Q Toon: Executive Disorders

The Even More Corrupt Trump Maladministration has come into office on a tear, spewing forth a blizzard of executive orders that Donald Joffrey Trump hasn't bothered to read. He didn't read Project 2025 either, and told us so in no during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last year.

It may have been the one true thing he said all night. He doesn't read. He was a D student all the way through school, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's completely illiterate.

Anyway, the executive orders implementing Project 2025 are designed to "flood the zone" (also the “Gish gallop”) so that you can't react to one without ignoring the rest.

"Democrats don't matter," Steve Bannon told journalist Michael Lewis seven years ago. "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with crap."

Courts have intervened, and the maladministration has backtracked on some of those executive orders; heaven help you if you want to figure out which ones. 

A judge temporarily halted a Trump order unilaterally revoking the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship on the grounds that it was "blatantly unconstitutional":

Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee who sits in Seattle, granted the request by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and three other Democratic-led states for the emergency order halting implementation of the policy for the next 14 days while there are more briefings in the legal challenge.

“I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear,” Coughenour said.

“Where were the lawyers” when the decision to sign the executive order was made, the judge asked. He said that it “boggled” his mind that a member of the bar would claim the order was constitutional.

I'm not as confident that transgender Americans will find protective cover under the Fourteenth Amendment; they are a demographic that Trump and that unelected South African billionaire making off with all your Medicare, and Social Security, and banking data from the Treasury Department, Elon Musk, have a particular deep-seated animus against. 

Trump can force transgender persons to register as their birth gender, even their deadname, on federal documents from passports to tax forms to voter registration. (Requiring everyone to identify according to their gender at conception might have been an overreach too far; biologically, we're all female at conception.)

And lest you think that my characterization of Trump Maladministration policy as embracing white supremacy is overreacting, even NASA has been literally ordered to "drop everything" and expunge all material pertaining to diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, women in leadership, indigenous people, "under-represented groups/people," and environmental justice from public records. 

Those “Hidden Figures”? Put 'em back under wraps, Major Healey, or else!

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Now, I might be wrong in suggesting that the suspension of PEPFAR funding was among the executive orders rescinded. Or maybe it’ll be cut by virtue of his vaporizing USAID without congressional authorization. Or perhaps all the rescinded executive orders will have been unrescinded by the time this post appears on line. 

This has been one of those times when I’ve had to draw a cartoon well ahead of publication in order to take a vacation, host visitors, schedule surgery, etc.; I edited and re-edited the dialogue in panel one several times before sending it in to Q Syndicate.

For all I know, none of this stuff is important any more. There is no telling what mischief Donald Joffrey Trump has pulled since I shut down my computer and turned off the TV news. 

He wants to reclaim the Panama Canal — probably because he’s still seething at Jimmy Carter for dying 23 days before Trump’s coronation and making him sit through a funeral where not one eulogist offered a paean to Trump’s greatness. If he could revoke the Camp David Accords just to spite Jimmy Carter, he would.

We could be at war with Africa because Trump decided a.) China has too much influence there; b.) he wants to divert the Nile to fight California wildfires; and/or c.) to establish a Palestinian homeland in that odd piece of land that juts out from the northeast corner of Namibia.

I wouldn’t know.

Please don’t tell me.