White House Easter Egg roll sponsorships illustrate the politics of stupid | Opinion
With the death of a pope on the day after the holiest day on the Christian calendar, minds naturally turn toward the eternal. Here, at home, it is hard to reach serious let alone profound as we are in the silliest of silly seasons. Political actors across the country are proving that they never miss an opportunity to disappoint.
Over at the White House, President Donald Trump has decided to sell corporate sponsorships to the annual Easter egg roll traditionally sponsored by the national nonprofit representing the egg industry.
YouTube, owned by Google, which was just declared a monopoly by a federal judge, is one of the companies enjoying branding opportunities.
Amazon, whose owner Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, which is going through a brand remake to be more pleasing to the Trump administration, will get its logo before the White House press corps.
Meta, which owns Facebook — a platform accused of fueling a global decline in teens’ mental health — is also in on the deal.
What else can be sponsored?
No doubt, soon to come will be the GEICO National Prayer Breakfast, the State Farm State of the Union speech and the 2026 Telsa Congressional Elections. The tawdry spectacles will pass with barely a blip of outrage, as this is just SOP for Trumpland on the Potomac.
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has approved a state education budget through the year 2425, which I think is the 100-year anniversary of the founding of Starfleet. What the Wisconsin Supreme Court is doing approving budgets is a long story involving the line-item veto, two state constitutional amendments and three decades of dry political history.
In any case, you might remember this bunch from recent weeks when the state held a Supreme Court election in which billionaire Trump-minion Elon Musk spent millions trying to elect a conservative judge. All the smart and ethical people told us we should pull for the liberal.
Now the liberals have voted as a bloc to support a budget trying to ignore the results of elections for the next 400 years. You see, the judges explain, while the state constitution outlaws vetoing individual letters to make new words and vetoing words to make new sentences in bills, it does not outlaw vetoing numbers to make new numbers.
Meanwhile, in other news
Back on the East Coast, at the notorious Rikers Island jail in New York City, where 38 people have died in custody in just the last three years, convicted Hollywood criminal Harvey Weinstein has emerged as the poster boy for efforts to close the deadly jail where dead bodies by the dozen have failed to move the New York bureaucracy to reform.
Somehow serial rapist Weinstein’s lawyers expect a judge, the public and politicians to be moved by the human suffering of a man who spent decades making human women suffer. I’d rather have a convicted carjacker as my cabbie than give Weinstein anything less than a full understanding of what punishment means in America’s greatest city.
I could go on and on. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth didn’t learn from his first disclosure of national secrets on a chat app called Signal. Now, he’s done it again, this time with his wife and brother.
Democrats in the California legislature have noticed that undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal disaster aid after devastating fires, so they have introduced a bill that will prioritize such people for state spending on fire recovery. That’s the latest from a state that gives undocumented immigrants access to $100,000 home loan subsidies.
Get me off this ride. I can take it when the news is bad, but this is all just embarrassing.
This story was originally published April 22, 2025 at 10:46 AM with the headline "White House Easter Egg roll sponsorships illustrate the politics of stupid | Opinion."
