Grifter-in-Chief Peddles Snake Oil From White House Podium
Many things have happened. Here are some of the things. This is the morning memo of TPM. Register for the e-mail version.
High popalorum and low popahirum
Despite all the echoes of European fascism at the beginning of the 20th century, Donald Trump is still firmly planted in the long American tradition of the snake oil seller, carnival barkers and crooks. He is at least as strong in American history as our Puritanism, seated in the counterweight of his ascetic moralist self-deprivation. We celebrate charlatans like Pt Barnum, do scoundrels in adorable archetypes and root the conversion of crooks like “teacher” Harold Hill.
The crossing between Huckers and politicians did not start with Trump.
Dudley J. Leblanc de Louisiana, who intermittently served as the legislature in the 1920s in the 1970s, made a fortune by creating the patented medication labeled Hadacol. In the early 1950s, Hadacol was a marketing wonder, stimulated by the traveling medicine The Hadacol Caravan, which presented some of the main artists of the time, including Hank Williams. What made Hadacol so popular was less its promise of miracle remedies and more of its 12%alcohol content. You could drink it in dry counties where little was available.
Leblanc, whose doubtful Wikipedia page attributes the idea of social security to him, made millions of people on high-level high-level surface, Hadacol renown before everything collapsed in the midst of unpaid invoices, late taxes and the examination of the Federal Commerce Commission (more on which of the Supreme Court below). “The Federal Trade Commission complained that the Ballyhoo sillyly baked by Hadacol (” The Boogie Hadacol makes you Boogie-Woogie all the time “) is” false, misleading and misleading “by representing nostrum as” effective treatment and healing of dozens of diseases and diseases “, reported Time Magazine in 1951.
The snake oil seller is such an element of our culture that one of the most famous grifters in American politics, the Senator of Louisiana, Huey Long, used the trope to denigrate the two main political parties by trying to stand out. The parties were, he said, not different from those of the patented medication seller selling the same product under delicately different names: the high papalorum and the low popahirum. Invited to explain the difference between the two bottles, the seller explained that they were both made from the same tree, but they were different: the first was made of the peel off from top to bottom and the last taken off from bottom.
Yesterday, HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Medicine Medicine Show made a stop at the White House, where President Trump was the star barker at a press conference outside the rails. Taking a non -scientific objective on vaccines and unfounded links between Tylenol and Autism, the President has made a long and winding reflection recalling some of the worst pressors of the Covid era boosting bleach and ultraviolet light:
Medical experts, scientists and public health defenders were dismayed by the White House scene.
Roberts runs sounds to final death for Indy agencies
It was normal that the day of President Trump and his HHS secretary made fun of science and praised unproven remedies, the Supreme Court of Chief Judge John Roberts took a hammer at the FTC.
In another abuse of his shadow file, the Court of Roberts actually canceled its own centenary precedent on independent agencies and enabled Trump’s dismissal of the Democratic Commissioner to the FTC to enter into force during the case of the case.
The previous one that the Supreme Court has actually canceled, Humphrey’s executorwas a case of 1935 On the dismissal of an FTC commissioner – So it could barely be more about. The court was therefore impatient to change the course he agreed to resume the case immediately rather than waiting for the Court of Appeal to hear it. It was a contrast to, for example, the refusal of the Roberts Court to consider the similar demand for Accelerated Treatment Counsel Jack Smith in the Trump’s presidential immunity case. And we all know how it turned out.
Even judge Elana Kagan, generally more moderate than her two liberal colleagues in the court, managed indignation and indignation in her dissent: “Our emergency file should never be used, as was this year, to allow what our own previous bars. Even more, it should not be used, as was also the separation of the transfer routes.
Quick -relaxed operation: the non -denial denial of Homan
It was not only extraordinary that the White House took on a public position on the underlying facts of a criminal investigation which he blocked and buried. It was also comical that, while the secretary of press Karoline Leavitt denied that the border tsar Tom Homan had taken the $ 50,000 in a Cava bag in an exchange which allegedly recorded by the FBI, Homan for his part did not say it directly in an interview last night on Fox News with Laura Ingraham:
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