Federal records are all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, made or received by a Federal agency under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business. Federal records must be preserved by an agency – as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations or other activities of the United States Government or because of the informational value of the data in them.

“Federal Records Management”/The National Archives

Sometime during our childhood, we were all introduced to an exercise called, “Telephone.”  Participants would stand in a line or circle.  The process began with the facilitator whispering a message in the ear of one of the players.  That person would then repeat the message to the person standing next to him or her.  And so on, until the penultimate participate whispered the message to the last person in line.  That individual would then share the message he/she received followed by the facilitator restating the original message.  The teaching moment involved a demonstration how a rumor passed from one person to another morphs with each iteration to the point where it is largely unrecognizable from the original source.

As well documented, the Trump administration has changed the rules.  No longer do they need a communications conga line to turn a given set of facts into a conspiracy or a lie. The president has usurped the role of originator, ultimate recipient and every participant in between.  Perhaps the best example was his claim millions of dead people, some older that the USA itself, were still getting social security payments.  A legitimate story about the outdated COBOL computer program to track Social Security accounts became a scandal of unbelievable proportions.  By March 6, 2025, during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, he had convinced himself the Social Security Administration was still making payments to over 16 million people over the age of 110, including one who was 360 years old.  Trump was right.  It WAS unbelievable because it was not true.

But as Arlo Guthrie would say, “That’s not what I came here to talk about.”  More importantly, as we learned this week, the Trump administration has spent the last two years perfecting a new game.  For lack of a better name, I will call it “Telegraph.”  Here is how it works.

• Since the days of Newt Gingrich, aggrieved Republicans or now MAGA cultists have been making a list of governmental institutions, programs, officials or laws they believe are the source of their grievance.
• American oligarchs created and funded the Heritage Foundation to be the keeper of the grievances and to construct a comprehensive plan to eliminate all the barriers to shape the government, economy and culture in their own image.
• The oligarchs then needed a useful idiot who would run for president on their platform.
• Next, pack the Supreme Court with justices who would give their useful idiot free rein.
• In what turned out to be an unsuccessful dry run in 2017, the oligarchs wrongly assumed their useful idiot could build a team to implement their agenda.
• Therefore, for their second attempt in 2020, the oligarchs commissioned the Heritage Foundation to draft a 980-page, step-by-step manual for addressing personal grievances and anointed their own vice-useful idiot.
• Finally, they filled every major position in the executive branch either with one of their own or other useful idiots who would do exactly what the chief useful idiot told them to do.

So why do I call the new game “Telegraph.”  Because anyone who was paying attention no longer had to speculate what a second Trump administration would bring.  The oligarchs and their puppets “telegraphed” exactly what would happen.  There is no more proof of this than the case of the security lapse on Signal by useful idiots Vance, Hegseth, Gabbard, Waltz and Ratcliffe.  Which begs the question, “Why was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent there?”  He obviously served two purposes.  First, he was the designated oligarch (a former hedge fund manager) to protect his fellow oligarchs’ interests.  Second, he was one of the architects of Project 2025 and, therefore, it was his responsibility to ensure the useful idiots followed the script verbatim.

And follow it they did.  Which explains why the Yemen confab was conducted on the Signal app.  One of the MAGA petty grievances from Trump 1.0 was the Presidential Records Act, the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, which Trump and his benefactors claimed provided fodder for Congressional oversight and the media.  To avoid a repeat of this legal “inconvenience,” government officials began using alternative communications channels to circumvent the requirements contained in these three legislated prerogatives.  The danger to governmental transparency and oversight were clear as laid out in a 2021 analysis of the practice by SUNY-Stony Brook professor Jessica Wittman.

Recent litigation has highlighted why courts, attorneys, and other legal researchers must consider social media as a primary source of government information, particularly when records may become inaccessible once a social media post is modified or deleted, or when technology becomes obsolete…Until clear and consistent retention policies exist and there are systemic ways to access and preserve social media as government information, the definition of a “record” becomes irrelevant.

Knowing everything Trump and his sycophants say is either an admission of guilt or projection, the creation of “policy chats” on Signal proved their denunciations of Hillary’s emails and Hunter’s laptop were merely a roadmap how they would use non-traditional channels to expunge the record of improper or even illegal abuses of executive power.

Project 2025 is nothing more than a 980-page telegram of what the oligarchs and their useful idiots plan to do to change the sacred constitutional and legal foundations that made the United States exceptional as a role model for self-governance.  They could have saved a lot of time, energy and paper if only they had sent the following Western Union condolence telegram.

Unfortunately, nobody including the voters, Congress, the Supreme Court and both political parties responded by pointing out the word “STOP” was omitted at the end of the message.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

Democrats slammed the confirmation process, with some fuming that lawmakers were not given access to an FBI background check detailing the sordid allegations.

~Juliegrace Brufke/The Daily Beast

In the Coen brothers 2009 film “A Serious Man,” protagonist Larry Gopnik (portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg), suffering from a growing series of misfortunes, seeks the guidance of his rabbi.  During the session, the rabbi tells Gopnik about another congregant, Sussman the dentist, who had sought his advice.  Sussman, while casting a mold of a non-Jewish (a goy) patient’s teeth, discovers Hebrew letters etched on the inside of his lower teeth, when translated, say, “Help me.”  Is it a sign from God?  The scene ends as follows:

GOPNIK: So what did you tell him?
RABBI:  Sussman?
GOPNIK:  Yes!
RABBI:  Is it…relevant?
GOPNIK:  Well–isn’t that why you’re telling me?
RABBI:  We can’t know everything.
GOPNIK (to himself): It sounds like you don’t know anything.

Exasperated and curious, Gopnik asks, “And what happened to the goy?”  To which the rabbi replies, “The goy?  Who cares?”

I came to the same conclusion as I watched excerpts of the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearings for Defense Secretary designee Pete Hegseth, confirmed in the opening quote.  “Is it…relevant?”  “So, he cheats on his wife, drinks to excess and when it comes to financial management is a complete failure.  Who cares?”  Ulysses S. Grant was a alcoholic.  John Kennedy was a philanderer.  Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy six times.  NOBODY CARES.  So why waste time on the irrelevant.

In a country of 350 million citizens, there are drunks, whoremongers and shysters who would make damn good Defense secretaries because they have the knowledge and experience to understand when and where lethal force is the appropriate response to an international crisis.  The secretary’s primary job is not to count beans or micromanage the HR department.  (The Heritage Foundation will find other loyalists, who do not face Senate confirmation, to do those jobs.)  He is there to advise the president about military options as a tool of foreign policy and whether there exists sufficient capacity to wield that hammer.  Why not ask Hegseth:

• When do think it is appropriate for the U.S. military to engage in a regional conflict?
• How many such conflicts do we have the capacity to take on at one time?
• What criteria will you use to determine the appropriate balance among land, air, naval and space assets in the next defense budget?

Unfortunately, this ship has already sailed.  One can only imagine the vague or inaccurate answers Hegseth might have provided.  Those responses would have had a better chance of embarrassing one more Republican enough to vote no on Friday.

There are other cabinet and agency heads proposed for the administration still to be evaluated.  And the slew of executive orders provide grist for those nomination hearings.  Perhaps the best opportunity to test this approach is the upcoming hearings before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for HHS designee Robert Kennedy, Jr.  Forget the brain worm, dead bear prank and other RFK memes.  Ranking member Bernie Sanders should engage the nominee in the following discussion.

Mr. Kennedy, could you describe for the committee the demographics of the Medicaid program?

If Kennedy says he cannot or gives inaccurate guesses, Sanders should educate him, especially as it relates to the number of retired Americans who depend on a combination of Medicare and Medicaid for their health care.

Mr. Kennedy, the congressional DOGE caucus has circulated a document that includes cuts to Medicare to fund President Trump’s tax cuts.  Are you prepared to strip millions of American’s of their health care to give additional tax breaks to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg?

Regardless of RFK’s answer, I have complete confidence Sanders can produce a sound bite that can be used by every Democratic candidate for Congress in 2026.  The Democratic mantra for the next two years should be:

When it actually has to govern, MAGA is its own worst enemy.  Do not get in its way.  Just be on the record as opposing bad policies and document their impact.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

When I first went there [in] 2016, we were, I had a lot of good people. I had a lot of good advice, but I put people in that in some cases, were not what I really wanted because I didn’t know much about Washington.

Donald J. Trump/September 9, 2024

Above is the one time in the past decade, president-elect Trump admitted his first administration was not as successful as he hoped it would be because he did not know how Washington worked.  In a December 16, 2024 unscheduled press briefing at Mar-a-Lago, he suggested he and his team are much better prepared to achieve their agenda.  There is only one problem.  In 2017, he was facing institutions, procedures, rules and traditions associated with a democratic republic.

In the intervening eight years between January 2017 and today, he repeatedly praised autocrats, in particular Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, and based his 2024 campaign on a promise that America would be great again if only he could duplicate their experience here.  However, as he has demonstrated in the past, Trump failed to understand the information right under his nose.  Knowing more about Washington, per his September 2024 declaration, does him no good because he now must negotiate the rules and traditions associated with being the poster child of an oligarchy, not a constitutional democracy.  And based on the last 48 hours of the transition it is clear he failed this important lesson.

Imagine if, in February 2022, Ukrainian-born Mikhail Fridman, head of the Alfa Group, a multinational Russian conglomerate, had announced the invasion of Ukraine.  And then, within hours, Putin posted on social media that he agreed with Fridman.  The lede on the front page of every major world newspaper would begin, “Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman appeared on national television to report that a military convoy was advancing toward Kyiv, Ukraine.   Fridman explained this ‘special military operation’ was designed to demilitarize Ukraine which represented a threat to Russian security.  Within hours of the televised message, President Vladimir Putin posted support of the operation on social media.”

Of course, that did not happen.  Why?  Because Putin and more importantly the oligarchs understand the consequences of exposing the fact their “elected” government is nothing more than a puppet and mouthpiece of the uber-rich.  That is why at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of February 23, 2022, Putin addressed the Russian people, justifying the incursion as a response to requests from the leaders of separatist regions in Eastern Ukraine who accused the Ukraine government of persecution and genocide.  Instead of wondering who was in control at the Kremlin, Russian state media praised Putin as a strongman who was protecting the safety of Russian citizens living in occupied Ukraine since 2014.

Believing Putin’s strongman veneer was real, Trump responded on February 23, 2022, as only he could.

I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.

That is what happens when you confuse Putin with Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  Trump’s takeaway from Putin’s actions vis-a-vis Ukraine was to dream of a day when he too could say, “Make it so!”  During Trump 1.0, he thought “my generals, my justices and my attorney general” would support and carry out his agenda.  He would not make the same mistake twice.  Trump 2.0 will be populated with oligarchs.  Some will masquerade as members of his cabinet, agency heads and ambassadors as evidenced by 11 billionaires nominated for these posts.  At least, Trump can claim these 11 oligarchs “work for me,” and can flex his muscle by firing them.  No so with the two bomb-throwers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

More importantly, the difference between Putin’s oligarchs and the Musk/Ramaswamy tag team is the latter never agreed to rules of the “me president/you oligarch” game.  Russian oligarchs believe it is to their advantage to hide in the shadows.  Wealth is their prime directive.  Therefore, they are more than willing to let Putin take credit for policies that increase their assets and appreciate Putin taking the heat for mistakes that hurt Russia’s national interests.  They satisfy their huge egos through life styles few can imagine.

Not so with Musk and Ramaswamy. The irony is each think they are the “real” leaders of MAGA world.  And they do not need an “imposter” for a middleman.  Which explains why they saw no need to confer with Trump before undermining the budget agreement negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson.  This morning Trump made a feeble effort to change the narrative with a laughable post on Truth Social, as though the timing of a government shutdown would determine who is to blame.

If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under “TRUMP.” This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!

If this was Trump’s attempt to reassert his claim, “only I can fix it,” it is too late.  The toothpaste is already out of the tube.  Maybe voters should have paid more attention when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Putin’s puppet.  At the time, however, even she never imagined who would eventually be pulling the strings.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP