Welcome back. TGIF is financially structured in a funny way. I’m paid on one date per month if I’m very good. So let’s get to the news because 5,000 words and I qualify for guac on the side (the date is Chipotle, the person the date is with is Bari’s assistant Sean).
→ Oh, Joe Biden: He’s still the sitting president, so we begin here. Another week brings us yet more details on how far Biden has been falling mentally, this time coming from The Wall Street Journal, where a team of reporters describe an insulated, out-of-contact Joe, beginning when he took office. Over his presidency he’s had very, very little contact with people you’d think of as important top figures in the government. We already know he didn’t do evenings, but he wasn’t great in the mornings either. But the 40 minutes in the middle of the day after his nap and before his IV drip? That’s the gold right there. Right at 2:20–3? That’s when America is Online.
“[I]n the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.”
Ahead of the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, key government figures couldn’t get in touch with Joe. As inflation crushed consumers, then–Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was on her own.
Here’s Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: “I really had no personal contact with this president.”
Biden was the cozy vessel. He was the comforting smile, a flirty wink that said, I’m normal and you’re safe. In the background, up very early and also very late, were busy bee staffers with a very different vision for the country: opening the border on Day One; $175 billion for student loan forgiveness; plus, for good measure, his presidential proclamation recognizing Trans Day of Visibility (what about lesbians, Joe!). Any given day, staffers just put on the Joe Biden bodysuit and did something absolutely bananas and then said, “Whoa, whoa, are you calling Joe Biden a communist?”
Anyway, this is me reading tea leaves, but Biden this week chose the leftist magazine The American Prospect to publish his farewell essay. Obama chose The Economist, a stately bugle for intelligent globalists such as myself. Which is all to say: Joe Biden was never a moderate president. From the day he got in, his mind was slipping and his policies were wild, and in polite, elite society we were all supposed to pretend otherwise because he does give a moderate vibe with those shades and the ice cream cones. And he flirted with a biker chick once—doing a little inappropriate flirting does feel moderate. I do regard that as being politically aligned with me.
→ Budget battle: President-elect Elon Musk, along with a conservative influencer based in Florida (Donald Trump), successfully prevented Congress from passing a big new budget, even though Speaker Mike Johnson was good with it. Speaker Johnson, who looks and talks like a Boy Scout, had made it just perfect, he thought: The budget had enough handouts for red states and for blue states. It was perfectly seasoned with scams, delicately balanced with corruption. The ears were marked. It was ready to go.
Then these hooligans came in and threw it in the air. “Congress should only get a raise when the budget is balanced,” posted President Musk, amid rapid-fire replies to various right-wing X accounts of varying levels of insanity— which is now just called the legislative process. The new trend for Republican members of Congress is posting pictures showing how many pages the budget is and pretending they’re reading it. And it is a lot of pages (1,500)! Vivek says he will read the whole thing. This is becoming the ice bucket challenge but for Congress, and I promise, guys, you don’t need to do this, just as no one needed to post wet T-shirt videos and pretend it was for whatever the ice bucket challenge was for. We, the taxpayers, know that you, our representatives, do not know what you’re voting for. And that is the sacred bond of democracy.
While Elon, the President-Elect-by-Vibes, is successfully revamping the entire U.S. government’s budget, Donald Trump is also doing important things.
Brilliant activity for him, guys. The perfect Trump quagmire topic. This involves so many parties. It’s both important to everyone and important to no one. I’m pretty sure he means “make daylight saving permanent,” but whatever. Elon’s going to be in a complex transaction with Xi Jinping, trading Maine for a new city in Heilongjiang province, while Trump is still just Truthing hard about daylight saving time.