This Is Not An April Fools' Day Joke

There is no reprieve from the ignorance of the Trump/Musk regime—or the evil.

Greg Olear Apr 1

Traditionally, on the first day of this rainshowery month, we make up wild, crazy scenarios and try to pass them off, to the more gullible among us, as real. We take as long as necessary to sell the ruse, and as soon as we see that our chosen sucker has taken the bait, we shout, “APRIL FOOL!” and we all have a good laugh.

Like, for example, we might show our mark a photo (Is it Photoshopped? Surely it must be!) of the Vice President—whose official duties are constitutionally limited to breaking ties in the Senate and outliving POTUS—gesturing towards an unseen something on what looks like Hoth but is actually Greenland, where this white nationalist and his brown-skinned wife (Is his obvious hypocrisy part of the joke?) have come to explain to the native Kalaallit people that, like it or not, their cold island is about to become a province of the finally-great-again American Empire. And then we would wait a beat and break into a grin and cry, “APRIL FOOL!”

But in 2025, there’s a twist: This year, there is no “APRIL FOOL” punchline. This year, all the wild and crazy scenarios are real. This year, the joke’s on us.

Consider what’s already happened during the 72 days of the Trump/Musk regime—and how much of it sounds like jokes we’d crack on April 1:

• We really have outsourced our national health services to a whale-beheading conspiracy theorist moron who thinks vaccines are harmful—and then watched a measles epidemic break out almost immediately.

• We really did confirm a rapey drunk Fox News talking head with white Christian nationalist tattoos to head the Defense Department, and he really did share attack plans in a Signal chat room which members included at least two individuals—including a journalist!—who lacked the proper security clearance. This is the same guy who brings his (third) wife to top secret meetings at the Pentagon, presumably because he’s too loaded up on Dewer’s to remember details. And, in response to this colossal national security failure, rank abrogation of duties, and egregious violation of federal law…nothing happened. There were zero consequences.

• We really have granted Elon Musk and his crew of baby-faced Antinoöses—none of them elected, none of them confirmed, none of them legally allowed to do what they’re doing—full access to, basically, the entire federal computer system, where they have already caused so much damage the nation might never recover. And we really have allowed the regime and the media to call this effort, with a straight face and nary a hint of irony, “Government Efficiency.”

• We really have watched this South African Nazi gazillionaire—likely an illegal immigrant himself, incidentally—assume all the duties of the President, while wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt, heiling Hitler, bearing a chainsaw, and traveling close by his Omen-like youngest child / human shield, while arguing on the social media platform he owns about parental support for the child he had with one of the worst women on the internet and crying to rightwing media hosts about the Tesla stock price tanking.

• We really have countenanced the passive-to-the-point-of-statis “strategy” of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in responding as the regime cuts funding willy-nilly, to any and all programs, departments, non-profits, universities, law firms, government contractors, and so on who fail to kiss the ring with requisite enthusiasm—or whose existence rankles the religious weirdos and moronic dipshits now running things.

All of this is real, and it’s only getting worse.

Today, for example, the indefatigable Jessica Valenti reports that the government will freeze $35 million earmarked for Title X, “the nation’s only federal family planning program. It provides affordable reproductive health care—birth control, STI testing, cancer screenings—primarily to low-income and uninsured patients.”

She continues:

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration planned to strip Planned Parenthood of Title X funds under the guise of targeting “DEI” initiatives. What no one expected was the sheer number of non-Planned Parenthood groups targeted—and how blatantly cherry-picked the cuts appear to be.

One of the organizations impacted, for example, is Converge, Inc.—the Title X grantee for Mississippi and parts of Tennessee. Abortion, Every Day obtained the letter sent to Converge by the Department of Health and Human Services through a source outside the grantee network. In it, HHS notifies the group that their funding is being withheld based on “possible violations” of federal civil rights law.

The supposed violation? A 2020 statement opposing racism in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

The Trump/Musk regime has also killed off medical research programs, global vaccine funding, and much much more, blaming it on “DEI”—as if all this MAGA idiocy proved DEI’s alleged failure rather than confirmed its obvious value.

This, down here—this looks like a joke, right?

Nope. It’s real—a quote-tweet celebrating us bombing some “terrorists” in Somalia. Maybe they really were terrorists, and maybe we really did need to kill them to maintain national security—but it’s, at best, cringe for the White House to issue communications like that. All that macho posturing does is make Americans less safe.

And buckle up, kids: the Cruelest Month is just getting started. Trump has vowed that April 2 will be “Liberation Day”—when his ill-conceived tariffs will (supposedly) go into effect, further harming the economy.

What’s that, you say? You want to know who says tariffs hurt the economy? Literally everyone! As Erica York, senior economist and research director for the Tax Foundation (not exactly a commune of hacky-sack-kicking Marxist-Leninists) wrote at the Cato Institute (same) last year:

From 1930, when 1,028 economists urged President Herbert Hoover to veto the Smoot–Hawley tariff bill, to 2018, when 0 percent of surveyed US economic experts answered that they agreed that US tariffs on steel and aluminum would improve Americans’ welfare…economic theory and empirical evidence both confirm the harms of tariffs….

The Tax Foundation’s general equilibrium model estimates that a new, across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all imports, as proposed by candidate Donald Trump, would reduce the level of US gross domestic product by 0.7 percent by reducing incentives to work and invest.

Empirical research from David Furceri and others examined 151 countries from 1963 through 2014 and found that tariff increases lead to economically and statistically significant declines in domestic output and productivity, as well as increases in unemployment and inequality. Fajgelbaum and others estimated that US consumers and firms that buy imports lost $51 billion while US producers gained $9.4 billion, implying substantial redistribution from importers to the US government and protected industries.

York concludes:

American history provides an abundance of examples of politicians using tariffs to protect domestic industry. Taken together, the examples show that tariffs do not generate higher levels of employment or production for the economy overall; they do not ensure the long-term health of the industries being protected or fundamentally alter the trade balance; and they serve not the strategic interests of the nation but the parochial interests of politicians who get to enrich preferred companies and workers by imposing diffuse and mostly hidden costs on the rest of the US economy.

But who cares what all of the experts say? Trump and his felonious chum Peter Navarro know better that the entire population of actual economists. Expertise is elitist! MAGA! And so tomorrow Trump will continue to roil the markets with his foolishness.

Today I realized that part of me has been waiting for someone in authority—some 2025 iteration of Allen Funt—to shout, “APRIL FOOL!” and assure us that the last 72 days have been nothing but an elaborate prank. This can’t be real, can it? How can the country have fallen for something so stupid?

But, alas, it’s all too true. There’s no “backsies.” Allen Funt’s been dead more than a quarter century.

What really drove this home for me was the Atlantic story making the rounds last night on social media. What happened was, the ICE Gestapo—and if you know anyone who works for that group, please socially shun them—seized a Maryland man, Abrego Garcia, who was in the U.S. legally; removed him to the “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador because of clerical error; and now claims, preposterously for a group that earlier this week was threatening to annex Greenland, that it “lacks jurisdiction” to demand his safe return:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

I thought about the stories we’ve read these last few weeks about good people wrongly removed: the gay hairdresser whose head the prison guards shaved, the kindly older brother with the Autism Awareness tattoo. I realized that, on some level, I have been waiting for them to return—for photos of them reunited with their families to appear in People magazine, for the wrong to be made right, for common sense and decency to prevail over abject wickedness.

But that was my privilege speaking. The truth is, they’re never coming back. Not until we remove these monsters from office, anyway.

“Trump administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds,” Nick Miroff writes in the Atlantic, “including that Trump’s ‘primacy in foreign affairs’ outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.”

Already we’ve gone from forcibly removing actual undocumented gang members to undocumented people who aren’t gang members but have tattoos to non-citizens who are in the country legally. We’re dangerously close to the point where ICE starts rounding up dissidents, regardless of country of origin. “Primary in foreign affairs,” don’t ya know.

The April Fools are in charge of the federal government. They are as ignorant as they are evil. And while we mock them mercilessly (and rightly so): No one is laughing.

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HANDS OFF!

On Saturday, April 5th, there is a nationwide “Hands Off!” protest. Click this link to learn how to participate.

Tonight, in advance of what I hope will be one of the largest if not the largest protest in the history of the country, there is a virtual training organized by MoveOn, Public Citizen, Stand Up America, and the Not Above the Law Coalition in support of the Hands Off day of action and future actions.

People are fighting back, in myriad ways large and small, and it’s inspiring to witness. Corey Booker started this at 7pm on March 31, so it’s not an April Fools’ joke, and as of this writing—4:42am—he’s still going strong:

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Photo of Vance: Jim Watson, pool photo.

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