This week has already been a ball of malevolent chaos, and I don’t blame people for not knowing how to react or whether they should already be in a full blown panic. This week, Donald Trump froze federal funding of everything from SNAP (food stamps), Pell Grants, Head Start, federal student loans and more. Additionally, agencies began being locked out of the federal Payment Management Services portal. Sh-t hit the fan yesterday when dozens of states reported that they had been locked out of the Medicaid portal, setting off widespread panic in the healthcare industry. What followed were a lot of lies from the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers, and Democratic-controlled states rushed to court to sue the Trump administration. The panic over Medicaid specifically led to a late backtrack by the Trumpers, and it appears that the Medicare portals are in the process of being reopened. Around the same time, a federal judge hit pause on Trump’s federal funding freeze:

A federal district judge on Tuesday granted an administrative stay in a case challenging the Trump administration’s planned freeze of federal aid, pausing the plan for a week and setting a hearing for further arguments next Monday morning.

The order only applies to the pause of disbursements in open grants, Judge Loren AliKhan said. And it doesn’t get into the legality of the freeze, instead just giving the judge time to hear more fleshed-out arguments from a coalition of nonprofits about why she should issue a temporary restraining order that could block the freeze for an addition two weeks. That hearing will take place at 11 a.m. on Monday.

The stay was issued only minutes before the freeze was scheduled to begin Tuesday at 5 p.m.

[From NBC News]

I’m already done with the conspiracies about “Trump is doing this and this to hide this other terrible thing” and “Trump wants us to panic” and “this is all the Democrats’ fault!” Enough. Not everything is a conspiracy – some things are as they seem, and this is exactly what it seems. Donald Trump and his Nazi cronies were given all three branches of the federal government, and they’re dismantling it and driving us into a national/global Depression. The moment to “do something” about any of this was last year, when every Democrat and every Democratic Party voter was telling everyone that this would happen if they let Trump anywhere near power again.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.