Rachel Maddow just nailed it

| 10:18 pm EST January 18, 2021
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Rachel Maddow spent much of her MSNBC show tonight documenting the disturbing story of how Donald Trump has installed yet another political hack into a key civilian position, with just a day and a half left in his presidency. Trump’s reasons for doing this are still unclear.

But I want to focus on a different story that Maddow also covered tonight, involving Trump’s new executive order which lifts the U.S. coronavirus travel ban for several countries as of January 26th. As Maddow pointed out, the ban expires after Trump leaves office, and Trump’s executive orders don’t last beyond the end of his presidency except in instances where President Biden decides to keep them around.

The Biden regime has already announced tonight that it’s not going to keep Trump’s travel ban executive order intact, meaning it’ll never go into effect to begin with. The whole thing is a non-story. Trump’s only possible goal here might have been to force Biden to take some heat for keeping the ban intact, but in reality no one’s going to care. Trump is signing this order just to make himself feel like he has power that he doesn’t, presumably to boost his sagging ego.

This brings us back to the story of Trump installing a few loyalists in key positions. Biden will be able to get rid of them immediately, either by firing them or by transferring them to a dead-end position. And these guys aren’t exactly Bond villains; instead they’re buffoons. So it’s possible that Trump is merely installing them to reward them for their loyalty so they’ll get a pension out of it, or that Trump is merely doing it so he can pretend he has power that he does not. As Maddow pointed out, the travel ban story is merely about his ego, so perhaps installing the flunkies is merely about his ego as well.