Trump clarifies that yeah, he really does want Pulte to pursue election conspiracies over national security

It seems only a day ago that I churlishly argued that Donald Trump doesn't give a flying damn whether or not America is attacked by terrorists during his watch, or our electrical grids sabotaged by foreign malware, or whole American industries are held hostage by state-sponsored hacker groups because whether or not you live or die is not something Trump will ever, ever care about when he has ballrooms to design and enemies to punish.

What's that? Oh, right. It actually was just a day ago. To the collected pundits of The New York Times, The Washington Post, every broadcast outlet, and every member of the White House Correspondents Association a declaration like this must have sounded not just rude, but outright slanderous. Partisanship can be rough and tumble, to be sure, but how dare anyone suggest that the obviously delusional seditionist rapist convicted felon is willing to undermine the safety and security of every American in an obsessive-compulsive quest to manufacture crank conspiracy theories against public figures who publicly stated that Donald Trump Sucks.

It isn't like we have any concrete proof that Trump's appointment of wealthy real estate failson turned weird memestock conspiracy theorist turned FHFA Democratic mortgage investigator Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence was done for explicitly crooked reasons, and there won't be any proof because Donald Trump would never dare oh wait, yeah, he just came out and said it.

Wow, Entire Collected Pundit Corps of America That I Am Imagining In My Head. I bet you're feeling pretty stupid right now.

If anything, what Trump is now saying out loud is worse than what we were originally accusing him of. My theory of Pultism is that his appointment as (part time!) acting DNI, a position that ostensibly collects and coordinates the discoveries of every U.S. intelligence agency so that no 9/11-scale attacks against us ever again catch a president by highly photographed surprise, was merely an excuse to give Pulte a top-level security clearance that he could use in the same way he's used the FHFA's mortgage records. Pulte would wave his security clearance in agency faces and demand he be handed any file that so much as mentions an American on Trump's enemies list; Pulte would then use his richly marbled brain to come up with something those enemies could be accused of.

And, perhaps, the sloppiness of Pulte's antics would compromise high-level American espionage operations, because there's little question that Pulte would absolutely out even a dozen American spies if he thought leaking their work would hurt someone who wasn't Trump. And perhaps giving Bill Pulte, one of the nation's foremost Bed Bath and Beyond conspiracy theorists, a full-buffet security pass isn't even about selectively leaking U.S. intelligence in schemes to make Trump's enemies look bad; it might be that Pulte was given such access so that he could comb through top-level intelligence documents looking for secrets juicy enough for Donald Trump to store in his Mar-a-Lago ballroom.

You know. The thing that famously already happened.

If we're to believe President T. Antichrist's stream of consciousness explanation, however, Pulte isn't there to do those things. He's instead there to undermine United States elections by concocting new conspiracy theories asserting them to be "rigged."

Because Trump says they're rigged. Which Trump says because Trump lost reelection in November 2020 and, rather than admitting it, went into a narcissism-fueled spiral and declared that he didn't lose, not really, it was a grand conspiracy to rig the outcome against him, one spearheaded by dead Venezuelans and Italian communication satellites and the ghost of that groundhog Bill DeBlasio assassinated and, of course, MiNoRiTiES.

Which is the same excuse Donald Trump has always given whenever he doesn't win an Emmy, or a real estate bid, or a Nobel Peace Prize. He always says it's rigged. Every damn time.

So it turns out that Bill Pulte's directive, if we're to believe Trump—who had just woken up after his usual mid-meeting nap, so was perhaps even less lucid than usual:

—is to try to find any national intelligence product that might suggest the dead Venezuelan and/or Italian satellite and/or groundhog conspiracy actually happened, and since he's not going to find those things his job will immediately morph into looking up classified risotto recipes and claiming those were somebody's coded election-rigging plans.

And, if he happens to be told of real foreign operations to boost Trump as the Russian and Chinese-preferred American leader, he will have a high enough security clearance to find out which federal workers discovered those plans so that the White House can quickly fire their asses.

Look, I realize I am cynical about this. But I am cynical only in the sense that "these are all things that have actually happened, in one form or another, and it would seem really, really stupid for anyone to presume that the things that have already happened will keep happening." Would Donald Trump and his weird, weird minions jeopardize national security in their efforts to lie to Americans about everything, all the time?

Buddy, look around. They've been doing that for a decade. They've been doing that since Steve Bannon first pressed the shiny elevator button in Trump Tower.

There is still a very good chance that Pulte won't be nominated as real, non-acting DNI; even the most toadying Republican Senators largely recognize that the man is a hack and a nutcase. In the meantime, however, there's nothing stopping Pulte from doing what he was appointed to do. He's there to invent conspiracies that nobody else can find, and he'll do it.

My own guess, because I really cannot emphasize enough what a crackpot this wealthy Florida lad has turned out to be, is that it will all somehow tie into Bed Bath and Beyond. Pulte will announce that Bed Bath and Beyond faked its own bankruptcy so that it could instead funnel the money into a groundhog-orchestrated plot to rig the 2020 elections against Trump—and that the FBI, NSA, CIA, and the soon-to-be Pope Leo all conspired to hide it from you, the loyal Bed Bath and Beyond customer.

Meanwhile, the full extent of Jeffrey Epstein's predations remains hidden. There is still a conspiracy between Trump and his own alleged "Justice Department" to bar the IRS from further examinations of as much as $100 million of past Trump tax fraud. And the conspiracy to hand out multi-million dollar rewards to the seditionists who attacked Congress and police officers on Trump's behalf is still ticking along.