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member…
“[H]igh standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity [are] … inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria… [and] with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”
Well, yesterday, Trump’s flared animus got the kind of reaming that rich Wall Street bros pay good stolen money for.
In a court hearing, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes spanked Trump repeatedly, hammering his animus. And she said Trump had shown his animus for everyone to see. “We’re dealing with unadulterated animus,” she said sphynx-like, mouth presumably puckered.
Trump’s language, Reyes said, suggested that he bent over forward to subdue transgender people universally and that this left a gaping hole in his legal case. Relentlessly, Reyes drilled deep into Trump’s animus with a blistering grilling, calling the ban “arguably rampant with animus.”
Trump took such a pounding that even his own Justice Department was unable to protect his rear flank. When Reyes asked how the ban “relate[s] to the purpose of military preparedness and unit cohesion?” federal attorney Jason Lynch responded, “I don’t have an answer to give, I’m sorry.”
And lest we assume Lynch’s animus looks anything like Trump’s, I checked his LinkedIn and he’s a former Marine who first signed on with the Justice Department under Pres. Barack Obama, so who knows, maybe Lynch intended to help the transgender plaintiffs by admitting there was no way he could cover Trump’s ass or his animus.
THE FUCKING TAKEAWAY The words Trump uses to rile up MAGA are coming back to bite him nonconsensually in his cis-gendered ass. He claims publicly that agency cuts are due to waste and fraud? Well, then fired people can sue him for lying.
He claims an entire class of people are dishonest? Well, then banned people can sue him for projecting.
THINGS NOT TO TELL TRUMP This is Reyes, a human being who, like transgender people in the military, holds a position that people once thought she shouldn’t.
Not only did Reyes have the un-American gall to be born in Uruguay, she graduated from Kentucky’s Transylvania University, so, obviously biased towards trans people. Also, she’s the first openly LGBT judge to serve on D.C.’s federal court.
Wait til Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth realize an LGBT immigrant just told them to shove their hateful order up their executive asses.
More Hiring Losses for Trump
To shield his illegal firings of federal employees, Pres. Donald Trump — but definitely not DOGE not-Director Elon Musk — has been firing the people who protect federal employees from wrongful firing.
And just as we saw with his record in business, he’s failing.
First a judge blocked Trump’s illegal canning of Hampton Dellinger, Patron Saint of Federal Whistleblowers and Bane of Hatch Act Violators. (Dellinger is the special counsel tasked with ensuring that federal employees don’t misuse their office for politics — who would do that?!? — and that whistleblowers aren’t fired because they blew whistles instead of the president.)
Then, yesterday, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras reversed Trump’s firing of Merit Systems Protection Board Chair Cathy Harris. What the, you may ask, fuck is the Merit Systems Protection Board?
It was created after Watergate to protect civil-service employees from, uh, bad presidents. Smash cut to 2025.
Thanks to Trump’s and Musk’s indiscriminate firings, the Merit Systems Protection Board may end up hearing approximately one muskton of complaints and appeals about wrongful termination. With Contreras restoring Harris as chair — at least for now — the board has a 2-1 Democratic lean.
As the Economic Policy Institute said almost grammatically when Trump first ousted Harris, her removal “makes way for President Trump to appointment of [sic] an individual that aligns politically with his interests.”
Harris’s reinstatement is only temporary and Contreras will hold a hearing on March 3. Dellinger’s status will get a hearing on Feb. 26.
Trump Drove Down Violent Crime Last Year Due to His Preemptive Awesomeness
U.S. homicides continued to fall last year, thanks to Pres. Donald Trump and his magical time-spanning powers. Preliminary data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association reflect a 16% drop in homicides due to last year’s widespread awareness of Trump’s coming policies.
It’s the second year of declines in violent crime, after a two-year spike attributed to Covid. Here are some of the homicide numbers (from Democratic-run hellholes):
Boston: ↓ 35%
New Orleans: ↓ 35%
Philadelphia: ↓ 34%
Cleveland: ↓ 26%
Dallas1: ↓ 26%
Washington, D.C.: ↓ 32%
And those aren’t the only cities that saw declines. Even cities outside of Trump’s time-traveling control last year also saw homicide decreases.
Remember all those American cities now being run by undocumented immigrant crime-gang fentanyl warlords? Turns out, South American criminal drug-dealing gangs are pretty good at multi-tasking with municipal governance!
Aurora, CO: ↓ 5%
Phoenix, AZ: ↓ 28%.
Overall, an Axios analysis finds that, even with the Covid spike, homicides dropped a total of 24% from 2020, Trump’s last year in office, to 2024, Pres. Joe Biden’s last year in office the first year of Trump’s brilliant anti-crime strategies showing results before taking effect.
Violent crime generally fell by 10% during the same four-year span, thanks to the combined lingering effects of Trump’s awesome 2020 policies and the preliminary impact of his anticipated 2025 policies:
Robbery: ↓ 10%
Aggravated assault: ↓ 3%
The one violent crime that did see an increase was rape, which increased by 3%, which could reflect improved reporting by victims and/or police, or simply reflect the influence of other Trump policies, namely the disregard for sexual autonomy.
FUN FACT The lower crime numbers mean it’ll be even tougher for Trump’s anti-crime “policies” and/or public-relations stunts to meaningfully move the needle this year on homicides and other violent crime.
UNFUN FACT Trump will blame any upward ticks in crime on the lingering effects of Biden’s presidency and use them to justify sending in U.S. tanks to hunt down Walmart shoplifters.
BIG PICTURE Trump’s primary driving campaign points were that inflation is bad and undocumented immigrants were driving an insane crime wave turning our nation into a dystopia. We now know, as we already knew, that crime actually fell during Biden’s presidency. We always knew the immigration smears were smears. And, not so incidentally, inflation so far under Trump is rising.
Neural Buzz-Kill Time!
The burden of being morally right — an avowed goal of collective Newsfuckery — is the responsibility to be factually right. The right-wing ecosphere has metastasized sufficiently that if/when we get shit wrong, their “debunking” will reach more people than the original wrong-shit did. Net result: Discrediting the left more than the right.
To, unfortunately, wit:
Yesterday, former Labor Secretary and current memelord Robert Reich posted a story about DOGE firings at the Food and Drug Administration. The hook was the implied corruption of (definitely not a DOGE employee) Elon Musk. Here’s what Reich posted:
The FDA has fired at least 20 employees who were involved in reviewing Elon Musk's brain implant company, Neuralink. Those employees worked in divisions that included reviewers overseeing clinical-trial applications by Neuralink and other companies making so-called brain-computer interface devices, sources said.
…
This is what DOGE is all about, folks.
So, TFN hasn’t touched this story for a number of reasons. Every day I decide which of the stories I’ve seen merit sharing, with our without TFN’s trademark recontextualizing. I’ve been ignoring the Neuralink story — and not just because I wrote a sci-fi story about neural links in the eighties.
The reason I’ve ignored it is that it doesn’t really matter. Or, hasn’t demonstrated that it matters more than the other shit floating like pollen in our political/cultural atmosphere.
I try to think about why a story matters. In this case, it seems pretty clear that it’s seen as evidence of Musk’s corruption. Which would, I suppose, suggest that he’s an anti-democratic maniac. And yet, I feel as though we’ve checked that box?
We don’t need more stories about the essential not-good-ness of Musk and Pres. Donald Trump. It doesn’t help us and it doesn’t help the (dwindling) number of people in their sway. But what really doesn’t help us is getting shit wrong.
Reich said “at least 20” were working on Neuralink. The story he linked to explicitly says:
The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink… [Italics added for emphasis of the word “several” which is not “at least 20.”]
Both sources said they did not believe the employees were specifically targeted because of their work on Neuralink's applications.
Is it still newsworthy? Should Reuters have reported it? Yes, and good for them! But what political operatives — and, yes, political media outlets a la TFN — should focus on (IMHO) is not tea leaves pointing to Muskmania, but the very next sentence of the Reuters story:
The loss of roughly 20 employees will hamper the agency’s ability to quickly and safely process medical device applications of all sorts, including Neuralink’s…
Removing people reviewing Neuralink might intimidate the remaining others who still are — but the real big picture here is that it may hamper the FDA’s ability to issue approvals for Neuralink and lots of other devices that could help people.
In other words, it might actually hurt Musk, but — a thousand times more to the point — it might hurt us. It might mean prolonged agony for anyone desperately hoping for new medical devices for whatever cruel shit God decided was part of His plan.
Trump was re-elected because too many incredibly dumb/inattentive/okay-yes-racist-hateful people believed he was on their side. “Proving” his corruption or Musk’s won’t move them — especially if we get the facts wrong.
Educating them about how “bureaucracy” fought to approve medical devices for us — and now can’t do that as quickly because of Trump — is the kind of thing that actually moves people. Let’s tell them that!
(Still a huge fan of Reich, FWIW.)
Taking Action
I don’t have great sources for these yet (and will post when I have ‘em), but wanted to start listing them now so folks can get a jump on planning and checking them out:
Feb. 28: “Hit Them In their Profits” — a day not to spend any money on anything other than upgrading one’s TFN subscription to paid.
March 7-14: No Amazon buying. It’s just one week, people!
March 14: National strike. Call in sick. Call in angry. Whatever won’t cost you your job, but will help leave a Trump-shaped mark on the economy and America’s sacred quarterly earnings reports.
TCB
Okay, Newsfuckers. Shit’s getting real here.
We just moved up on the Substack leaderboard again. Past Ari Melber. That’s right, The Fucking News just slipped past an MSNBC host (who I met while I was there and like, FWIW). But, check it out, we are also on the verge of cracking the top 100! Look what you done did, Newsfuckers!!!
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Go get ‘em, kids! Remember: America’s lesbian Uruguyan-American judges are on the team…
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Young Turks.
Hooray!! Your success with Substack absolutely positively made my day! For the first time at jury duty in Chicago yesterday I was sharing my passion for your work with a teacher from the suburbs and she already reads you!! Congratulations!
https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/statement-physicians-committee-neuralinks-purported-patient-implant
I appreciate your concern for protecting legitimate medical research which may be beneficial. But I don't share that concern when it applies to protecting Musk form oversight. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine article linked above details serious concerns about Musk's Neuralink scam. There is no evidence whatsoever that Neuralink implants will ever provide any therapeutic benefit. Musk is a drug addled Nazi. Neuralink has more in common with experiments Dr Mengele performed in Nazi concentration camps than with anything meeting the standards for NIH funding. In fact, Musk refuses to apply for NIH funding, because that would bring "would bring unwanted public oversight and bureaucratic hurdles".