“These guys are weird.” – Minnesota Governor Tim Walz
By Marc C. Johnson (April 3, 2026)
The president of the United States went on television Wednesday night (April 1st) to say something about the war he launched in the Middle East.
To say that the reviews were, well, less than flattering would be like saying Nero’s fiddle was out of tune while Rome burned.
Here’s POLITICO, a reliable barometer of conventional political wisdom in our nation’s capital:
To a number of GOP strategists and local party leaders involved in key congressional and gubernatorial races, the message was too little, too late and too jumbled.
“What the hell did he just say?” one GOP strategist in a battleground state wrote in a text to POLITICO after the president’s address, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “A quick recap and a path forward would’ve been helpful. Instead, it was nonsense left for Sean Hannity to articulate.”
Loyal readers know that I have long believed that Donald Trump is on a one way downhill slide into ever more radical derangement. His ability to grasp the reality around him, informed not by factual information and critical thinking but by generations of lies, conspiracy theories and personal expediency, has diminished on pace with his mental and physical decline.
The president is not well.
But that diagnosis isn’t the full story of what unfolds before us hourly.
In Trump 2.0 the president has surrounded himself with the most comical, corrupt and incompetent collection of clowns ever assembled outside of a Ringling Brothers hiring fair.
Trump has now fired two of these jokers in the space of a week. That’s good news.
The bad news is that he won’t be able to upgrade through replacements. There is no Trump minor league of normal waiting in the wings.
The clown show is baked in.
The idea that an individual with a sense of ethics, fidelity to the law and the Constitution and enjoying some sense of self respect would willingly join this circus is simply fanciful thinking.
Oh, some may think they can stay above the ethical sludge and stand aside the moral rot, but they are kidding themselves. And we kid ourselves, too, if we believe any of what we are seeing is even remotely acceptable or can possibly get any better any time soon.
Their very strange world is our very strange world.
When every job description in the Trump Administration requires simply pleasing the Clown-in-Chief, while appearing on TV as often as possible to spout nonsense and traffic in lies, it only stands to reason that you’ll get a Kristi Noem and a Pam Bondi.
They are gone now. There will be no better replacements.
It’s difficult to be an optimist in today’s world and I’m not all that optimistic, but I do focus on realism and try to populate my writing with solid sourcing and not merely opinion. I write these pieces to offer a perspective based on history and particularly American political history since 1900.
These essays are free, but a financial contribution helps support my writing and research, including a new book in progress.
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SubscribedGoing to the dogs
It is hard to keep track given the chaos and corruption of the last 14 months that Trump, and his now defenestrated attorney general, Pam Bondi, have some history that predates Jeffrey Epstein’s files and trying to prosecute James Comey.
Here’s the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) way back in 2016:
Trump and Bondi are entangled in a major political scandal involving a $25,000 illegal contribution made by the Trump Foundation, a non-profit charitable foundation, to a political group supporting Bondi’s election. Bondi personally solicited the contribution from Trump himself, and received it around the time it was reported that her office was investigating Trump University. After the contribution, Bondi’s office told reporters there was no investigation into Trump. The Trump Foundation told the IRS it made no political contributions and instead of listing the Bondi group, listed a Kansas organization with a similar name to which they could legally donate.
OK, that sounds familiar.
Here’s more from POLITICO at the time Bondi was nominated to be attorney general shortly after the 2024 election:
In 2016, news emerged that Trump paid a $2,500 fine because his foundation improperly donated $25,000 to Bondi’s political election committee in 2013 before her office opted not to pursue a fraud investigation into Trump University. Trump eventually paid $25 million to settle fraud complaints against the now-defunct university.
Bondi said she was unaware of Trump University complaints at the time and that the contribution had nothing to do with her office’s decision not to pursue the case. Trump has said he admired Bondi for never backing away from him amid the controversy.
Bondi was also a good pal with Lara Trump and she worked at one point for the same Florida lobbying firm as Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff.
Such cozy back scratching and junking a legal action in a trade for an appointment is, in this administration, just your typical Thursday.
Bondi is off, so Trump says, to an important job in the private sector that will be announced very soon. She’ll be able to spend more time at home redacting with her family, as Jim Fallon says.
As for that very important private sector job, there must be a 7-11 in Palm Beach that needs a night manager. Stay tuned.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot.
Bondi was actually Trump’s No. 2 pick to run the Justice Department. The original idea for the nation’s top law enforcement officer was Florida man Matt Gaetz. You remember him, right?
Here’s NPR from December 23, 2024:
The House Ethics Committee on Monday released its long-awaited report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., after looking into sexual misconduct allegations against him.
The committee found there was “substantial evidence” Gaetz violated House rules, state and federal laws, “and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
Among other accusations, the committee found Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl in 2017, and used or possessed illegal drugs on multiple occasions from 2017-2019, including ecstasy and cocaine.
As bad as Pam Bondi has been we coulda had that guy. Almost did, in fact.
But before we leave the now unemployed Pam Bondi I feel compelled to remind you of this:
Bondi was involved in a custody battle with Hurricane Katrina victims over a St. Bernard she adopted in 2005 after the dog was separated from his family during the storm.
The family had been trying to find the dog and Bondi refused to return him. She accused the family of neglecting the animal, an allegation they denied.
The family sued, and the dispute lasted 16 months until the two sides settled before trial. Bondi returned the dog to the family with food and medication.
Well, she didn’t shoot the dog, which is something I guess.
But we do know who did. Shoot her dog, I mean.
Cricket’s assassin
The mere fact that Kristi Noem wrote a book that, among other things, detailed how she killed her dog – poor Cricket – for being a rambunctious puppy and also decided a farm goat had no reason to live because, well, she didn’t like the goat would have been enough in most galaxies for someone to say – hey, let’s not appoint her to an important government job, OK?
Nope.
In Trump 2.0 being creepy and flaunting it is a major qualification.
In the end, however, it wasn’t her profoundly destructive and deadly leadership of the Department of Homeland Security that kicked Kristi to the curb but rather her lavish spending on a TV ad campaign featuring herself. When she tried to pass it all off as having Donald’s approval her jig was up.
In other words, it wasn’t her cringy puppy killing, the murder of two peaceful protesters in Minneapolis, the scandalous deportation policy or even her, eh, “relationship” with her sort of chief of staff that broke Noem’s pick.
In short, she embarrassed the most embarrassing man in the world and that’s what got her.
It’s charming in a way to read various accounts that speak of “stumbles” by Bondi that led to her sacking, but she didn’t stumble. She humbled herself before a psychopath who always believed the only real job was to please the master, and at that impossible task she failed.
As corrupt as she is she wasn’t corrupt enough.
Actually like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem was a walking, talking political disaster before she came to Washington. Her tenure as South Dakota’s governor was one scandal after another, one bit of self dealing after another, one bit of incompetence after another, but that counted for nothing in clown town.
She embarrassed Trump. That’s what counted.
Incompetence brings no comeuppance with this regime. Blind loyalty is insufficient, too. Success at survival is only measured by the Stephen Miller standard: one must become as unhinged and evil as the boss.
That is the only ticket to staying in the circus of Trump World.
The firings will continue
Late yesterday news broke that a former Fox News weekend host fired the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Randy George, a four-star West Point grad with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As The New York Times reported:
Two weeks ago, General George asked Mr. Hegseth to meet with him to discuss the removal of the four officers from the one-star list, as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall, the officials said. Mr. Hegseth refused to meet with General George about the matter, they said.
Last week, Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist who is close to Mr. Hegseth and President Trump, posted on social media that the defense secretary was “seriously considering” removing General George. Ms. Loomer has also repeatedly attacked Mr. Driscoll.
General George also had a close relationship with Lloyd J. Austin III, Mr. Hegseth’s predecessor and a former Army four-star general.
Two other senior general officers were also dismissed yesterday. Here’s NBC’s coverage:
Hegseth has fired numerous officials during Trump’s second term. Last year he fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, after an initial assessment by the agency in June indicated that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were less expansive than Trump had said.
Before that, Hegseth fired Navy Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, who was the U.S. military representative to NATO’s military committee. Parnell at the time cited “a loss of confidence in her ability to lead.”
Hegseth’s other firings included Joint Chiefs Chairman CQ Brown Jr.; Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, who headed the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command; the Navy’s top admiral, Lisa Franchetti; and the head of the Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan.
Other reporting from CNN indicates that the former Fox News weekend host will replace General George with General Chris LaNeve, the current Army vice chief of staff:
LaNeve got Trump’s attention in the hours after his inauguration, when LaNeve called into the Commander in Chief’s Ball with his troops from South Korea.
“Sir, on behalf of the brave men and women who serve under my command and the thousands of dedicated service members that are part of the joint team in Korea, congratulations on your victory as the 47th President of the United States,” LaNeve said on a video call. “Welcome back, Mr. President.”
Trump praised LaNeve, saying, “Is this man central casting or what?”
“They’re not going to play games with you. That’s good,” Trump added, according to an official transcript of the event. “I like to see that. Nobody is playing games with that man.”
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence and call me alarmist, but I think all this is some evidence – just a tiny bit of evidence – that Donald Trump is trying to politicize the U.S. military.
And this is happening during a war the ol’ boy still can’t explain and can’t find a way to end. What could possibly go wrong?
The calls to central casting will accelerate now. The Labor secretary, the FBI director, maybe the Commerce secretary and certainly others are heads on the great man’s chopping block.
I don’t have enough space today to talk about the FEMA official who said he was teleported to a Waffle House or Kristi Noem’s boob fetish husband or RFK, Jr’s raccoon penis.
The chaos and incompetence will continue because these guys are weird and they will double down on dangerous and strive to be just evil as the boss. That how they survive as a straphanger in their and our very strange world.
Gulp.
These essays are free, but a financial contribution helps support my writing and research, including a new book in progress.
Subscribe to Marc’s Substack for $8 a month or make a pledge.
Many thanks.
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