You have to give it to Donald Trump. The man is a marvel at multitasking.

In one sensational swoop, President Trump was able to set the global economy reeling, shatter our alliances, shred our standing in the world, tank consumer confidence, scupper the Kennedy Center and tart up the Oval Office, turning it into Caesars Palace on the Potomac.

And yet he still managed to find time to brag about winning his Jupiter golf club’s championship and sign an executive order relaxing restrictions on water pressure from shower heads — “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” the president cooed. He also ordered an investigation of an election security official he had fired four years ago for having the temerity to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen.

“We’re living in a bizarro world where heroes are being targeted and scoundrels are in a position to target them,” David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist, told me.

Trump is also consumed with terms of surrender for top law firms and Ivy League universities in his quest to get even with those he feels went after him unfairly or embraced wokeness too avidly.

My Netflix algorithm searches for “revenge,” “lives ruined” and “mayhem.” But I don’t want that in my government.

Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores. The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man.

“Revenge is the oxygen that keeps him afloat,” said Tim O’Brien, the Trump biographer.

And he has surrounded himself with small people who elaborately flatter him and puff him up in risible Cabinet meetings. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, even has a Maoist golden Trump head on his lapel.

Barack Obama’s White House portrait was nudged aside for one of Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt.

The Emperor of Chaos told us to “BE COOL!” as markets cratered and people got “yippy,” as Trump put it. But how is that possible when everything is so unstable?

Trump may even turn into the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, warned Friday on CNN that the holiday may be difficult for a lot of families accustomed to getting their cheap artificial trees, lights and ornaments from China, not to mention presents.

I had to go to summer school for algebra, but I don’t want a government that’s bad at math. O’Brien wrote in Bloomberg News that Trump’s “tragicomic ‘formula’” for tariffs “somehow positioned Cambodia and Thailand at the top of the heap of countries posing major economic threats to the U.S. and also caused tariffs to be imposed on uninhabited islands near Antarctica.”

The Republicans’ math on the budget bill is also fuzzy. You can’t give trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and pretend it won’t cost anything.

Even before Trump opened a Pandora’s box of economic woe, we knew numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had six bankruptcies, and his father had to buy $3.4 million in chips to save one of his casinos.

The most conclusive evidence of his innumeracy was his appearance in 2006 on Howard Stern’s show with Ivanka and Don Jr. The Trump siblings’ insistence that they got into Wharton on their merits inspired Stern to give them a grade school-level pop quiz.

“What’s 17 times 6?” he asked.

After some nervous laughter, Don Jr. replied “96? 94?” His father interjected, “It’s 11 12. It’s 112.”

“Wrong!” Stern said, adding, “It’s 102!”

Donald Trump repeated “112.”

Trump should be alarmed that investors are skittish about buying U.S. government bonds, usually considered safe assets.

“And guess who owns a lot of U.S. debt?” O’Brien said. “China, Japan, Europe. Are they feeling good about us right now?”

As everyone else gets yippy — JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned of a recession — the president seems to be enjoying center stage, toying with the strings like a cat.

“All of this unnecessary, orchestrated dissent and doubt and damage for his own amusement,” O’Brien told me. “He’s the kid in the garage with matches standing next to the gasoline tank.”

Now that Trump’s tariff scheme has gone horribly awry — and the administration’s attempt to spin it as an “Art of the Deal” victory has fallen flat — it remains to be seen if this will be a “Wizard of Oz” moment when the curtain gets pulled back on the con man.

Will the global chaos puncture the sense of mastery that Trump has projected?

“This is not a reality show,” Axelrod said. “This is reality.”

He continued: “People like the idea of cutting waste and fraud and abuse until it means that the Social Security office in your hometown or veterans’ health programs close down, or there are measles outbreaks, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Do these add up so, at some point, people say: ‘You know what? This isn’t really working for me’”?

The former casino owner in the White House brags that he has never gambled. But he is gambling with Americans’ lives and futures. How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the U.S. brand.

Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.

Minnesota is a Boogeyman of sorts to Denver. Not only did Minnesota end the Nuggets’ title defense a year ago, they also swept Denver in four regular season matchups this year.

So, Denver breathed a little sigh of relief when the Clippers edged the Warriors in overtime Sunday, meaning the Clippers, not the Wolves, would be the Nuggets’ first-round opponent. Now, Denver won’t see its Boogeyman unless the Nuggets and Timberwolves both advance to Western Conference Finals.

Minnesota, on the other hand, will see its version on Saturday night in Los Angeles when the Lakers and Wolves meet in Game 1 of the first-round series.

That boogeyman is Luka Doncic.

Minnesota was riding high off its thrilling conference semifinal win over Denver a year ago before it was promptly grounded by the Slovenian star in the West Finals. Doncic averaged 32.4 points, 9.6 rebounds and 8.2 assists while shooting 43% from 3-point range in the series, which Dallas won in five games.

A Minnesota defense that looked so ferocious throughout last year’s regular season and first two playoff rounds was tamed by one of the league’s top-five players. The Timberwolves threw a number of looks at Doncic throughout the series, all to no avail. By the end of the conference finals, Minnesota looked resigned to its fate. The Wolves simply could not beat this man.

Everyone will recall Doncic’s cold-blooded, stepback triple at the end of Game 2 to steal a Dallas victory and put the Mavericks up 2-0. Later, he scored 20 first-quarter points in a decisive Game 5 victory, sending the Wolves into the offseason with their tails tucked between their legs.

After that blowout defeat, Anthony Edwards was asked how the game got away from Minnesota.

“Luka,” Edwards said. “It’s that simple. He hit like three shots from the logo, pretty much. Nothing we can do about it.”

Can the Wolves find a legitimate solution this time around?

Doncic’s dominance over the Wolves extends beyond that. Including the playoffs, he’s 7-1 against Minnesota in his past eight meetings with the Wolves excluding the Christmas Day game in Dallas, which he left early in the second quarter.

The Lakers are more than just Doncic. Obviously, they have an all-time great in LeBron James, and Austin Reaves looks like a future all-star. Dorian Finney-Smith and Rui Hachimura are versatile pieces who help Los Angeles succeed on both ends.

But Los Angeles also has some potential deficiencies on the glass and with its perimeter defense. Minnesota has paths to success in this series. But those will only reveal themselves if the Wolves can prevent Doncic from taking over and controlling each contest in the same ways he did last spring.

Perhaps the experience of last year’s Conference Finals will better equip Minnesota for this series. There should be no lack of what to expect.

The Wolves also have different personnel options. Jaden McDaniels will likely again receive the opening assignment on Doncic, but Jaylen Clark did a solid job on Doncic when Minnesota lost in Los Angeles in late February, and Julius Randle’s physicality could provide a necessary changeup against the all-star at some point in the series.

Schematically, Minnesota can also approach the Doncic matchup a little differently considering the guard’s new roster with the Lakers doesn’t present the same lob threats that were so plentiful and dangerous in Dallas. Rudy Gobert can be more aggressive in his help on Doncic when the guard enters that 8- to 10-foot range with less concern about what may take place behind him.

“He’s a smart player. He’s seen every coverage possible in the world. It’s about how we execute it, how throughout the different coverages we’re able to rebound and, offensively, how we take care of the ball and do all these things that put us in a position to try to slow them down,” Gobert said Sunday. “We’ll see what coaches have in mind, but it’s about, no matter what we do, keep our physicality and keep playing to our strength.”

To do that, Minnesota must enter this first-round playoff series with the proper mindset and a true belief that it can contain Doncic — that a playoff matchup with the majestic maestro isn’t necessarily a death sentence. That history doesn’t always repeat.

That the Boogeyman doesn’t exist.

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El Salvador President Nayib Bukele may have found the best description for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s new approach to dictatorial regimes: a laughing emoji.

After a federal district judge ordered the administration to stop a U.S. flight deporting Venezuelans to his country, Bukele wrote on X, after the flight departed: “Oopsie … Too late.’’ He added the symbol known as “face with tears of joy.”

Rubio reposted it.

For many who have watched Rubio’s career, it was wildly incongruous to see him snubbing a U.S. court over immigrants expelled to a brutal prison in a country ruled by an authoritarian.

Rubio, a lawyer, built his political career talking about being “the son of immigrants and exiles” and condemning the human rights abuses in countries such as Cuba, which his parents left during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

But now, as one of Trump’s top lieutenants, Rubio is not only willing to partner with the aggressive and duplicitous Bukele, he has thrown his full support behind an inhumane purge of immigrants from the U.S. without due process.

That’s quite a shift from the Marco Rubio of 2008, when he was serving as Florida’s House speaker — the first Cuban American to hold that job. Back then, the anti-immigration fervor of the Tea Party was just starting to emerge.

Florida lawmakers from both parties had proposed dozens of bills — ranging from a Democratic lawmaker’s plan to require police to report suspected undocumented immigrants to Republican plans to prohibit government benefits for undocumented adults. But that version of Rubio was much more sensitive to the political repercussions of an immigration crackdown. He refused to give any of the bills a hearing and told legislators he didn’t want to appear “anti-immigrant.”

Four years later, Rubio spoke fondly of his upbringing by immigrant parents as he addressed the Republican National Convention. He extolled the virtues of “American exceptionalism” and the promise of a country “founded on the principle that every person has God-given rights.”

It’s hard to imagine Rubio giving that speech today, especially after a Venezuelan man convicted of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley was afforded more due process than the Cuban business owner with no criminal history who was snatched from his driveway by ICE agents in Miami two weeks ago. (The man’s wife said the man had spent years renewing work permits and trying to navigate the labyrinth of bureaucracy to obtain citizenship.)

The deportation tactics of today are also far from the future Rubio imagined in 2013 when, as one of the bi-partisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight,” he proposed an immigration reform plan that provided a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants but was never passed. It was “in our national interest” to bring people “out of the shadows,” Rubio said at the time. “This is who we are. We are the most compassionate nation on earth.”

Three years ago, Rubio was still on the side of compassion and law. He criticized Bukele, who had declared a state of emergency because of widespread gang violence and then used the military to arrest thousands of people without due process. Rubio called it “a really troubling situation” and noted Bukele “very openly criticizes and mocks the U.S. and other Western institutions.”

But Rubio is doing the mocking now. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he boasted recently, after canceling hundreds of visas.

He has ordered his staff to scour the social media accounts of visa applicants and deport anyone guilty of creating a “ruckus.”

It’s true that the State Department has broad authority to revoke a visa from someone they consider a threat. But according to law, it must be for very specific foreign policy reasons.

Many of the foreign students caught up in Rubio’s sweep have been accused of no crime and appear to have been targeted because the administration finds their pro-Palestinian speech objectionable. Some have been imprisoned or denied due process. Some are permanent residents or married to U.S. citizens.

Dario Moreno, a professor of political science at Florida International University in Miami who co-taught many classes with Rubio at the school, said he doesn’t know how Rubio is squaring the contradictions in his positions today with those of the past, but he thinks there is political risk to some of the administration’s immigration policies.

“I don’t think Cuban Americans, or Latinos in South Florida, probably agree with the roundup,” he told me.

“Putting away privileged students at Ivy League universities or people who look like gang members, that doesn’t bother people,” he said. What does upset them is the recent Trump order requiring a half-million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to leave the U.S. by the end of the month, even though they were given work permits in the U.S. under a Biden-era humanitarian parole program.

Scholars also tell me they see dangerous parallels between the Castro and Trump administration’s policies. They seemed surprised that Rubio doesn’t see them, too.

“(Castro’s) discourse was essentially the same as Trump’s, which is, if you don’t agree, get out of this country, and if you’re not the right kind of Cuban then you don’t belong here,” said Lillian Guerra, a professor of Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida. “Unless he knows nothing about the actual factors of the authoritarian state in Cuba, one could not understand how Marco Rubio could be endorsing these policies and be a spokesman for them.”

Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University, said Rubio’s about-face stems from political pragmatism and foreign policy realism.

Rubio is unlikely to run for elected office again unless he runs for president, so he has turned his allegiance to Trump. He was appointed to “serve only one person — the president who has cast aside multilateralism and any logic of American pluralism,” Gamarra explained.

And the “realist” school of thought believes a country’s national interests are more important than its ideological underpinnings, he said. The approach allows the U.S. to “expel people to a country that is known for cruel and inhumane treatment,” Gamarra told me. “So Fidel’s torturing is bad, but if Bukele is doing it, it’s good.”

That’s why Rubio and Bukele can now share a laugh. The joke’s on anyone who doesn’t get it.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

 

By TARA COPP and LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A long sliver of federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border that President Donald Trump is turning over to the Department of Defense would be controlled by the Army as part of a base, which could allow troops to detain any trespassers, including migrants, U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

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The transfer of that border zone to military control — and making it part of an Army installation — is an attempt by the Trump administration to get around a federal law that prohibits U.S. troops from being used in domestic law enforcement on American soil.

But if the troops are providing security for land that is part of an Army base, they can perform that function. However, at least one presidential powers expert said the move is likely to be challenged in the courts.

The officials said the issue is still under review in the Pentagon, but even as any legal review goes on, the administration’s intent is to have troops detain migrants at the border.

The corridor, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, is a 60-foot-wide federal buffer zone that ribbons along the border from New Mexico to California, except where it encounters tribal or privately owned land. It had been run by the Interior Department until Trump directed control be transferred to the Defense Department in a presidential memo released Friday night.

For the next 45 days, the Defense Department will test taking control of a section of the Roosevelt Reservation in New Mexico, east of Fort Huachuca, which is an Army installation in Arizona, one of the U.S. officials said. During that period, the Army will put up additional fencing and signs warning people not to trespass.

People not authorized to be in that area could be arrested by the Army’s security forces, the officials said, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public.

Any migrants in the country illegally who are detained by military personnel on those lands would be turned over to local civilian law enforcement agencies, the officials said.

It was not clear if the added land would require the military to deploy additional forces to the border. There are about 7,100 active duty troops under federal control currently assigned to the border and about 4,600 National Guard troops under state control.

Troops are prohibited from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil under the Posse Comitatus Act. An exception known as the military purpose doctrine allows it in some cases — but would not apply here and would likely be challenged in the courts, said Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center for Justice.

That’s because even though troops would be on land designated as an Army installation, they would have to prove that their primary mission there was not to conduct border security and law enforcement — and the whole point of Trump’s order transferring the Roosevelt Reservation to the military’s control is to secure the border, she said.

The military purpose doctrine “only applies if the law enforcement aspect is incidental,” Goitein said. “Does this (area) have a military purpose that has nothing to do with enforcing customs and security at the border?”

Rebecca Santana contributed from Washington.