Q Toon: $250 Bill of Sale

A pair of Trump lackeys in the Treasury Department came up with the brilliant scheme to put Donald Trump's face on a new $250 bill, ostensibly to mark the nation's 250th birthday this summer. But really because adding Trump's signature to all our paper money and minting a special gold-plated dollar coin with Trump scowling at whomever had the misfortune to end up with one just wasn't enough.

They hired a British guy to design the portrait for the bill (I might have recommended the New York courtroom sketch artist from Trump's fraud trial, but they didn't ask me), and Trump's ever so servile Treasury Secretary presented the a mock-up of the bill to the nation as if he were announcing a sign from heaven above.

Now, the chances of the Donald Lookitme! Lookitme! Trump $250 bill being approved by the U.S. Congress, given that living persons are not allowed to be on U.S. currency, are thinner than an earthworm's mustache.

No living person has appeared on U.S. currency since 1866, when it was outlawed after the image of a mid-level Treasury bureaucrat showed up on a 5-cent note. Legislation that would allow Trump to appear on a $250 bill was introduced in Congress last year to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary but has languished.

There is also the slight problem that federal law mandates what banknote denominations the Treasury Department is authorized to produce, and $250 is not one of them.

Treasury employees who pointed out the obstacles to getting any Trump commemorative $250 bill out in time for the nation's sesquiquincentennial found themselves transferred to janitorial duties at the Adak, Alaska field office.

In any event, there are too many primaried Republican congressmen and senators who no longer have any political reason to suck up to Dear Leader before their forced retirement next January.

Q Toon: Moving Right Along

With our self-styled Secretary of War ordering war crimes in the Caribbean, and the President of the United States falling asleep at a meeting called for the express purpose of finding out how deep his cabinet of ass-kissers can give him tongue, it may seem a mere distraction to focus on the Secretary of the Treasury dismissing complaints about inflation by suggesting that people in "blue" states should just move to "red" ones.

But my bailiwick is the LGBTQ+ press, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is gay. That was my excuse for paying so much attention to the previous Secretary of Transportation, and I'm sticking to it. If the next president's Secretary of Energy is a lesbian, I'll probably have to come up with a bunch of cartoons about her, too.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bessent's advice ain't gonna do ya a heckofalotta good if you already live in a red state. And if you're a New Yorker who's fond of Ethiopian-Peruvian fusion cuisine, the most au courant Broadway extravaganzas, or having an international airport within Uber distance, you might want to reconsider relocating to Shelby, Montana.

And you might want to check out what the pay grade for your line of work is out there, too.

By the way, if inflation is making life difficult for you, I really wouldn't recommend moving to Argentina.

Meet Mr. Mnuchin

It's time for another installment of Meet Your Cabinet!

Sixth in line in the presidential order of succession is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Mnuchin, 54, followed his father in the mortgage department at Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner there in 1994. He left in 2002, managing hedge funds and heading the residential lender OneWest, as well as founding a film production company, RatPac-Dune Entertainment.

An early supporter of Donald Joffrey Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Mnuchin accepted Trump's offer to be the national finance chairman of his campaign last April, after Trump had won the New York Republican primary. Up to that point, the Trump campaign had not set up a large-scale fund raising drive; Mnuchin set to work creating and managing one.

In spite of Trump's campaign attacks on the banking industry (an ad charged Goldman Sachs of having "robbed the working class"), Mnuchin joined the Trump administration, along with fellow Goldman Sachs alums Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Eric Ueland, and appointees up and down the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In August, Mnuchin came under scrutiny for his use of government aircraft after his wife, Louise Linton, posted a selfie on Instagram showing her deplaning a government jet in Kentucky in time to see the solar eclipse. Mnuchin denied that the solar eclipse had anything to do with the trip, saying "People in Kentucky took it [the solar eclipse] very seriously. Being a New Yorker, I don't have any interest in watching the eclipse."

An investigation by the Treasury Department's Office of the Inspector General subsequently found that Mnuchin had requested a military jet for his honeymoon travel to Europe in June. The OIG investigation also showed Mnuchin had taken a USAF C-37A to return from New York to Washington on August 15 after flying to New York commercially. Mnuchin's return flight lasted less than an hour and had an operating cost of at least $25,000.

Mnuchin has reimbursed the government for the definitely-non-eclipse-viewing flight, and has defended the honeymoon flight on the grounds that he needed access to secure communications during that trip. But a pattern is emerging of Trump cabinet officials who seem unable to accomplish anything without a five-figure government plane trip involved.