with CHARLIE HARPER

Amid all the chaos, confusion, malice and mistakes currently reigning in Washington, someone suggested that a few laughs might be in order.

Here are a couple of chuckles, adopted from late night television last week:

A new poll indicates that some Americans feel buyer’s remorse about voting for President Donald Trump.

On Thursday’s “Late Show”, Stephen Colbert pointed out that’s mainly because, after six weeks in office, Trump has yet to eliminate inflation, as he promised during his campaign to do on Day 1 of his new administration. Gas prices haven’t dropped.

“That was his claim. He said it over and over again, but now his voters still think things are too expensive. Somewhere in Delaware, Joe Biden is shaking his head, chuckling to himself.” And he could be thinking, ‘maybe those voters are getting what they deserve for supporting a liar like Trump. They should have voted for me.’

That’s what Biden could be thinking, Colbert suggested. Then came the punch line.

“But actually, Biden was thinking, ‘why was it again that I came into this room? Can’t seem to remember…’”

Elsewhere on TV, another comedian offered the following trenchant commentary on an upcoming space launch: “So Jeff Bezos is launching a historic rocket mission in which Katy Perry, Gayle King and (Bezos girlfriend) Lauren Sánchez will be the astronauts on an all-woman mission. They’re calling it the ‘Real Housewives of Mars.’

“The mission will last four hours, but the women are expected to take six weeks to get ready. Also, there will be a booster rocket following their spaceship carrying all their luggage — because, you know, they’re women…”

Billionaire Bezos, who has been tinkering with the editorial page policies of the Washington Post, has angered many of its liberal readers in recent weeks. His managing editor quit in protest. Many customers have cancelled their subscriptions to the Post in protest of Bezos’ apparent cozying up to Trump since the president moved back in to the White House.

The casually malign, often cruel machinations of another Trump-leaning billionaire, Elon Musk, have also made the news often in recent weeks as he leads a peripatetic, often confused foray through the federal workforce in Washington and elsewhere, firing thousands of civil servants for often whimsical and sometimes unexpressed reasons.

As the US Senate with its slim Republican majority watches with uneasy fecklessness, Trump and Company continue to follow the 2025 playbook conceived by for them conservative activists starting early in Joe Biden’s term as president. Though Trump often denied any knowledge or even acquaintance with this thick volume while campaigning for another presidential term, he and his team nevertheless arrived in Washington on January 20 eager to implement many of its provisions.

With inflation still high, eggs only available at exorbitant prices as supplies dwindle due to a bird flu epidemic, anti-vaccination sentiment hindering efforts to extinguish an ominous outbreak of measles in West Texas, and memories still fresh of Trump and vice president JD Vance’s almost comically undiplomatic shouting match last week with the visiting president of Ukraine, polls are starting to edge more strongly against the new president.

A liberal friend wondered out loud if the US constitution’s intricate set of checks and balances on presidential power would ever be seen again.

“The Congress and the courts are supposed to have – and to exercise – the authority to check excesses like those we are now witnessing,” she lamented bitterly. “Where in the world are they?”

A cynic might answer that the legislative and judicial branches, having been recently dominated and appointed respectively by Trump, are fearful of primary challenges, public ridicule and possible threats, and other risks and dangers that seem to accompany defiance of Trump.

Those factors may indeed be in play. But it is also true that many of the policies that are guiding Trump and his associates are long-term conservative and Republican goals.

A great example of this is the ongoing dismantling of the principal American non-military foreign assistance agency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Thousands of agency employees were fired last week, and there were pitiable reports of individuals being told to leave and clean out their desks with little or no advance notice.

While the methods and indeed legality of this massive reduction in force were new and certain to be challenged in court, the goal of disbanding USAID has long been a GOP objective. Forty years ago, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms of North Carolina succeeded in cancelling the independent US Information Agency and merging it into the State Department.

He then turned to USAID with the same intent. But he didn’t succeed then, because the foreign assistance agency had – and retains – powerful support outside Washington, particularly in the Midwest where thousands of big and small farms are subsidized and rewarded for their overproduction of grain and other foodstuffs by government purchases for use in foreign aid programs.

Trump’s lightning blitz has caught farmers and agribusinessmen by surprise this time, though they are catching on. The head of a Kansas farmers’ association, interviewed on TV, said he and his members should have read Trump’s proposed programme before they voted for him. “Might be too late now,” he offered.

It might be late, but it’s not too late. A quickly emerging consensus is building around the notion that Congressional backbones will be stiffened and some resistance to Trump will become apparent when the voters back home in Kansas and elsewhere start to register annoyance and anger at government cuts that reduce services or transfer payments they have come to depend upon.

And it won’t likely take too long before Trump’s heavy tariffs levied against the largest US trading partners in Canada, Mexico and China begin to bite into the disposable income of voters. Retaliation is inevitable, and the cost of goods and even services in the US is bound to rise. And that might push the country fairly quickly into recession.

Musk and even Bezos might not care, but Trump has shown that he does care about those voters who supported him. The consensus is that when enough of those MAGAns register their unhappiness, he will grandly pull back his shock troops and restore services and stop the assaults on people’s lives.

Even if the president does tighten the reins on all the governmental reductions and eliminations, however, Trump is laying the groundwork for a colossal Republican defeat in November 2026. And such staggering political losses would not be recently unprecedented.

By 2010, Barack Obama’s big Congressional majorities had allowed him to pass the landmark Affordable Care Act that was designed to be the centerpiece and initiator of reducing or eliminating the large, structural underclass of American poor people.

The Republican opposition attacked the new legislation pervasively and quickly, and generated opposition that persists in Trump’s mind even today, years after Obamacare has been shown to benefit many millions of Americans.

By the end of November 2010, the mid-term elections had wiped out Obama’s comfortable Congressional majorities.

Similarly, in 2018, after the first two years of Trump’s first term had revealed his distaste and disregard for the conduct and organisation of government and his behaviour had offended millions, the GOP majorities in the House and Senate were wiped away in a Democratic landslide.

If Trump continues to direct the disassembling of government agencies and departments that actually deliver necessary assistance to US citizens, a powerful backlash seems inevitable.

But at the current pace of “scorched earth” swaggering through the corridors of the federal government by Trump’s minions and the Musketeers, the backlash may arrive much sooner than November 2026.

Many expect that after the Easter Congressional recess in April, congresspersons and senators will return to the capital full of their constituents’ distaste for what is happening in Washington.

Then, four or five months into this new administration, a quiet pullback of the attack on the federal government is likely.

Meantime, the US federal court system led by the American Supreme Court will have faced numerous challenges to what seems to many as the most brazen exercise of unchecked presidential power in at least eighty years.

While the Supreme Court has been sympathetic to executive power in recent years, the justices are also sensitive to public opinion. They might also push back against Trump.