(Dobbs) A Question For Every Contradiction

We can see right through these people if we look.

Earlier this week, we published Part I of a commentary about the contradictions between what the Trump Administration through one side of its mouth professes to support, and what it actually says and does through the other side. Part I showed Exhibits A through D, ending on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who professes to abhor politicization of her department but in fact has ratcheted it up. This is Part II.

_____________________________________________________________________

Exhibit E: More about Pam Bondi. She has promised transparency. Donald Trump has promised transparency. They have been paper promises.

Bondi at some point came into possession of anywhere between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares— disclosure laws only require a range— of the president’s “Trump Media & Technology Group,” which is the parent company to his social media site Truth Social. She was required, per the terms of an ethics agreement when she took office, to sell those shares by early this month. However, she sold them well before that. When? On April 2, which conveniently happened to be Trump’s “Liberation Day” when, after the markets closed, he announced earth-shaking tariffs on products from nations around the world.

The stock market went through the floor. Trump Media went through the floor.

But Bondi’s stock? Conveniently, she sold before its value dropped by almost 15 percent. As ProPublica reported, trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through work could violate the law.

Just a coincidence? We report, you decide. Any questions?

Exhibit F: Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem. She wants a new $50 million airplane. And President Donald Trump. All he wants— putting aside his own new airplane, “gifted” from Qatar, to which any healthy skeptic can only say “Yeah, right!”— is a parade.

The mission statement of the Department of Government Efficiency, the unaccountable entity run by Co-President Elon Musk, is to put an axe to waste, fraud, and abuse. Perverting that without parallel, it has done its best to choke off foreign aid to nations in need— meaning, nations with citizens uprooted by wars and societies with starving children. And it has taken a chainsaw to government services on which millions of Americans depend.

$50 million would buy a lot of food, a lot of tents, and a few more people to assist retirees who need help with Social Security. But Secretary Noem wants to spend it on a 16-passenger Gulfstream V.

She already has one by the way, but she says it’s time for a new one. She also has at her disposal the department’s $66 million Gulfstream 550, which can carry 19.

Waste, fraud, and abuse? In the world of Donald Trump, charity begins at home.

It’s like Trump’s plan to spend between $25 and $45 million for a parade on June 14th. Ostensibly the parade would celebrate the 250th anniversary of the vote by the Continental Congress to create the American army. But that just so happens to also be Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. Warplanes overhead, tanks on the streets, and upwards of 6,000 troops will make for a great birthday party.

It might be less obscene if Trump hadn’t announced a plan in March to eliminate some 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and if his “big beautiful bill” now worming its way through Congress didn’t propose cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, which hurts this nation’s neediest citizens.

$50 million for a new plane for Kristi Noem. Up to $45 million for a parade on the president’s birthday. Meantime, this rich nation withdraws from its traditional mission helping societies in stress and citizens at home.

Any questions?

Exhibit G: Continuing with the theme of abandoning people we’ve always helped, this is about the welcoming embrace and fast path to citizenship that Trump has extended to Afrikaners, the old white stewards of apartheid in South Africa. A week ago, the first planeload landed in Washington.

After tweeting a few years ago that there was “large scale killing” of white farmers in South Africa, Trump now pins their alleged suffering on the black majority government, which he attests is persecuting them. His press secretary issued the following statement: “Afrikaner refugees who arrived in the United States today shared their harrowing stories of discrimination and persecution in South Africa, including violent attacks, vandalism of property, death threats, racial slurs against farmers, songs calling for the death of all Afrikaners, affirmative action laws that prevent many from finding work and a government that, at a minimum, did not respond to their requests for help.”

The mystery is, when Trump is deporting refugees from Latin America and Asia and black Africa and the Middle East whose home countries are infamously known for their brutality against dissidents and minority groups, why import Afrikaners with open arms? Maybe because, unlike the deportees, the Afrikaners are white?

Any questions?

Exhibit H: shutting down government grants to combat misinformation.

Misinformation has been Trump’s stock-in-trade. It comes naturally to a man who can’t tell the difference between the truth and a lie. That’s part of the reason why, after January 6th, the mainstream social media world shut down Donald Trump.

Like every slight he has ever suffered, he has never forgotten. So now, universities are losing their scientific grants to study fabricated photos and videos generated by artificial intelligence, and to understand how social media gets manipulated. In other words, to get at the root of the practices of people like Trump.

He says this research results in online censorship and he’s just protecting the First Amendment. But maybe it’s the other way around: he’s just protecting himself.

Any questions?

Exhibit I: the latest reversal(s) on tariffs. The president promised a quick resolution to the tariff mess because countries would come running to make a deal and get in his good graces. Now all he’s saying is, they won’t all get good deals because they can’t all get in the door.

He said at the end of his Middle East trip, “We have, at the same time, 150 countries that want to make a deal, but you’re not able to see that many countries. So at a certain point, over the next two to three weeks, I think Scott (Bessent, treasury secretary) and Howard (Lutnick, commerce secretary) will be sending letters out, essentially telling people, we’ll be very fair, but we’ll be telling people what they’ll be paying to do business in the United States.”

He’s pretending it’s a sign of success but the reality is, Plan A failed and he had no Plan B.

Trump put everyone in a quandary and now, unable to schedule negotiations with every country (if he’s even telling the truth about that), he’s putting them in a vice. In the meantime, the mess is spreading all over the floor.

Note that I wrote about Trump's “latest reversal(s)” on tariffs. That’s because of the even later one, where he was so angered by Walmart’s announcement that it would have to raise some prices because of the tariffs that he demanded on Truth Social that Walmart should “EAT THE TARIFFS, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING.” Mattel had threatened the same thing— price rises— to which the president threatened to put a 100% tariff on their products and warned, Mattel “won’t sell one toy in the United States.”

So much for his inane and inaccurate insistence that the tariffs are paid by nations and exporters overseas, while American companies and consumers wouldn’t feel any pinch in their pocketbooks.

Any questions?

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 38-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net