Stupid Trump stuff

WhoWhatWhy - Donald Trump has already spent $10.7 million of taxpayer money to play golf since retaking the White House last month, an expense that appears to have escaped the attention of his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ waste, fraud and abuse hunters. The golf-related expenses — which are likely to recur most weekends while Trump is in office — have somehow flown below the radar of Elon Musk and his ‘high-IQ’ team, as Trump calls them, of programmers who are ransacking their way through the federal budget and labeling items they do not like or appear not to understand as ‘fraud.’”

Washington Post Fact Checker -  According to Trump and his staff:

• Zelensky is “down at 4 percent approval rating” (The latest poll shows approval at 57 percent)

• Zelensky “admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’” (Zelensky never said this and Trump’s envoy to Ukraine says this is not true).

Borowitz Report - Calling the birds’ behavior “a disgrace,” on Thursday Donald J. Trump threatened to deport the nation’s chickens unless they act immediately to lower the price of eggs.
“We are not going to be held ransom by some birds that are, quite frankly, disgusting,” he said. “This should never be allowed to happen in this country.”

Trump vowed retribution against the poultry, calling the birds “far left radical Trump haters.” Noting that egg prices had skyrocketed since he took office, he remarked, “The chickens have been treating me very unfairly.

NPR - President Trump’s administration has fired over 200 FEMA employees, who help local authorities in disasters, as part of federal government cuts. Along with the firings, NPR has been informed that FEMA is rolling back its work to make homes and buildings safer before a disaster. FEMA is one of the agencies Trump has talked about eliminating. 

Washington Post -  President Donald Trump is expected to take control of the U.S. Postal Service. Trump is preparing to sign an order this week to absorb the independent mail agency into his administration. Experts say that would probably violate federal law.

National Memo - President Donald Trump took time away from golfing to speak to a group of billionaires at the Saudi Public Future Investment Initiative Institute summit in Miami, during which he complained about remote work.

“All federal employees must once again show up to work. It's a new phenomenon. You know, since COVID. Show up to work in person like the rest of us. You can't work at home. They're not working. They're playing tennis, they're playing golf, or they have other jobs, but they're not working or they're certainly not working hard. You could never build a company or a country with that,” he said.

One of Trump’s first edicts was to issue a memo demanding all federal workers to return to the office while he went … golfing. Since then, Trump’s itinerary has included trips to the Super Bowl, a publicity stunt at the Daytona 500, and a lot more golfing—all at taxpayers' expense. 

The Guardian -     The Trump administration is falsely claiming that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving social security payments. Over the past few days,Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting benefits – a “HUGE problem”, Musk wrote, as his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) digs into federal agencies to root out waste, fraud and abuse. It is true that improper payments have been made, including some to dead people. But the numbers thrown out by Musk and the White House are overstated and misrepresent social security data. Here are the facts... More 

Daily Beast - President Donald Trump wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and create an “external” revenue service that will somehow force the rest of the world to fund the U.S. government, according to his newly confirmed commerce secretary. “His goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” Howard Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Wednesday night.

Instead of the IRS, Trump plans to create an “external revenue service” that will “get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against America” and raise $1 trillion of revenue, he said, promising that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting task force DOGE would also find $1 trillion in waste and fraud to eliminate.

In January, Trump vowed to create an “External Revenue Service” to oversee tariffs, though he stopped short of saying he would eliminate the IRS. The rebranding reflects Trump’s oft-repeated and inaccurate claim that tariffs are paid by foreign countries.

In fact, they’re a tax paid by American companies, with the costs passed on to consumers. They’re also collected by Customs and Border Protection, not the IRS, according to Axios. Trump has nevertheless said that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

In February, he announced a 25 percent tariff on all products from Mexico and Canada, and 10 percent on all products from China, before agreeing to temporarily pause the tariffs against Mexico and Canada. If the proposed tariffs are implemented, they’re projected to cost about $272 billion per year, triggering massive inflation, economists told CNN and Axios.

Trump’s “external” service would also handle duties—a tax based on the type of product, as opposed to the country of origin, that is also paid by American companies—and “all revenue that comes from foreign sources,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last month.