What did Donald Trump do today?

He picked some communications officers.

Today, Trump announced he was appointing Karoline Leavitt as his press secretary, and Steven Cheung as his director of communications.

Leavitt is a 27-year-old campaign spokesperson who has drawn comparison to Hope Hicks, a spokesperson turned advisor in Trump's first administration. Both were very young and inexperienced, but had (or adopted) a certain look Trump favors in his spokeswomen, and both reportedly have a knack for soothing Trump's emotional outbursts. 

Cheung is a former spokesperson for Ultimate Fighting Championship. He recently falsely accused a law enforcement officer of having a mental breakdown when she objected to the Trump campaign using Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op. He called a South Carolina politician a "bitch" to deflect from first-hand witness accounts that Trump used racial slurs on the set of his game show. He used racial dog-whistles to suggest that Vice-President Kamala Harris "smells."

Leavitt and Cheung will be the main White House employees dealing with members of the press, whom Trump has threatened with violence, imprisonment, and worse.

So what?

• White House communications officials are supposed to work for the American people, not as political surrogates.

• They're also supposed to be qualified for their jobs.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got "mentored" in economics.

Argentine president Javier Milei today became the first foreign leader to meet with Trump since his re-election. A self-described libertarian, Milei has decimated the workforce of the Argentinian government—something that Trump has promised to do in the United States.

Milei has a lot to gain from the support of an American president, and has in the past week tried to position himself as a sort of economic mentor for Trump.

Trump, who is notoriously susceptible to flattery and manipulation by world leaders, appears to have been convinced. He called Milei his "favorite president" yesterday and cited what he apparently thought were Milei's economic accomplishments.

Since Milei took office, annual inflation has spiked into the 200-300% range. The number of Argentinians living in poverty has gone up 36%.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents should get their economic advice from actual U.S. government experts, not foreign leaders with their own agenda.
  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He helped Matt Gaetz evade an investigation into child prostitution allegations by nominating him for attorney general.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was the subject of a criminal and later House Ethics Committee investigation for child sex trafficking. One of Gaetz's associates, Joel Greenberg, pleaded guilty in 2021 to six charges including bribery of a public official and sex trafficking of a minor. 

In 2018, Gaetz paid Greenberg $900 via Venmo, listing the name of a sex-trafficked girl in the memo. Greenberg then paid an identical amount three young women, with the payments labeled things like "books" and "tuition" and "school."

In the waning days of the Trump administration, Gaetz desperately sought a pardon from Trump for violations of federal sex trafficking laws.

The House Ethics Committee was set to release its investigative report on the matter on Friday, but today Trump tapped Gaetz to be his next attorney general. Gaetz, who could have stayed in office in the meantime, resigned immediately. This means he is no longer under the jurisdiction of that committee.

It's not clear if Gaetz could be confirmed, even with a 53-vote Republican Senate majority. While he was never criminally charged, the allegations that he paid minors for sex were convincing to many Republicans, too.

Why does this matter?

• The attorney general of the United States shouldn't be a political crony of the president.

• The attorney general also shouldn't be someone credibly accused of sex crimes against minors.

Coverage resumes

This blog ceased publication on November 8, 2020, when Joe Biden's victory became apparent. I hoped, along with tens of millions of other Americans, that the Trump presidency, and Trump's malign influence on American politics, would begin to fade from memory.

Maybe we got too much of what we asked for.

If this daily blog with its HTML 1.0 design ever changed anyone's mind about Donald Trump, I'd be surprised. Its readership was miniscule and there was no shortage of news about Trump. In fact, there was too much—some people read it because they wanted to engage with at most one thing Trump did.

Of course, people's minds did change about Trump, and they'll change again without any help from me. Still, it seemed important at the time to keep some kind of record of just how relentlessly dangerous and criminal Trump's unhinged presidency could be. He was famously, provably lazy at his day job, often putting in three-day weeks filled with multi-hour blocks of "executive time" that he spent tweeting or watching TV. But he never took a day off from the spotlight—in fact, he seemed to delight in trolling Americans with drama for drama's sake.

In the years since, I've occasionally paged back through what I wrote here. It's astonishing how easy it is to forget the details, although in fairness there were more than 1,400 days in his term. I can't help but wonder if that accounts for his victory in the 2024 election. Perhaps he was so good at flooding the zone with reality-TV drama that it crowded out memories of the horrific blend of criminality and incompetence. (See the sidebar for a handy summary.)

I don't want to do this again. I so enjoyed not having to think about Trump every day. But I know I'll have to anyway. Writing down a little bit of what he says and does every day isn't much of an act of resistance, but it is something, and doing something feels better than doing nothing.

I'll resume regular posting in a few weeks, once I've had time to mourn what we've already lost and what we surely will. Good luck to us all.