This is not normal, Part XXIVLZ

Trump arrives for NATO summit: The Guardian

What woke me up to the need to write this column were the reports, as Trump held his good-bye press conference in the Netherlands after the NATO summit this morning, that the other European leaders had agreed last week to shorten the summit from three days to one and cut the meeting of NATO leaders down to two and half hours, to accommodate our president’s “short attention span,” according to two reports out of Europe. NPR this morning noted that Trump had not growled at the other leaders about NATO being irrelevant and useless, or gone on and on about the others “not paying their fair share” as he did during his first term every time the four letters N and A and T and O were strung together in his presence.

“It seems they’ve learned how to flatter him,” one analyst said on NPR. That made the summit a grand success, she observed.

I could make snarky jokes about Trump falling asleep at the summit meeting, two and a half hours apparently being too long for him, but I’ll settle for This Is Not Normal.

Nor is it normal for the President of the United States to call for a CNN correspondent, Natasha Bertrand, to be “fired” and “thrown out like a dog.” Trump continued his attack on Truth Social, apparently posted from Air Force One on his way back from Europe: “She lied on the Laptop from Hell Story, and now she lied on the Nuclear Sites Story, attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit 'pay dirt' — TOTAL OBLITERATION!"

Laptop from Hell Story? Destroy our Patriot Pilots?

“CNN is scum, MSDNC is scum, the New York Times is scum. They’re bad people, they’re sick,” Trump went on. “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY.”

Trump is trying to say that any questioning of the efficacy of the bombing of Fordo is an attack, not on his judgement in ordering the bombing, but on the Air Force pilots who flew the B-2 bombers. The intelligence report on the effectiveness of the bombing being quoted by CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, was produced by his own Defense Intelligence Agency.

This is not normal.

Back in the good old U.S.A., Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against all 15 federal judges in the federal court district of Maryland over an order issued in Maryland that requires all deportations to be paused 48 hours so that immigrants picked up by ICE agents can file a petition for habeas corpus challenging their detention by ICE.

Previous to this lawsuit, which legal experts have called unprecedented, federal judges have enjoyed immunity from lawsuits challenging the execution of their duties as part of the judiciary. The Supreme Court has already ruled that immigrant detainees are entitled to protection of their right to due process under law.

This kind of lawsuit has never been filed against federal judges by the government. It’s not normal.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled U.S. funding of GAVI, the international vaccine agency, accusing the agency of “ignoring the science” regarding child vaccinations around the world. Kennedy told the agency that the U.S. would not make good the Biden administration’s $1.2 billion pledge to assist in vaccinating children in poor foreign countries. The decision was made unilaterally by Kennedy and delivered to the international agency in a video sent to the meeting of international members of GAVI who had gathered to support the goals of vaccinating children against infectious diseases. Vaccinations have succeeded in nearly totally wiping out certain childhood diseases such as polio, measles and rubella that were once the cause of widespread illness and death among children.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s new vaccine advisory panel held its first meeting in Chicago today. Kennedy had fired the previous vaccine panel and appointed eight new members. One of his new appointees withdrew from the panel, leaving only seven to meet in Chicago today. The chairman of the new panel, a vaccine skeptic who was critical of the COVID vaccine, announced that the panel will review the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella shot that has been used safely to vaccinate children for many years. During tomorrow’s meeting, the panel will be addressed by Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense Fund, an anti-vaccine group, on the use of the preservative, thimerosal, which has been phased out of U.S. vaccines. In a slide presentation that has been prepared to be delivered to the vaccine panel tomorrow, Redwood quoted a study that does not exist. Redwood was forced to remove the reference to the non-existent study when the person she quoted as its author said he had not done the study.

The seven members of the vaccine panel have not undergone any form of vetting of their credentials or been cleared for conflicts of interest as required by law for service on the panel.

This is not normal. Kennedy himself is not normal.

In his press conference earlier today in the Netherlands, Trump compared his bombing attack on Iran to the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. “Actually, if you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war too. This ended a war in a different way. But it was so devastating," Trump bragged.

This is the man who has the codes to order the use of our nuclear arsenal. None of this is normal. He is not normal. And yet, a majority of our fellow Americans elected him President.