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Today’s highlights from Trumponia, the nation within our nation, the place where truth is not truth, where alternate facts exist, and where news that displeases the President of the 8th grade class is labeled Fake News.

• In an act of egregious spite and pettiness, Mr. Trump did not issue a statement on the death of Senator John McCain Saturday, opting instead to tweet condolences to McCain’s family. On Monday morning, after the White House flag had flown at half-staff Sunday, he ordered it raised to full-staff rather than allowing it to remain at half-staff until the Senator’s funeral, as is the traditional protocol. Faced with a public outcry, he relented late Monday afternoon, issuing an anodyne statement of respect for McCain’s long career of public service and ordering the flag to fly at half-staff until next Sunday.

Score this as another self-inflicted wound. One has to believe that, if Mr. Trump was given a firearm, he would eventually shoot off most of his toes.

• To put a thump to the end of the week that included Paul Manafort’s conviction on eight felony counts and Michael Cohen’s pleading guilty to another eight felonies, Team Trump’s efforts on the legal front are making them the Cleveland Browns of national lawyering. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have granted immunity to Trump confidant and sleaze merchant David Pecker, who used his ownership of The National Inquirer to help Trump and Cohen bury stories of Trump’s relationships with a number of women, in order to compel him to testify (most likely to a grand jury). They also granted immunity to Allen Weisselberg, the Chief Financial Officer of The Trump Organization, in exhange for his testimony. This gives the Feds an inside look at Trump’s business dealings, something he has kept hidden for decades.

Guessing the systolic measure of the “very healthy” Mr. Trump’s blood pressure is well north of 150 these days.

• New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood “filed a scathingly worded lawsuit on Thursday taking aim at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, accusing the charity and the Trump family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing and illegal coordination with the presidential campaign. The lawsuit, which seeks to dissolve the foundation and  bar President Trump and three of his children from serving on nonprofit organizations, was an extraordinary rebuke of a sitting president. The attorney general also sent referral letters to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission for possible further action, adding to Mr. Trump’s extensive legal challenges.” (New York Times)

• Trump took another legal hit on Saturday when a U.S District Court judge in Washington ruled that executive orders he issued to make it easier for Federal agencies to fire workers and to limit union activities violated the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute of 1978.

(Whoops...)

• In effort to avoid irrelevance in the bin of Trump discards, career political rat-fornicator Roger Stone is claiming that “reliable sources” tell him Special Counsel Robert Mueller will indict career rich-man’s son Donald Trump Jr. on charges of lying to the FBI. Stone is repeating his claim that he will also be charged with something, although there is no Federal statute against being a very weird dude.

• The Inspector General of the Government Services Administration issued a report concerning its inquiry to changes made in plans to replace FBI headquarters, the J.Edgar Hoover Building. The original plan was to move the FBI to a campus in the suburbs and raze the existing structure, replacing it with private development. The site is opposite the Trump Hotel (the old Post Office Building) and the modified proposal is to rebuild on the present site. In testimony before a House committee, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy admitted to meeting with the President to discuss the project. In a series of moves of clusterflockery proportions, the GSA first withheld the subject of the WH meetings claiming executive privilege. Confronted with the fact that the GSA and its Inspector General are part of the executive branch, “GSA’s Acting General Counsel informed us that he received direction from White House Counsel’s Office regarding the matter. He told us that pursuant to those directions, GSA employees were authorized to disclose to the OIG the existence of the White House meetings, discuss who attended, and discuss any high level agreements that resulted from the meetings; but not to disclose any statements made by the President.”

(Eyebrows, raised.)

[Editor’s Note: The Trumponia Times-Journal-Post-Courier is published intermittently when the staff can collect itself to deal with the deluge of verbal and tweeted effluence produced on an uninterrupted basis. We are trying.]