Was it really only three days? Just three?

This morning I asked myself, So, how's the week been going so far? I'm rather sure I'll never ask again.

In late 2024, Columbia University student and early organizer of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests Mohsen Mahdawi stepped away from activism because of his disaffection with the movement's increasing radicalism and his opposition to any advocacy of "violent resistance." Mahdawi chose instead to talk with Israeli students in pursuit of some middle ground, which many of his former, pro-Palestinian activists rejected.

Nevertheless, he remained vulnerable to Trump's "widening dragnet against pro-Palestinian student organizers," reports The NY Times. Mahdawi, a philosophy major with the ironic objective of becoming a diplomat, is due to graduate next month, But while at a meeting earlier this week to acquire U.S. citizenship — his wife, an American — he "was taken into custody by immigration police." Former senator and current Sycophant of State Marco Rubio issued statement defending Mahdawi's arrest, saying his activism "could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment."

Yesterday, Trump named Jay Clayton as interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a position, notes Politico, "that has historically posed a significant threat" to career criminals like Trump. The act was an in-your-face defiance of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who otherwise would have employed the home-state privilege of a "blue slip," a senatorial device that blocks such appointments. Blue slips have been a bipartisan tradition since the early 1900s; accordingly, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Republican members said despite Trump's dishonoring of yet another political custom, they still support the practice. "It serves a useful purpose even when in Democratic hands,” said GOP Sen. John Cornyn.

Also yesterday, federal Judge James Boasberg threatened in a 46-page ruling to initiate a contempt investigation into whether the Trump regime violated his March order that planeloads of Venezuelan migrants be stopped before arriving in America's fellow dictatorship of El Salvador. One would be hard-pressed to identify exactly what is in need of investigating; Boasberg said he'd "begin contempt proceedings against the administration unless the White House did what it had failed to do for more than a month: give scores of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador under the [dubious] authority of ... the Alien Enemies Act a chance to challenge their removal."

The Trump regime won't attempt the repatriation of even one shanghaied noncriminal, thus inconceivable is the regime seeking due process for "scores" of others who were deported. The would-be comical part of the Times report on the judicial order was this: "Should administration officials slow-walk his efforts, Judge Boasberg warned that he could make a criminal referral to the Justice Department or even appoint an outside prosecutor." Did I miss something? Did Judge Boasberg miss something? He'd refer criminal acts perpetrated by the regime's criminals to the corrupt Justice Department whose mission statement positively reeks of defending Trumpist criminality? And an "outside prosecutor" — the poor sap would receive funding from ...?

Again on Wednesday, some higher-level officials at the Internal Revenue Service began informing colleagues that the Treasury Department had asked the agency "to consider" — you gotta love that kind of underworld insider understatement — stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status. Trump had publicly wondered the day before if this even greater exacerbation of his wanton abuse of power would omce again be almost universally greeted by an even greater exacerbation of the nation's wanton indifference to despotism — a tyranny that ceased creeping some time ago and is now warmly nestled in the soothing assurance that no one or groups of ones of any real countervailing power gives a shit.

I'm too exhausted by the stultefying horror of the above to go into foreign affairs, such as University of St. Andrews' professor of strategic studies Phillips Payson O'Brien's observation in The Atlantic on Monday that "Trump’s tariff campaign has a clear geopolitical winner, and it’s not the United States. It’s China'; or that America's despot called the bloodthirsty despot Vladimir Putin's ballistic missile strikes that murdered at least 35 people last Sunday in the Ukrainian city of Sumy a "mistake"; or that Trump, also on Monday, had a gay time sitting, joking and lying with El Salvador's dictator in the White House, mostly to demonstrate to the globe's inhabiyanys that U.S. leadership now ranks in ethics, probity and honor with the North Koreas of this rottenest world.

It's all just too fucking exhausting.