THE PLANE! THE PLANE!

Here's an obvious solution to the whole Qatari plane deal:

Trump's library takes the plane (sooner or later) and pays for storage and so forth. When Trump leaves the White House, he can do whatever he wants with the damned thing.

This way the bribe/gift will not reach him while he's President. No harm/no foul.

(Sort of. No hassle with the Constitution, at least. Probably.)

Leave the Defense Department out of it. The American people will not have to foot the bill to renovate/make safe this white elephant because the 747-8 will never be Air Force One.

Bottom line: The baby gets his toy; the rest of us go back to worrying about the next eminent threat to America.

Sure, it's a kind of appeasement.

But I think appeasement has been given a bad name. True, it helped precipitate the Second World War, but it also set the stage for the ultimate defeat of the Third Reich.

Appeasement gave Hitler the confidence to start the war two years before the military and weapons production were ready for it. Initial success was followed by inevitable and utter failure.

Appeasement might have been a way of giving the bastard enough rope to hang himself.

(BTW: "86 47" doesn't mean assassinate the president. It means get rid of the guy, some how. If the 2026 elections favor the Dems, impeachment and conviction will do the job handily. Ballots, not bullets.)

MAKE IT SO

It doesn't bother Donald Trump that the majority of American citizens are unhappy with his performance as President.

Why should he care what the polls say? He's convinced himself they're all fake.

If not irrelevant: He won by a landslide, don't forget, which means he has a mandate to do exactly what he's doing.

I suppose it would be pointless to explain to him that he won by a narrow margin (no landslide) and that if the election were held again today he would decidedly not be President. How could it matter: The people said yes to him once, and that's enough. He's determined to hold the country to that faulty decision.

On Meet the Press, Trump was told the American people didn't sign up for this. He said: They did sign up for this.

It's as if he's saying: "I told you what I was going to do and you voted me into office. Stop whining and take your medicine!"

Two problems with that:

(1) When he said he was going to do various stuff, he never once added that he intended to do everything illegally.

(On the other hand, had he actually pointed out at rallies he planned to go rogue to get things done, the response would probably have been howling assent. The defective yak-heads he accumulated before him were literally up for anything he proposed. After all, that's why they came: "We love you, boss! Now pass out the damn Kool-aid! We're dying of thirst!")

(2) When a candidate makes a crap-load of promises, getting elected doesn't mean he gets to do them all. Could be there's only one topic folks used in deciding their vote. And since some things are easier to get done than others, it's likely the new President would gobble up the low-hanging fruit first. In fact, it might be that one thing voters really wanted done can't be done at all, or if done, could only be done in a misleading manner.

("We're going to have a country of millionaires!" Turns out the guy didn't mean everybody was going to become a millionaire. He just meant he'd be deporting to Libya anybody who wasn't already a millionaire.)

Under our (current) constitution, the executive branch is tasked with enforcing the law, not breaking the law when enforcing it proves to be inconvenient for the accomplishment of this or that political agenda.

When courts point out that America is not at war and as a result wartime statutes cannot be used to deport folks willy-nilly to the four winds, Trump says the courts want everybody to live at the whim of violent thugs.

Not at all. The courts are simply saying that due process under the law is a thing. Deal with it.

When Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor, he went to the Reichstag to demand emergency powers. (And outside, the Brown-Shirts were chanting they would murder anybody who failed to vote for emergency powers.)

In contrast, Donald Trump lied about what's going on and granted emergency powers to himself.

(Like they say, it's easier to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission. More straightforward, at least. And you can appeal the courts' decisions till Doomsday, all the while doing whatever you want. Deny, deny, deny.)

Trump is ruling by executive order—like a king. It suits his temperament.

The man knows what he knows and it's pointless to suggest he could be wrong about anything.

Could he pick up the phone and get Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to this country? Absolutely. But he won't because somebody sent him a doctored photograph that shows "MS-13" tattooed on the man's hand. Never mind the image has been 'shopped. Never mind that even if the guy was in MS-13 he didn't deserve to be sent of that prison in El Salvador without due process of law.

Trump can see, plain as day, the characters MS 13, and that's an end to it. No point in arguing.

Besides, arguing with kings could get you sent to the Tower. If not beheaded.

Trump has already assumed the power to rendition illegals to black sites around the world. All he needs now is to grant himself the power to do the same to citizens who fail to show him proper deference.

And maybe he'll get his chance.

The Supreme Court is set to take up birthright citizenship. If Trump could crack that sucker, we'll all be fair game.