Bryan Smith via ZUMA

A fire broke out at Trump Tower yesterday, killing a tenant. America’s sociopath-in-chief took the opportunity to…praise his own building:

Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2018

The victim was Todd Brassner, a former art dealer who had been in ill health recently.

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA

Donald Trump stands by his man:

While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at EPA. Record clean Air & Water while saving USA Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market rate, travel expenses OK. Scott is doing a great job!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018

Death threats! My goodness. Well, let’s see them:

I had filed a #FOIA with EPA for any records of death threats made against Scott Pruitt.

EPA said it had zero recorss. https://t.co/XsCctrPYi7

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) April 8, 2018

This is shocking. The president of the United States is just baldly lying? But that’s not all. He’s not even putting his heart into it:

.@realDonaldTrump tepidly Tweeting @ 8pm from who knows where sitting w who knows who:

• Pruitt’s security: “somewhat more than his predecessor.”

• Pruitt’s rent: “about market rate.”

• Pruitt’s travel expenses: “Ok.”

He can’t even convince himself.https://t.co/kV7CCd2j1u

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) April 8, 2018

Are you following Philippe Reines on Twitter? You should be. Reines is a famously, um, colorful guy who’s a longtime Hillary Clinton aide, and after she lost he took to Twitter and decided he didn’t give a shit what he said anymore. This naturally makes him great fun to read.

Oh, and as long as we’re on the subject of Pruitt, Michael Grunwald has a long piece in Politico making the point that Pruitt hasn’t actually accomplished much. He’s certainly good at self-promotion, but the fact is that rolling back EPA rules takes years of careful, detailed work. Will Pruitt pay attention long enough to do any of that? We’ll see. But so far it doesn’t seem like it. The press coverage seems to be what he’s really after.

Is this catblogging or caterpillar blogging? You be the judge. As you can see, Hilbert was pretty intrigued by the caterpillar crossing his path, but in the end he didn’t do anything. He raised his paw at one point to give it a swipe, but for some reason decided not to. So the caterpillar made it safely to the other side and is now, I believe, a cocoon attached to the wall of the house. In a few days, if its luck holds, it will become another lovely Monarch butterfly.

The life of a caterpillar must be a stressful one, don’t you think? Living in a world full of thousand-foot giants on the ground and predators the size of rocs in the air. Every morning at 6:30 it rains, but the raindrops are the size of refrigerators. And then there are the flash floods that come without notice, usually when one of the million-foot giants is around. It’s a wonder they don’t spontaneously explode just from high blood pressure.

Ingo Wagner/DPA via ZUMA

At the same time that Donald Trump is trying to undermine environmental standards for US cars, he wants to tighten them for imported cars:

Mr. Trump has asked the Environmental Protection Agency and several other agencies, including the Commerce and Transportation departments, to pursue plans to use such laws as the Clean Air Act to subject cars made overseas to strict emissions-standards testing and reviews when entering the U.S. The rules could effectively require more expensive technology on some foreign cars or subject those cars to more expensive hurdles that can be billed to the manufacturer or importer.

Either option would likely raise the costs for foreign cars sold in the U.S., making domestically produced cars cheaper by comparison. This effect of raising prices on consumers is common to most nontariff barriers, which seek to penalize imports through measures other than tariffs or duties.

I don’t even know what to say about this stuff anymore. Is this aimed at Canada and Mexico as yet another threat to force them to cave to his NAFTA demands? Is it a play for votes in the upper Midwest? Does he care that it would mostly affect Europe, Japan, and Korea? Is it just some random idea that sprang from his mind after watching Fox & Friends? There’s no telling.

This is prompted by nothing in particular, but I thought I’d put up a chart showing the real wage gains for blue-collar workers over the past few years. These are “production and nonsupervisory” workers, who make up about 70 percent of the labor force. The election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress doesn’t seem to have done much for them. But at least the stock market is up, so there’s that.

The American economy gained 103,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a very weak 13,000 jobs. The employment-population ratio was flat yet again, and the headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1 percent. Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up 2.2 percent. That’s exactly the rate of inflation last month, so blue-collar workers saw no pay increase at all.

This is a pretty sluggish jobs report: new job creation stalled and blue-collar wages were flat. Let’s hope things pick up next month.

On Tuesday, the Atlantic reported that Scott Pruitt went behind the president’s back to give two of his favorite aides huge pay increases. On Wednesday, Pruitt went on Fox News to say that he had just heard about this and had immediately rescinded the raises. Today, the Wasington Post confirmed that Pruitt was lying:

On Thursday evening, two EPA officials confirmed that Pruitt endorsed the idea last month of giving substantial raises to senior counsel Sarah Greenwalt and scheduling and advance director Millan Hupp — although he did not carry out the pay raise himself….[Pruitt] instructed staff to award substantial pay boosts to both women, who had worked in different roles for him in Oklahoma.

The Wall Street Journal ran a laughable editorial today insisting that all of Pruitt’s offenses were the merest peccadilloes, total nothingburgers cast into the spotlight by a conspiracy among the press, the “administrative state,” and environmentalists who hate Pruitt. For some reason, though, they failed to mention either Pruitt’s end run around the White House or his firing of officials who questioned his spending habits. When they get around to it, I’m sure they’ll decide those are just nothingburgers too.

More Scott Pruitt news from CBS:

NEW: Scott Pruitt was stuck in traffic. He wanted to use lights/sirens to get to his official appointment, but the lead agent advised him that sirens were to be used only in emergencies. Less than two weeks later that agent was removed from Pruitt’s detail https://t.co/yfPYHmFaN0

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 5, 2018

The New York Times tells us the rest of the story:

At least five officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, four of them high-ranking, were reassigned or demoted, or requested new jobs in the past year after they raised concerns about the spending and management of the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt.

The concerns included unusually large spending on office furniture and first-class travel, as well as certain demands by Mr. Pruitt for security coverage, such as requests for a bulletproof vehicle and an expanded 20-person protective detail, according to people who worked for or with the E.P.A. and have direct knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Pruitt bristled when the officials — four career E.P.A. employees and one Trump administration political appointee — confronted him, the people said.

Aside from being hellbent on wrecking the environment, Pruitt is just a very strange guy. What kind of person is so paranoid that he wants all this stuff, or so puffed-up that he thinks the EPA administrator rates it? Pruitt is a stone nutcase.

*Not counting Donald Trump, of course, who has been removed from competition for chronic use of asshole steroids.

Family week ends today with a picture chosen by my brother. This is a swan in the Round Pond by Kensington Palace. This pond swarms with swans, and getting a super-duper closeup like this is just a matter of setting down your camera and pressing the shutter button over and over. Naturally, it’s best to free ride on somebody else who’s feeding the swans, since that’s where they congregate. Keep it up, and eventually you’ll get a swan beak right in your lens.

One of Donald Trump’s most effective white nationalist trolls during the 2016 campaign was “Ricky Vaughn,” who was also one of the most reliable retweeters of Russian Twitter accounts. He did his best to stay anonymous, but Luke O’Brien finally tracked him down for HuffPost and he turns out to be…

Douglass Mackey.

….The 28-year-old has done a good job keeping information about himself off the internet….But here’s what we know so far….Mackey is from Waterbury, Vermont, a small town of around 5,000 people in the middle of the state. His father, Scott, a lobbyist who focuses on tax policy affecting wireless communications and the digital economy, was a former legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.). When contacted by email, Scott told HuffPost that “this is a very difficult time for our family and I don’t have any comment.”

….He went to Harwood Union High School, then nearby Middlebury College … moved to Brooklyn, New York, and took a job as an economist at John Dunham & Associates … terminated for reasons that Dunham could not reveal under New York labor laws … moved that year into a two-bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue.

….Secrecy will no longer be effective for Ricky Vaughn.

No it won’t. Good.