Marble Falls Back in the USA, Trump continues to court chaos, which was hardly a surprise, and largely bereft of even a hint of rationality.
He’s obsessed with his narcissistic capitol city makeover. The reflecting pool was always a $14 million, no bid, boondoggle, and done with so much ineptness that the paint is peeling and algae is back in full bloom. In his standard go to move, Trump blames the scandal on the vandals, asking us to believe in some kind of pool terrorists. The ballroom is an even larger extravaganza, where he has gone from claiming it would all be done with private money, to asking for one-billion for the job and seeing over $350 million transferred from training and recruiting Secret Service to the Government Service Administration on a sideways, no look effort to finance this mess. The biggest distraction is a dangerous one, and that’s his proposal for some kind of 250-foot-high monument to insanity that would endanger planes flying into DC National airport.
All of that pales to the lengths that he is willing to go to not just uglify Washington, DC, but to directly inflict more pain on the American people. In a miracle of sorts, bipartisan majorities passed a new housing bill. At the eleventh hour, Trump is now bawling in the corner and wailing that he will not sign this modest effort, unless and until he gets his way.
What’s in the housing bill, you might wonder? This is no radical reform, but it would include among other things, new provisions that would streamline environmental reviews, remove restrictions for the construction of manufactured homes, increase access to small-dollar mortgages, and, moving forward, bar large institutional investors like private equity firms from owning more than 350 single-family homes. The Washington Post offers more detail, saying the bill would…
eliminate federal regulations on manufactured homes, such as a requirement that they include a metal-frame chassis, which can add as much as $10,000 to the cost. The deal would ease federal restrictions on how much banks can invest in affordable housing and community development projects. [And create]… a competitive grant program to encourage local officials to streamline their permitting processes and increase housing density.
It won’t change the game, but it’s a step forward on several fronts.
What’s the beef?
Trump has been at loggerheads with the Senate for months over his so-called SAVE bill where he wants to create more barriers to access voting and assert more federal control over constitutionally required state administration of voter lists. Ironically, the same day that Trump upset the apple cart by refusing at the last minute to sign the housing bill, a federal panel blocked his Justice Department’s effort to coerce the state of Michigan into turning over their voter list, arguing that the federal government had no such power. This is still all about Trump’s fallacious claims that he never lost the election to Joe Biden, but there was some kind of voter fraud, which at any level he has never been able to prove. With the impending butt kicking in the midterm elections in November, he’s desperate to try and change the rules of the game.
What a mess!
Here we have it. Hardly two weeks before the 250th anniversary on July 4th, Washington will look like a construction site and the reflecting pool will look like a sewage canal, while chaos will reign from Congress to the White House, a typical Trump day in America.