This illustrates one of the many oddities about Trump.

With any other president, we had policy debates and stated goals and decisions made and implemented.

With Trump, we just have this string of essentially arbitrary threats, promises and rhetoric, and alongside that is a string of essentially arbitrary policies arbitrarily enacted and rescinded and followed and ignored, and there’s no necessary correlations between any of it.

It’s another of the things that I think Trump does simply because he’s a delusional toxic narcissist, a genuinely stupid person, and emotionally a toddler, and another of the things that the would-be autocrats - the billionaires and the CEOs and the religious right and the Republicans and the rest of the greedy and power-hungry scum - take advantage of him doing.

Exactly as intended.

his chances of raising money and looking like a leader

Note that raising money is the first thing mentioned.

And note that winning elections isn’t mentioned at all.

Which neatly sums up what’s wrong with the DNC.

But the Trump administration is refusing to reassure them they won’t be subject to retaliation.

That would be because they will be subject to retaliation.

Trump is nothing if not petty and vindictive, and as with all the rest of his many and profound flaws and failures, he’s molding the rest of the government into his gross and detestable image.

And as with the rest of his brazen assaults on legal and ethical standards, nobody with any authority will do a single fucking thing about it.

I don’t see how it could make any difference.

He’s already an idiot, a delusional narcissist, and a compulsive liar, so it’s not as if he could become even more detached from realitybthan he already is. And his supporters don’t care (and likely don’t even notice), since they’re even dumber than he is.

And it’s not like he"s going to forget his platform, since it’s pretty much just hating immigrants and LGBTQ, dicking over poor people, singing his own praises and scamming as much money as possible, and that’s all as natural and automatic to him as breathing…

Really, there’s just not much cognition going on there in the first place - it’s more in the nature of infantile immediacy and animal instincts - so I can’t see how any loss of it would matter much.

Oh look - a grotesquely incompetent and unqualified Trump appointee. I haven’t seen one of those in… an hour or so. Maybe even an hour and a half.

Sorry Mike, but one of the good things that’s come out of the internet is that it’s made people far more aware of just how much of the value their labor creates goes to paying for the privileged lives of worthless shitheels like you.