The Weekly WTF: Dumbest Congressional Hearing Ever
Plus, Todd Blanche's secret, the Elon Musk poverty watch, and why foreigners now favor China over America
THIS STUFF ACTUALLY HAPPENED:
African migrant crisis coming to America. President Trump warned that thousands of African migrants would overtake the United States if Democrats ever regain power. That was Trump’s response to the migrant crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish territory in northern Africa where more than 50,000 migrants recently arrived from neighboring Morocco, many of them transported by trafficking gangs. The migrants are trying to escape poverty and hunger.
“That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News on July 31.
Does that make you feel terrified? You’re supposed to feel terrified. Please feel terrified.
Now, most of the migrants returned to Morocco because there was no food or housing for them in Ceuta. Plus, the Spanish authorities, caught by surprise at first, sent military troops to Ceuta to deal with the problem. But think about it: If the migrants can’t get into Europe, the next thing they’ll probably try to do is bob across the Atlantic, right to America. Somebody do something! 😧
Blanche checked. Trump can’t get his attorney general nominee confirmed because he won’t give up on his plan for a personal government slush fund and perpetual indemnity for tax fraud. You might recall, Todd Blanche, as acting attorney general, helped set up the $1.8 billion fund Trump would be able to use to make payments to loyalists. That deal would also have shielded Trump and his family from future tax prosecution. Bipartisan outrage ensued, and a federal judge voided the deal in mid-July.
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Several Republican Senators want Blanche to pledge, in writing, that he will never try to revive that corrupt deal. Blanche has said he won’t revive it—but he won’t put it in writing. A few Republicans say they won’t vote for Blanche until he does, and without those GOP holdouts, there aren’t enough Senate votes to confirm Blanche.
What’s going on? Trump clearly doesn’t want Blanche to put anything in writing, probably because he fully intends to give the slush fund another shot. Otherwise he’d tell Blanche, just do what they’re asking and get confirmed. By refusing to put the pledge in writing, Blanche is signaling that yeah, Trump is going to try it again.
For anybody keeping track, there are only three or four out of 53 Republican senators who even seem to care that the next attorney general may be planning something that is blatantly corrupt. All the others seem ready to approve Blanche and let him commit fraud. Anyway, if the Senate doesn’t confirm him, Blanche can continue in an acting capacity indefinitely. But he could face a lot more flak from Congress than a fully confirmed AG would.
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Covid forever. Are you still stuck on Covid? Some members of Congress are, roughly five years after the nation emerged from the pandemic, hoping to forget all about it. That’s why we got the absurd spectacle of Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky holding a hearing featuring infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci, who invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a three-hour hearing, said virtually nothing, and even declined to answer when asked what color tie he was wearing.
What’s the point of this kind of crap? Paul is a strident libertarian who feuded with Fauci, the government’s Covid czar during the pandemic, over masking requirements and other restrictions. He wanted to grill Fauci on what may have been a change of view over how the Covid virusemerged in the first place. He also clearly wanted to embarrass Fauci. Paul published hundreds of pages of diary notes Fauci kept during the pandemic, including some in which the eminent physician preened about his fame and celebrity connections. Paul got the notes because Fauci kept them on a government computer, and Trump staffers discovered them.
Fauci retired from the government in 2022, at the age of 82. He repeatedly took the fifth during the July 29 hearing because he thought Paul and other critics would try to trick him into committing perjury, which the Trump administration could then prosecute. Fauci was probably right about that. So the ultimate outcome was, two giant egos faced off, accomplishing nothing.
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For what it’s worth, scientists still aren’t sure how Covid originated—and a vindictive congressional hearing was never going to shed any light at all on the mystery.
Hedgefund.gov. The US government has obtained ownership stakes in at least seven additional companies, as Trump operates what is becoming a kind of government-run hedge fund. The new deal involves about $870 million in funding for stakes in seven tech companies. There are now 37 deals in which the Trump administration has bought stakes in private-sector companies or announced plans to. Prominent targets include US Steel, Intel, Westinghouse, GlobalFoundries, and IBM.
Many of these deals are financed using money from the 2022 CHIPS Act, which Congress never meant to be siphoned off for equity purchases in companies. The funding was mainly for grants and incentives to spur US-based technology development. Trump changed the program without Congressional approval.
This quasi-nationalization of certain companies has drawn bipartisan criticism because it’s likely to politicize decision-making at some private-sector businesses. It also distorts capitalism by giving Trump’s favored companies the advantage of too-big-to-fail status, thanks to their imposing government investor. Uncle Sam is badly overreaching under Trump.
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Elon Musk poverty watch. The tech lord has lost half his net worth during the last six weeks. After his company SpaceX went public in mid-June, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, with a net worth that peaked at $1.4 trillion. But after surging, SpaceX’s share price has plunged nearly 50% from its peak, with the value of Musk’s share of the company dropping by the same amount.
His other big company, Tesla, has been falling too, with that stock down 31% for the year. Musk’s net worth is now around $700 billion. For now, the world is trillionaireless.
China trumps America. An annual Pew Research survey finds that China now has a better reputation around the world than the United States. Once a year, Pew conducts a huge survey on global attitudes toward America. This year, in 25 of 36 countries, more people said they had a favorable view of China than a favorable view of the United States. In only six countries did the United States outrank China. In five others, views were split more or less equally.
China’s biggest fans are in Pakistan, Malaysia, Palestine, Indonesia, and Singapore. The United States is most popular in Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, and the Philippines. Canada and most European countries, including Spain, Italy, and France, now break toward China.
Something about the United States seems to have changed during the last year or two. In 2024, when Joe Biden was president, a median 47% of global respondents said they had confidence in the US president. Now that Trump is in the White House, only 21% say they have confidence in the US president. Can anybody connect the dots?
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