When the Don blinks, it’s only to wink at the system to get his way time and againPOTUS was adamant that he wasn’t sleeping on the job like his predecessor “Sleepy Joe” when he appeared to nod off during a Cabinet meeting in December. He had only closed his eyes because “it got pretty boring, no offense.“You can’t really blame Donald Trump. It does tend to get boring when you have to keep listening to fawning cabinet members singing your praises for two hours, 18 minutes — just 59 minutes short of the record one last August.“I don’t sleep much, let me tell you,” he said at the start of his first Cabinet meeting of 2026 Thursday. He had closed his eyes “because I wanted to get the hell out of there.”He did “love” his Cabinet. But instead of discussing mundane issues from TrumpRx to tariffs, wouldn’t our action hero rather watch his commandos grab some foreign leader from their palace or bomb another nation. Or better still see his ICE immigration police beat the hell out of illegal immigrants.Or may just go gaga over a screening of ‘Melania,’ documenting the First Lady in the twenty days before his second presidential inauguration even as the fallout of ICE agents shooting down two protesters in Minnesota roiled the nation. Amazon paid Melania Trump’s production company $40 million for the film and $35 million to promote it. Who cares if some carping critics call it a bribe to curry favor with Trump?As the situation boiled over, Trump wanting to “de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota, did send his border czar Tom Homan to calm the waters. But as Homan raised the possibility of pulling out ICE agents from Minneapolis, Trump returned to his old ways calling Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse fatally shot by federal agents, an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist.”Pretti appeared “crazed” during a separate confrontation with federal agents 11 days before his death, posted the President on Truth Social resurrecting some real or manufactured clip.The New York Times saw Trump’s messaging on Minneapolis as “part of a pattern of dialing back his rhetoric only to change again if the political winds are shifting.”George E. Bogden, a former Trump administration trade official, cited by the Washington Post, went a step further suggesting those who mock Trump’s tariff tactics are missing his secret sauce.“For months, a spiteful acronym has passed for analysis in Washington and on Wall Street: TACO, or ‘Trump always chickens out,’” he noted. “Tariffs would be announced with theatrical menace, critics said, only to be paused, trimmed or forgotten at the first sign of consequences.”“But all along, from Inauguration Day to Liberation Day to Davos, the president has been eating his favorite dish: TACO salad. And the unsung ingredient is GUAC,” wrote Bogden. Donald Trump, he suggested, “has been ‘gaining unmatched American clout’ through his strategic use of economic pressure.”Meanwhile, as thousands of protesters marched through downtown Minneapolis and several other cities Friday in protest against Operation Metro Surge, the Senate passed a deal to avert a second dreaded shut down. The deal gives Democrats two weeks to negotiate restrictions on Trump’s immigration crackdown in Democratic ruled blue cities.And as the Justice Department announced release of three million more documents from Epstein files, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, Trump, concerned it may not be enough to quell criticism from lawmakers, survivors and some of the president’s own supporters, resorted to familiar diversionary tactics.In what critics saw a huge conflict of interest, he sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, alleging they failed to take necessary steps to prevent a leak of his tax returns to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.And still unreconciled to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, he sent the FBI to raid a Georgia election center to look for ‘stolen votes’ with his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard joining the party.The chief spook’s presence baffled national security experts and raised questions about whether she is seeking new relevance in the eyes of a president who had soured on her, suggested the NBC.Gabbard has for months continued “our extensive investigations around exposing the very serious issues we have related to election integrity,” but few expect her to find the results Trump wants.Election officials from across the country have pushed back against the Trump administration’s increasingly combative tactics following the FBI’s raid and a growing number of Justice Department demands for voter rolls.And as Federal Reserve Chair “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell,” as Trump calls him, “again refused to cut interest rates, even though he has absolutely no reason to keep them so high,” he announced plans to nominate Kevin Warsh to be the next chair of the central bank.Now he needs to find a way to install his loyalist at the bank as Powell, whose term as chair ends in May, concurrently also serves as a governor with a term running until 2028.Trump has castigated Powell for months, calling him a “numbskull,” a “moron” and a “jerk” for not lowering interest rates more quickly. He even launched a criminal investigation against Powell leading him to issue an extraordinary rebuke of Trump’s efforts to politicize the independent central bank.Meanwhile, Jon McNaughton, described as “America’s most popular relentlessly pro-Trump artist,” unveiled a new painting of “MAGA symphony of our time” showing Trump conducting an orchestra of his team.“You can feel it—the music is coming together—rising and stirring something deep inside,” wrote McNaughton. “It’s the sound of a nation waking up and remembering who it is.”A follower called it “brilliant! God is the creator of the anthem, Trump is the Conductor that gets it done!” — with all others playing second fiddle, as always!(By arrangement with The American Bazaar)
