The Lunatic In Charge

 

Donald J. Trump, “president” of the United States, has lost what was left of his mind. Last weekend, it exited for good. Gone. Gone like hope for America and the world if he and Republicans remain in control.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s not TDS. It’s a clear-eyed warning, obvious to sentient humans everywhere. Those who still support him will never see it, but Trump, as he devolves into incoherence, is placing every one of us in grave danger. Witness his latest round of insane postings on his vanity media, Truthless Sociopath (I might have misspelled it).

In one weekend, he put up over sixty truly bizarre, AI-generated images and indecipherable rants. One depicted him firing from space, blowing up the Earth. Another was a map of North and Central America, Greenland, and Iceland painted with the American flag, causing world leaders to pledge support for those islands. One showed the moon, captioned “The Moon is Ours.” Still another changed New Mexico to New America. Next, he was marching through fire with an army of giant robots. There were many more, equally nuts. 

MAGAs might welcome it as “sticking it to the libs.” Congressional Rs might pass it off as “Trump being Trump, ha-ha.” But it’s far from funny. It’s as serious as the stroke that turned John Fetterman into a Fox “news” bot and the possible one that explains Trump’s often-drooping face. Serious as his imbecilic, mismanaged war on Iran, his catering to adversaries while disparaging allies, his backfiring tariffs.

Our country is “led” by a man with a degenerating mind, empowered to order nuclear attacks anywhere he chooses. Seeing his life of privilege and uncontested criminality coming to account, embittered and vengeful, who can say he wouldn’t? With a Secretary of Defense almost equally dislocated, a pretend tough-guy who fired every General and Admiral with the integrity to refuse, replacing them with obedient inferiors, he’s removed the resistance. Those brainless tariff wars are already nuking world economies. Why not for real?

As Trump’s authoritarian incompetence has split and damaged America, so is it dividing and threatening Europe. By popular vote, an undisguisedly fascist party just overtook a part of Germany. Elon Musk, himself proudly fascist and back in with Trump, praised their victory. Joining the goose-steps heard round the world, the Department of Homeland (In)security’s General Counsel is targeting federal judges who’ve defied MAGA actions, posting their names and contact info on social media, leading, predictably, to death threats. Everywhere you look, Trump’s madness is afoot. 

The fascist playbook is written in blood, followed, drip by drip, by Trump and his inexcusable Cabinet. It receives implicit approval by our feck-free Republican Congress, and has been adopted by MAGAs. Sure, they’re brainwashed by Fox “news” and other far-right media. But it’s no excuse. They know what they’re seeing and like it.

Rewriting history, burying truths, like slavery; turning national treasures into propaganda palaces, defacing them with Trump’s likeness and tastelessness. I saw it when I travelled the Soviet Union in the Sixties.

Forcing out Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian Institution, grand archive of America and Americana (it displays Julia Child’s kitchen and Portland’s Sandy Boulevard!), preserver of the breadth and depth of our history and achievements. Attacking educational institutions and scientists like Anthony Fauci. And science itself. All part of the playbook, which differs little from Project 2025.

Controlling the press, menacing those still committed to a well-informed electorate, as democracy demands. The head of the FCC bullies outlets that publish polls Trump doesn’t like. Planting pliant loyalists in the judiciary, cowing legislators into “investigating” political opponents. And scapegoats, always scapegoats, currently a toss-up between trans Americans and imaginary communists.

Chapter One, of course, is “the big lie.” Trump has been lying about a stolen election since before the 2020 votes were counted. Echoed by elected Republicans (Elected? How did that happen?), facilitated by the Heritage Foundation’s hand-picked Court Supremacists, he’s using it to justify rigging elections for real. Chapter Two is ignoring rulings and laws they don’t like, threatening – and jailing – free-speeching protestors. And, in Trump’s America, infected by his psychopathy, getting away with it.

His handlers know the stakes. If Democrats retake Congress, the party, both literal and figurative, will be over. Corruption polluting the White House will be addressed. Impeachments will, hopefully, happen and, given Trump’s precipitous unpopularity, a few Rs might rediscover patriotic integrity and vote for removal. Starting, though, not with Trump but with Hegseth and Patel, both of whom have demoralized and damaged their respective departments, exposing America to real danger.

It’s unsurprising that Trump, being Trump, nominated such obedient incompetents, but it’s to the forever shame of Republican Senators who, knowing better but cowardly, abandoned America and ushered them in. Removing Trump while those two remain wouldn’t end the madness. First them, then Trump. A few more of his deranged posts, and maybe the (presumably) remaining true conservative voters will find it in themselves to acknowledge the obvious and do what’s right. It’s a definitional national emergency.

Water Over The Bridge

 

Michelle Obama told us, “I've seen firsthand that being president doesn't change who you are. It reveals who you are.” It was true of her husband: intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed, empathetic. And humorous. As people living in Queens knew all too well when Trump was there, he was dishonest, superficial, nasty, racist, and narcissistic. As “president,” those disqualifying characteristics have intensified a thousandfold.

The quote applies also to Trumpists. It’s clear that people who see him as God-given and God-like didn’t become that oblivious when Trump descended that golden escalator, or as he has continued his bottomless descent ever since. The desire to submit blindly to a demagogue has to have been there all along. They may not have known it; they can’t recognize it, but there it is.

I torture myself occasionally by watching video interviews of MAGAs at Trump rallies. It’s mentally harmful and physically painful. Same with observing the weak-kneed people in charge of Google, who, while Trump’s idiotic edict was still echoing in the Offal Office, instantly changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. As I write this, Apple Maps hasn’t, but they just hired a new CEO. We’ll see.

Because Trump and his enablers are vengeful people, businesses that cave to him have something to lose, and not just their integrity. Trump’s “presidency” has revealed their cowardice and greed. But how to explain the evident submission of our conservative Supreme Court Justices, with their lifetime appointments? Their claim to be Constitutional originalists and literalists is as dishonest as Trump and his Cabinet-squatters. Their proclamations that money is speech and corporations are people were created out of vapor. But allowing Trump’s illegal attempts to ban mail-in ballots is inexplicable, blatant disregard for the original, literal words of Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which says:

"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators."

Each state. Altered by Congress. Nothing, expressed or implied, gives that power to a president. We can’t know what the Submissive Six thought when they reread the Constitution, but what they said was, “We don’t care and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I recall incessant right-wing screaming about executive orders when issued by Presidents Obama and Biden. Trump’s are met with the silence of the lame.

His renaming water is mostly laughable and embarrassing and, hopefully, like Trump’s name and images everywhere in D.C., will disappear on January 20, 2029. If polluting the capital that way is a presidential right, any could have done the same, but none have been so malignantly narcissistic. Same with Trump’s bullying of corporate entities. None sicced the FCC on media whose personalities and content they didn’t like, nor did any prior presidents appoint such unqualified but worshipful people to run executive branch agencies.

Trump isn’t bright, is getting dimmer, and he’s all but illiterate. But he recognized something that was there all along, but which, out of respect for the law and for our country, no prior president chose to employ: laws are only as effective as those who follow them and those willing to enforce them. Having surrounded himself with the opposite, privileged with a Congress empowered by a fog-brained electorate to ignore his every transgression, and granted nearly complete immunity by less-than-supreme Justices, Trump does what he wants, enriches himself beyond imagination, and gets away with it unchallenged, except by a powerless minority. And he’s doing everything he can, come November, to keep that minority from power.

There are consequences. For example, replacing departing FBI agents who refused to serve an incompetent leader, Kash Patel has lowered hiring standards. Per CBS, “According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.” Hiring criteria for ICE, it’s apparent, are even lower, as those masked thugs appear to enjoy brutalizing non-white immigrants, most of whom have no criminal records and, lately, were here legally.

Deporting “the worst of the worst” has long since disappeared from Trump’s incoherent rhetoric. It’s all about intimidation and, like Putin and Kim, quashing dissent. When I served in Vietnam, the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, enjoyed editorial and content freedom dating from the Civil War. I looked forward to every issue. Pentagon Pete, demanding content aligned only with his tough-guy preening, fired its editor and the woman (!) in charge of protecting its independence. It’s another marker on the path(ology) to authoritarianism, unchecked by Congress, SCOTUS, or MAGA voters.

What else is new in Trump’s America? He just defunded bike lanes on roads because they’re DEI. His cruel removal of legal status from Haitians has led to at least one suicide. The insanity has to stop. If we can overwhelm his vote-suppression tactics in November, it might.

Ear Worm

“... [W]hile he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. He wants to build his ballroom and TRAVEL WITH NATALIE on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Oman.” (Emphasis mine) So spoke Senator John Ossoff (D-GA), causing coordinated, skyscraping dudgeon from every right-wing mouthpiece. Those capitalized three words constitute his total reference to Ms. Harp. The point was Trump’s gross dereliction.

“He called her a whore,” one said. “He attacked a defenseless girl,” (she’s 35) said another, reportedly seeking Trump’s press secretary job. “I’d vote for Putin over Ossoff. That’s how bad this guy Ossoff is,” said the former Bill O’Reilly, choosing, like Trump, a murderous dictator. Here, there be lessons.

Everyone but MAGAs, and every man, woman, and child Republican member of Congress, knows. It confirms, yet again, in what low regard Trump and his confederates hold their voters; creating a s#!t sandwich out of a nothingburger, feeding it to MAGA, calling it delicious, to be swallowed gratefully. It works. What Senator Ossoff said is simple truth. Travel with. On a flying emolument. It’s not metaphorical.

Theatrically apoplectic wingnuts claim sleaze because they’ve seen and excused Trump’s for years. Serial adultery is who he is and, therefore, comes immediately to the MAGA mind. If he were playing Harp as he has his past victims, it’d be creepy, but nothing new. This is worse.

America’s “president” is so needy, so damaged, that he hired a full-time, always-near woman to shovel continual flattery. To search and print for him laudatory opinions, fake polls, and attestations that things are fine. It explains his non-compos insistence that he’s leading in polls, that his horrendously stupid war is going great, that he’s admired round the world.

She’s not his only toady. In those made-for-TV, national embarrassment “cabinet meetings,” his appointees heap servile praise, provide his “jokes” with a forced laugh track, and applaud his every preposterous assertion. While the world’s worst dictators, recognizing his vulnerability, play him like a Harp. (Sorry. Accidental capitalization. I’ll fix it.) She does it constantly, all hours. It’s she, it’s said, who transcribes his hallucinatory wee-hour rants onto his Truthless Sociopath website.

The danger to us of a “president” kept from truth about national and world affairs ought to be obvious to everyone; even those made blind by Trump’s propagandistic right-wing media.

But enough’s enough. If there’s not another word about Natalie Harp, from either side, it’ll be too many.

Another victim of conjured outrage, also from both sides, is Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline, appointed US Senator per order of Trump. Asked about China policy in a televised debate, she admitted knowing nothing. Not ideal for one in her position, but understandable at this early stage. What’s legitimately disturbing, though, was her cleanup act on Sean Hannity’s show. She said South Carolinians don’t care about foreign affairs, which is probably true of her side. "People in South Carolina are more concerned with making ends meet,” she added. “They are concerned with boys in girls' sports."

That’s as telling as the preceding revelations about Republican politics. In South Carolina, as it happens, it’s illegal for trans girls to play in girls’ sports. There, it’s not a thing. (Across the country, it’s been a thing about twelve times.) So either Senator Sibling is lying like a dutiful R, or her voters are so indoctrinated by right-wing mendacity that they think it’s massive, everywhere. In any case, it opens the playbook of a political party bereft of positive ideas. Scapegoating and demonizing the vulnerable is all they have.

Ms. Graham, in other words, is the perfect Republican candidate, mirroring all of Trump’s choices: inexperienced, unqualified; obsequious genuflection and repetition of his lies, the sole requirement. And there’s none so inexperienced and unqualified as weekend Fox host, Pentagon Pete Hegseth, who fired the general responsible for creating an American drone division, hiring another, who ended it. It’s part of his idiotic “back to basics” approach, ignoring the lessons of the Ukraine and Iran wars.

Not recognizing that the military future belongs to drones is worse than Trump’s desire to build battleships in his name, when battleships are all but obsolete, and redesigning aircraft carriers because the ones he saw watching “Victory at Sea” while nursing his imaginary bone spurs looked cooler. Russia just launched an autonomous drone into Ukraine, guided by an American-made chip. Will Trump respond with bazookas and flamethrowers?

Dang. Now there’s no room to address his stupid trade war with Canada (he wants to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. That'll show 'em!) Or his appallingly corrupt, Republican-ignored stock purchases before announcing policies that boost them. Or SCOTUS, predictably 6-3, greasing his plainly unconstitutional ban on mail-in voting. When Democrats take over Congress, maybe they’ll end the madness.

For now, Canada’s Mark Carney is the moral, political, and intellectual leader of the free world.

On Sunday, Trump put on an Indy car race on the streets of DC.

Looking Away

 

                    (AI image)

For weeks, I’ve been wanting to write about something other than our dangerously deranged “president,” but his transgressions are endless and dangerous to ignore.

Nevertheless, despite his threat to “bomb the s#^t out of Oman,” a long-time ally; taking credit for falling drug prices resulting from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act; succumbing to Earth’s cruelest dictator Kim Jong Un’s weaponized flattery to the detriment of ally South Korea, a longer-time ally, further destroying trust in America; floating the Strait of Hormuz as US territory; threatening the International Criminal Court; blaming vandals (now his all-purpose, go-to excuse for his screwups) for damage to the White House lawn created by his self-celebrating grandstand; launching yet another First Amendment attack; demanding ridiculously expensive and inefficient redesigns of aircraft carriers; further enriching himself by turning his scammy crypto company into a bank; welcoming his unapologetically politicized Attorney General to a political rally – in just the last week – I’ll ignore it all. Instead, from my former life, a surgery story:

Almost erasing the bad luck in her life, Daphne chose to exsanguinate when I and OR staff were immediately available. She’d nearly died before arriving at the hospital. The call came just as I'd finished another midnight emergency case, so I was there to greet her. She wasn't in a position to be sociable. In shock, confused, vomiting blood, she was riding very close to the edge of life.

Her husband looked nearly as pale as I told him she needed immediate surgery, we'd see what we'd find, do what we could. It was a critical situation, I said, stating the obvious. Pushing the gurney myself, running, I pointed the husband to the waiting area and banged through the OR doors.

One thing about operating on the hypercritically ill: when you start from zero, there's no downside. I'm the only hope she has, but I can't make it worse. Death is the default outcome. What you might expect, based on the odds, is a bleeding duodenal ulcer, the surgical approach to which is generally straightforward: get in there quick, make an incision through the pylorus (the sphincter muscle at the distal end of the stomach), throw a couple of well-placed sutures around the duodenal artery, and calm is restored.

Daphne was anything but routine, though: due to taking high-dose steroids, she had two gigantic ulcers, encompassing most of her stomach, front and back, one of which had eroded into her splenic artery. No wonder she was bleeding so massively: that's a really big one, and I'd never seen it be the source of gastric hemorrhage. I put my finger through the hole in her stomach, onto the artery, to stanch the flow and give the anesthesia team a chance to catch up on blood and fluid replacement, during which there was nothing for me to do but stand there, a warm-blooded cork.

A professor of mine once said, "You don't need to worry about bleeding, Doc, unless you can hear it." Good for a laugh. This bleeding, I heard: frightening, shrill, threatening life like a banshee.

Daphne and I were in a fix. Those ulcers took up over half her stomach, plus, by tying off the artery, I'd probably just killed her spleen. At first I tried to save some of her stomach, but it became clear the remnant wouldn't survive. So, against everything desirable in a dire emergency, after prolonged shock, when fast and minimal is best, I removed her entire stomach and spleen, fashioned a sort of stomach-substitute reservoir out of intestine, and connected it to her esophagus. Too much surgery for such a sick lady, but it's what she needed.

In training, there was a generally adversarial relationship between surgeons and medical docs. In practice, happily, it's the opposite. I was partnered with a sensational group of intensive care specialists, and, working as a team, we pulled more than a few people out of the fire over the years. Daphne was one. Despite my having told the family to expect, at best, a long and complicated stay in intensive care, Daphne recovered on a semi-straight path, returning to her tough life.

She lived in half a hovel, to which I made many house-calls over the years. Her kids, named after cartoon characters, struggled in school; her husband rarely worked. But every Christmas I got a card from her, thanking me for another year of life she'd not have had. Once in a while she'd call with some health concern or another and, since it was hard for her to get around, I'd go see her and do what I could.

Several years later, a urologist ambitiously -- maybe injudiciously -- removed her urinary bladder for chronic infection, and once again she teetered on the edge of dying. This time, she had healing problems after she got home, and, by momentum I guess, I became her home-health aide, debriding her wound for months at her sad little home. I guess I didn't want those Christmas cards to stop. They did, eventually, but not for a few more years.

Wicked

 

According to current TV ads, there’s a new, more effective hair growth pill. It’s good news, and timely: I’m running out of hair to pull out. By now, every non-comatose American should have realized everything Trump says, without exception, is a lie. That there remain believers, a diminishing number but apparently floored at thirty percent of voters, is alopeciafacient.

What evolutionary aberration produced such people, and why haven’t the responsible genes been bred out? Ironically, it’s probably because people they hate the most, “libtards,” they call them, have, through decades of good governance, put in place programs enabling their continued existence, despite what would otherwise be unsurvivable credulity. Trump is the thanks we got.

How often has he claimed victory in his unnecessary, unconstitutional, poorly planned, ill-managed, Iranian war of distraction? How many times, after what, the 20th or 30th, bombing run, has he claimed Iran is “begging” for an agreement? Following his latest such bleat, while Iran was busy negotiating with Qatar, not the US, over control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran announced its conditions for opening it. In digestible form, here they are:

The United States must “correct its behavior,” including permanently ending the war, lifting the naval blockade and sanctions, releasing all frozen assets, fully compensating Iran for war damages, and promising never again to threaten it.

Does that sound like begging? Does it suggest Trump is winning his war of stupidity? Do his repeatedly disproven claims indicate a man of sound mind? A man who should remain as titular head of our country? Over the weekend, he bragged about “great poll numbers,” when they are, in fact, terrible (for him, not America). Even Fox “news” polls!

So, what explains it? Presumably, not even the hardest-died Trumpist would believe him if he said the skies were clear while standing in a downpour. So it must be insanity. Either he thinks whatever he says becomes truth, like God herself, or this. It’s not within a light-year of normal. He’s melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.

If Trump’s cultists were born that way, they can’t help themselves. But surely, some Republican senators have the capacity to see; Tommy Tuberville, Marcia Blackburn, Ron Johnson, and their comparables excepted. Rand Paul, dogged defamer of Anthony Fauci, M.D., was such an unqualified doctor that, after repeatedly failing national certification boards, he made up his own and declared himself legit.

Yet there he sat last week, abetted by compatibly corrupt Congressionals, kangarooing attention away from their inability to govern, pushing debunked conspiracies, misconstruing and misquoting Dr. Fauci’s private diary. Shameful is a word too mild. They pushed venal, disgusting lies. Knowingly, calculatingly, disgracefully. As contemptible as their capitulation on Todd Blanche.

Republicans in Congress aren’t your friends, MAGA, and Trump’s lies aren’t the harmless kind four-year-old kids spin. Allied nations no longer trust America, whether by virtue of breaking inkwet agreements or consistent dishonesty. Can’t you understand that his delusional inability to see reality, much less accept it, has led to worldwide catastrophe? And not just making us less safe by weakening us economically and militarily, and by dismissing our allies, but by strengthening our adversaries, maybe intentionally.

Having gutted USAID, Trump is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world, ending the flow of medicine and food to the sick and the hungry. Unsatisfied, he’s doing the same at home, defunding food stamps, child care, maternal health programs, limiting access to healthcare, deregulating poisons. And, just now, ordering changes to childhood vaccinations that will, at the very least, cause unnecessarily many trips to doctors’ offices, extra expense for parents, and multiple jabs for children, rejecting years of settled science, based on assurances from the worm that ate its way through Arfkay’s brain. And, because it’s already happening, will increase childhood diseases. And deaths.

His justification: “I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a, a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s, uh, body. And bad things happen in many, too many cases.” No, really: those are his exact words. Proof, he calls it, like evidence of Deflection Pool vandalism he just admitted doesn’t exist. Vaccinations the size of a soda bottle! Has America become so lost that there are MAGAs who hear that and think, “By golly, he’s right”?

Trump is hallucinating, conspicuously deteriorating, confirming it by posting nightly AI slop, portraying himself as a muscled superhero, or blasphemously kissing Jesus on a golden (of course!) Crucifix, or an AI-buffed, Medal-of-Honor-wearing Four-Star General. Not even Mussolini and Kim Jong Un, who also suborned glorification with posters and statues, went that far. And his flunkies stand by, grinning and nodding their heads.

But let’s conclude with well-deserved comic relief: A lawsuit filed by Trump against Citibank for “debanking” him prompted their disclosure that, rather than political, it was because they’d gathered evidence of money laundering in his accounts. Karma. Prosecute THAT, Todd Blanche!

Smoke And Mirrors

Even before the latest news, Trump’s Deflecting Pool fiasco was the perfect metaphor for his disastrous “presidency.” It has it all: incompetence, arrogance, cronyism, lying, corruption, blame-shifting. Then his weaponized and degraded DOJ dropped charges against an Olympian canoeist who dipped his hand into virescent waters to touch a cerulean shard. The charges were ridiculous from the outset, transparently intended to give credence to Trump’s desperate scapegoating for his self-created disaster.

There was never substantiation that David Hearn caused a penny’s worth of damage, let alone the thousand-dollar threshold for a felony charge. Yet Trump’s incompetent and embarrassing choice for US Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, recidivist disprover of the “ham sandwich” trope, and, like so many of Trump’s competence-not-required appointees, a former Fox “news” personality, incited an indictment, repeatedly claiming there were photos, witness testimony, expert analysis, and damning video showing the man VIOLENTLY ripping sealant from the bottom of the pool. USING BOTH HANDS!

Shortly after we learned that the government’s expert contradicted everything Trump-level prevaricator Pirro claimed, the charges went the way of day-one-ended Ukraine war, Mexico-paid border wall, and Iran’s obliterated nuclear program pronouncements. It happened immediately after Mr. Hearn’s lawyers petitioned to release grand jury transcripts, likely to have revealed the malfeasance of Trump’s DOJ lawyers in securing the indictment. Withdrawing all charges, Judge-not Jeanine’s report described the damage as due to “rushed and botched installation,” with no evidence of vandalism.

That’s not all, because, with Trump, it never is. When he secretes lies, like climate change hoaxes and stolen elections, and unlike his wives, he sticks with them forever. So, even after the revelation that his inexpert hire’s shoddy work and not vandalism caused the damage, he kept insisting the opposite. So accustomed is he to lies getting him out of trouble, he released a video which, he claimed, confirms very vandalistic vandals vandalizing vandally. It doesn’t. Have a look. What it confirms is Trump’s psychopathy.

Whether Trump knows he’s lying or believes the lies is moot. MAGA believes. Republican kangaroo courtiers create diversions to wipe them away. We’re camel-strawed with a “president” for whom lying is a way of life, a formerly useful political party that has embraced it as modus operandi, and a Republican-controlled Senate too cowed and corrupt to reject Trump’s uniformly alarming nominees for critical positions. Like Todd Blanche, up for permanent Attorney General.

Two outgoing senators, Carolina Tom and Texas John, with nothing meaningful to lose, made a sham show of refusing to advance Blanche out of committee unless he’d put in writing the undoing of Trump’s slush fund for insurrectionists, seditionists, and other criminals, as well as the unspeakably corrupt, permanent exculpation of all crimes, past, present, and future committed by Trump, his spawn, and his businesses. All of which was “negotiated” by Blanche in the baddest of faith.

Predictable as Trump lies yet to come, they executed a mammoth cave after Blanche smoked a few mirrors, purporting to have complied with their demands. He did nothing of the sort. Surely all three know it, but now they have the cover of darkness. The honorable duo turned out to be just as weak as their compadres of contemptibility.

The original Blanche-created outrages were formally agreed to and signed by both parties: Trump suing Trump. Included in that document was the stipulation that it could be revised only by agreement and signature of both parties. What Trickster Todd produced was a unilateral “memorandum.” The prior agreement remains in effect unless Trump signs on. Will he? Whereas it purports to have ended the crime-loving slush fund, it appears to keep in place the prosecution-avoiding provisions for all of Trump’s prior and current crimes, possibly allowing the pursuit of future crimes he’ll surely commit. Assuming Trump’s pet DOJ would choose to. Will it?

Even if the memorandum was bilaterally signed, wiping out all previous provisions, which it isn’t, there remain plenty of reasons why Blanche should be rejected like a moldy tomato. The timid two and all Republican senators know it. As acting A.G., he approved going after the so-called pool vandals, which they weren’t. He okayed the persecution of six Democratic members of Congress who reminded troops they can refuse illegal orders. He was instrumental in withholding and lying about the Epstein files, quidded a suspicious quo with Ghislaine Maxwell, and did Trump’s bidding in indicting James Comey.

Without fail, he’s demonstrated loyalty to Trump over the Constitution and ethical departmental independence. He was and remains Trump’s personal attorney, which he doesn’t hide because Republican submissiveness guarantees he doesn’t have to. He’s the archetypal Trump appointee and, as such, will likely be confirmed.

We can only wonder if any of the approval monkeys dba Republican senators look at the harm being done by the Trump goons they okayed and have regrets. If not, they’ll have eternity to ponder what they did, assuming Hell exists, which is doubtful, but in the era of Trump, I kinda hope it does. I’m willing to take my chances.

Dinner Time

 

With apologies to Thomas Hobbes, Trump’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was nasty, brutish, and long. It’s unsurprising that a man with no sense of humor, who can neither tell nor take a joke, who has empathy for none but himself, whose bitterness, mendacity, and self-pity characterize his entire life, resorted to unfunny, mean-spirited, crude, and childish insults at which no one laughed but his gaggle of incompophants. By acclamation, it was the most appallingly unpresidential speech since Andrew Johnson’s on September 4, 1866. The analyses are in. 

Decent people were disgusted. MAGA loved it, the name-calling, body-shaming, transphobia, and lies. Trump hates everyone and everything they hate, and they love him for it. Their delight at the stench of his speech confirms it.

As to the dinner itself, given Trump’s Constitution-hating attacks on the free press, calling reporters enemies of the people, threatening arrests and delicensing, inviting him to speak was like having cancer over for dinner after it killed your best friend. One reporter refused to shake his hand. The rest, who didn’t, debased themselves. So did the planners who ended the tradition of having comedians roast the current president and the press. It was cowardice and capitulation akin to most Congressional Rs.

Kudos to Wolf Blitzer, though, for reading the bill of particulars right next to Trump, including the doxxing of a reporter, leading to death threats, forcing her and her family to move. Trump, the personification of repugnance, literally laughed it off.

But there are greater outrages than useless dinners. We’re living under a government so corrupt, so dismissive of the intelligence of its people, that George Orwell would have burned his most famous book, had he concluded no one would believe such a dystopian world, like ours under Trump, could ever become real.

There’s no better (worse) example of Orwellian double-speak than removing the names of four soldiers killed in Iranian attacks from the list of eighteen war dead. Because those four were killed by strikes during one of many Trump-declared, imaginary ceasefires, they don’t count as deaths in war. So said straight-faced awficials.

That malevolence came not from North Korea or Russia, but our own, minority-elected government. If he could, Trump would hide all the failures of his unnecessary war. Surely MAGA doesn’t buy it. Not even they are so thoroughly brainwashed, so delightedly uncritical that they accept such fetid bullscat as another justification for their limerence.

Mr. Orwell presaged Trump’s executive-ordered signs outside the Smithsonian Institution warning of “inaccurate information” therein (i.e., resisting the MAGAfication of our true history). In “1984,” George had the Ministry of Truth saying, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In real life, he wrote, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Like revealing that government officials doled out billions of dollars in grants for clean energy development to states “based solely” on whether they voted for Trump.

Facts, pulled from a quicksand of lies, that should have led to actual revolution. Facts, like security problems with Qatairforce One, leading to Trump’s puppified DOJ subpoenaing New York Times reporters who revealed them. And their families. Trump’s lawyers abandoned that festival of unconstitutionality after a judge summarily firstamendmented them out of court. That acting Attorney General Todd Blanch issued those subpoenas shows why his nomination as permanent A.G. ought to be rejected 99-0 (absent not-necessarily-dead Mitch). Instead, his promotion will likely be approved, thanks to a Jello salad of devertebralated Republican senators.

Trump’s fact-free spewage includes, from now till November, accusing Democrats of being communists. Confident in the grateful gullibility of his voters and the fact that neither he nor they know the meaning of the word, he took a manly stand in defense of Mount Rushmore. “The communists want to take it down. They have tried to take Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up. They want to take it down…. These people are crazy.” If he believes that, he’s the crazy one. If he believes MAGA will believe it and that Congressional Republicans will look away from his confabulations, he’s right. But still crazy.

Crazier still are the rules his administration is pushing to complete his extinguishing of science, handing any hope of progress to the rest of the world, making his regressive, un-greatened America a fourth-world country. It limits creating research partnerships with other nations, the sort of cooperation that has led to major scientific breakthroughs. It would place in the hands of his unqualified, compliant political appointees, not experts, decisions on what kinds of research deserve funding, and how much. We can surmise which would get the axe, or, as Elon Musk’s death-dealing DOGE put it, the chainsaw: climate change, pollution, evolution, cosmology, vaccines, poverty, addiction, pure science like the Hadron Collider. And, by their exact words, “woke” and “DEI” things. 

But, hey, as long as Trump calls Adam Schiff a watermelon-head, it’s all good. Right, MAGA? Right? Are we great yet?

Fraud Fraudulence

 

Trump’s fraudulent fraud speech about election fraud came after I’d sent in last week’s column. A dishonest beaut, is what it was, confirming everything written about his intent to discredit any election a Democrat wins. Better yet, to keep such an election from happening at all.

Because he’s unable to read for comprehension, and because it wasn’t presented to him in cartoon form, the evidence to which he referred, posted on his Truthless Sociopath website, proved the opposite of what he claimed. With satisfying irony (who really knows what “irony” means?) the material confirmed the election meddling he’s been denying since day one of his first “presidency.” You know, the “Russia hoax” that wasn’t. A hoax. Also, China’s. 

Which is more inexplicable: that he can fool all of MAGA all of the time, or that he isn’t struck by lightning when he eructates his gaseous lies? Maybe the MAGA cult is right, claiming he’s sent by God. To lie, though? Surprising. If so, we've been misinterpreting the Ten Commandments all this time. Could it be, instead of “He has a plan for us all,” it’s “He has a scam for us all”? With its countless rewritings and translations, original intent may have been lost to time.

In that bizarrely self-negating, proofless smog, Trump claimed illegal voting is rampant; perhaps his biggest lie of the night. Innumerable investigations show instances to be vanishingly small; many were unintentional errors or misunderstandings, never in numbers enough to affect any election, anywhere, ever. His pre-hyped “bombshells” were damp squibs.

Also inexplicable: does he know he’s lying, or does his malignant narcissism render him incapable of believing he lost in 2020? Whatever the answer, each of his appointees and nominees is terrified of saying Joe Biden won that election; only that he was sworn in. With serial cowardice, they and their Republican questioners prostitute and embarrass themselves at every Congressional hearing. It follows, though, that a “president” having no integrity can sniff its lack in others and anoint only them. Notwithstanding the uncountable mistakes he’s made in managing everything from pandemics to energy production to ill-advised, lie-based wars, he deserves credit for getting every one of his selections for office exactly right. If “right” means sycophancy first, competence and rectitude last.

Which brings us naturally to the World Cup, FIFA’s glorious spectacle, second only to awarding Trump its once-and-only Peace Prize. Having known nothing about soccer pre-parenthood, we came to love (and hate, as every fan understands) the sport as we saw, in our son, the effort and athleticism required to master it. He was good, a striker, faster than the effluvium of lies from Trump. His select team, having won a state championship, played in an invitational tourney in Canada. Work kept me from attending the first bout, against the Canadian U-17 national team. When I got there Saturday morning, a dad told me I’d missed the best game ever. Score: 0 – 0. Which confirmed our status as aficionados of the game. Even my parents, when they came, once, from Portland to watch their grandson play – their grandson!! – said it was boring. As to skill, well, it took our son years to get exceptionally good, whereas the first time he ran with a football, he scored a touchdown.

I’m with the rest of the world on this: Americans should call it football, too. Except for a few seconds of a game, what we call football isn’t. We should call it handball. Then what would we call Olympic-style handball? Soccer.

We watched almost every World Cup match, including the final, less exciting than the third-place game. Much as I relished knowing Trump would be presenting the trophy to Spain, toward which he’s been exceptionally nasty of late, I forwent the ceremony. It’d have been like finishing a Michelin-starred meal with a cyclospora salad. (Another Trumpic mess; following the screw worm screwup.)

Proving me prescient, America’s embarrassing “president” ignored FIFA’s president’s efforts to get him out of the way of team pictures. How great, though, that Spain later edited him out. Would that it were that easy elsehow.

If this column sags a bit, here’s why: On Monday, my wife and I had lunch downtown with Joanie T., best scrub nurse/surgical assistant ever, and the friends of a friend of her friend, who sends copies of my columns to them in Nebraska, America’s heartland in more ways than one, evidently. Through friend of friend and Joanie, they’d requested an audience, if I may so describe it, during a planned visit here. Wonderful people, great fun. (My longest-distance reader, far as I know, lives in China.)

I wasn’t feeling a column this week. I would have taken a minibreak, but I thought of how nice those folks were, how interesting and engaging, the mutual appreciation, and didn’t want to disappoint right after our meeting. So this one’s for them.

Making A List

 

Presenting a surfeit of offenses, this column can be consumed cafeteria-style.

Unlike Trump upon the death of Robert Muller, I’ll not say I’m glad Lindsey Graham is dead. As to Mitch McConnell’s “proof of life,” I have questions.

Man-with-a-plan Trump proposed collecting tolls for passage through the Strait. One-eightied a day later.

Here’s an abbreviated, sorta-sanitized joke: A ship sank. Its captain and a married couple made it to an uninhabited island. The captain orders taking turns in a tree to watch for help, and goes first. Every few minutes he says, “All clear. And stop copulating down there.” The couple is puzzled, since they weren’t. It repeats till the end of his shift. Then the husband takes his. “All clear,” he says after several minutes. Then, “By golly, it DOES look like copulation down there.”

I think of it when Trump issues his daily lies about election fraud going on down there. And the fact that the only examples are when he and Republican lawmakers are down there doing it. To us. Like saying Georgia Senators Ossoff and Warnock are “illegitimate” because of nonexistent fraud. That’s 25th Amendment stuff.

With his approval sinking like that ship, Trump’s plan is clear: hammer it incessantly, so that if Ds win November, he’ll claim fraud, and MAGA will gobble it like Trump on a cheeseburger. Meanwhile, he’s fast-tracking his own election dupery by firing the Election Assistance Commissioners, whose job is helping states identify and eliminate fraud. Why? (We pause for the three seconds required to figure it out.)

The murder by ICE of an undocumented Texas man who’d been in the US for 35 years, law-abiding since arrival, started a construction company, put his kids through college, is stomach-turning. He was on his way to a job, three employees with him, each of whom had been in the US for over twenty years. All deny ICE’s claim that he’d tried to run over an officer. Trump is rushing to deport them, which requires another three seconds to comprehend.

After the execution of Renee Good, justified by a similar claim even after video revealed it was a lie, who believes any statement from ICE? Or from Trump’s administration, including him? MAGA. That’s who. Incredibly, ICE thought they were chasing someone else. And they just killed a documented immigrant in Maine in front of his three-year-old daughter. It’s the police state of Trump’s dreams. Even after belatedly pausing (then not pausing) vehicle stops, the deaths are on him. He ordered indiscriminate, massive deportations, with quotas.

It’s a looping online reel: Trump bombs Iran, says Iran wants talks, Iran denies; Trump announces a ceasefire, Iran says there isn’t one; Hormuz is open, Hormuz is closed; one side resumes bombing, then the other; Congress capitulates; Trump says Iran wants talks, Iran denies; Trump says he destroyed Iran’s offence, Iran attacks; Congress capitulates: it’s a war, it’s not a war. Here we go loop-de-loo. As the Queen of Soul asked, “Who’s zoomin’ who”? (I’d have said “whom.)

Yet again, Trump smeared the Smithsonian Institution for recording history truthfully. He aims to rewrite America’s story the way MAGA prefers. Happy slaves, no racism, no Trail of Tears. No liberals, probably. Trump has homed North Korea. History isn’t political. It’s history.

 

If lying about Democrats’ election fraud doesn’t fly, and if commie-calling fails to gain traction, there’s resurrected claims of welfare fraud, a trope sticky like flypaper since Saint Ronnie spoke of welfare queens. Saddled by Trump with another loser after the Iran Memo of Understanding, V.P. J.D. is charged with rooting out fraud (not Trump’s). He hyped a case which, he said, proves Democrats are pro-fraud. The perpetrator was a woman prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned under President Biden. Oops. In J.D.’s defense, in Era d’Trump the lyin’s share is committed by Republicans. He had few options.

Because there’s no bottom below which Trump won’t sink, he shared a photo of a kindergarten ceremony, shaming smiling little girls for wearing hijabs. Because there’s no bottom below which MAGAs won’t sink, there followed ugly comments on the school’s website, including membership-required death threats.

Trump rejected disaster relief for several blue states while granting it to red ones. It’s part of his efforts to manipulate voting, punishing states that neither kow nor tow. And he ordered the Postal Service not to deliver ballots in states that refuse his illegal demands. That’d be us. USPS says it will obey. Courts have a Constitutional duty. Will they?

Continuing its assault on the First Amendment, punishing journalists and others, Trump’s DOJ subpoenaed New York Times reporters for revealing safety problems with his “gifted” Qatari 747, already costing taxpayers $400 million in retrofitting.

Trump inflicted his name onto the airport nearest Married-a-Lardo. At least Ronald Reagan waited till he died. It’s more North-Korea-level cultism. Like the Trumphal Arch, just approved by his hand-picked something-or-other commission. And those fawning posters hanging like dingleberries on government buildings. And now, a one-dollar coin from the US Mint, with his face on it, right next to "In God We Trust." Un-fking-believable. Might 2029 see names removed and projects disassembled? We can hope. 

That’s only one week. Be sure your cafeteria has a sneeze guard.

They're Everywhere

 

In his “all about me” takeover of our national birthday, Trump proved me right yet again. In last week’s column, I predicted that from now till November, Republicans, of whom he is the leader of the pack of lies, will tell you Democrats are communists. “America will never be a communist country,” he vowed. True, uncharacteristically: there’s never been one, anywhere. The only examples of definitional communism have been collective farms in Russia and Israel, and a couple of failed ones in the US. Trump has no clue what communism means.

Same goes for MAGA. Nor, for that matter, do many – if any – of the fringe lefties who label themselves with the word. As national governance, it’s vapor. But when have lies stopped Trump and MAGA Republicans from pushing them?

The irony is that what Trump is actually making of America is what never-communist Russia is under Putin: a dictatorship facilitated by hyper-wealthy oligarchs. As to the Declaration of Independence, signed on the first of 250 American birthdays, who can point to any value enshrined within that Trump protects? Or believes? Or could name?

But enough about me. Graham Platner, the “common man” running against perpetually concerned Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), has been credibly accused of sexual assault. As opposed to Republicans, who voted for Trump after he bragged about committing it (“grab them ...”), and who are all in on Texas Ken Paxton, who’s approximately as amoral and corrupt as Trump, Democrats aren’t excusing Platner. Virtually all are calling for an end to his campaign, even if it threatens Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate.

It’s a consistent difference between what Republicans have become under Trump, and Democrats. MAGA can’t deny it, so they embrace it. Democrats opted for morality. Before Trump, both parties did. Mostly.

Which provides an excellent lead-in to the latest revelations of Trump’s astounding corruption. For he so loved us that he gave his begotten $400,000 salary. And cashed in on his “presidency” to the tune of $3 billion or so, to thunderous silence from Congressional Republicans, excepting a couple on their way out of office. The comparative corruption surrounding that “gifted” Qatari 747, which cost taxpayers $400 million in upgrades, wouldn’t feed a chicken.

Trump and his family made billions on their cryptocurrency scam, while credulous people who invested in it lost, in total, about the same amount. Stock in his company peaked at $79, when he pocketed the money. It’s now a buck seventy-five. Trump, his family, and his insider goons purchased stock in various corporations before Trump awarded federal contracts to them.

Just last week, Trump stood next to Michael Dell and told everyone to buy his “great” computers, which goosed Dell stock. Guess who’d purchased shares weeks before. And this: Trump is relaxing rules governing online purchase of guns. Need I tell you whose son has a big stake in an online seller? And how about the hundreds of stock trades he made before pausing tariffs? Nor shall we forget the gritfo di toti grifti, the corrupte qua non, his “Board of Peace”?

According to his financial disclosure statement for 2025, Trump absconded with over $2 billion. That included, in addition to his crypto crimes, grift from overpriced sneakers, Bibles, commemorative coins, and foreign-made Trump watches. What’s that saying? “You can fool all MAGAs all the time.”

Then there’s Trump turning the pardon process into a cash pig. “It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon,” a prominent defense attorney told anti-Trump, former Republican Charlie Sykes. He made $686 million from his eponymous cryptocurrency offering while suckered investors lost a total of $3.6 billion. Looking away, Congressional Republicans and America-loving MAGAs suffer torticollis.

There’s much more, but why bother? Even if Democrats retake the White House and Congress, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hall pass and Democrats’ faintheartedness, he’ll get away with it. That ought to matter to everyone, not just the ones he’s been playing for suckers for a decade as “president” and a lifetime before that. Their acquiescence is the avatar of Congressional Republicans’ hypocrisy. They chased non-existent corruption of President Joe Biden for years and perpetuated outrage over Hunter’s paintings, sold by a gallery, over a few years, for a total of $1.5 million; Trump probably keeps that much in his drawers.

Speaking of non-sequiturs, which nobody was, here’s another prediction: Supreme Court Justi and Constitutional literalists Alito and Thomas, who just ignored the literal wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, will retire before Trump’s term ends so he can replace them with yoots (Cousin Vinny reference) who’ll sit for decades. If Ds improbably take the Senate in November, they’ll do it before January, when the noobs are sworn in.

Finally: It’s a truism that everything Trump touches dies. Had he not meddled in the World Cup, giving Belgium super-incentive, might the US team have done better? We’ll never know. But about Alito and Thomas, we will.

Failure To Learn

 

“It’s déjà vu,” as my personal yogi once said, “all over again.” The ability of Democrats to unclench the jaws of victory and pry defeat out like a rotten molar can’t be overstated. It depends upon how much the recent primary results in New York City harbing national sentiment.

I like its mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Much as Republicans and their mendacious media tell you otherwise, he’s neither a communist nor an antisemite. Those prevaricators couldn’t define communism on their way out of a wet paper bag. He’s a Democratic Socialist (also right-side undefinable.) I have no problem with that any more than I do with Scandinavian countries, all of whom fit the definition and are distinctly capitalistic. What they get for higher taxes is economic security in retirement, free education and healthcare. Saabs. Volvos. Erickson electronics, Fiskars tools, Bang & Olufsen, Ambu bags. The products aren’t free, but they confirm thriving capitalism.

Mayor M speaks out against Israel’s conduct after the horrors of the horrifying, subhuman Hamas slaughter on October 7, 2023. A response was inarguably called for, but not, in the opinion of many, what has come since and continues. Many Jews agree with Mamdani. It’s not antisemitism; it’s antipolicyism. I admire Israel’s many accomplishments, especially in science, technology, and medicine. It’s given the world much and we should hope it always will. Just not this.

The mayor didn’t do Democrats any favors come November, though. His endorsements for NYC’s Democratic primaries all won. Knocked off was Dan Goldman, one of the most effective Representatives and interrogators, when they show up, of Trump’s goons. But he’s a mainstream Democrat. In NYC, that was fatal.

One winner– not the Goldman slayer – was Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, whose credentials are impressive in many ways, and who’s clearly very smart. But her thoughts? Not so much. She’d eliminate police, prisons, and borders. And she openly prefers communism. For those being told she’s proof of MAGAfoxian claims, her similars among Democrats number in the zeros. But there will be ads. Billions of dark dollars’ worth. And they’ll hurt. From now till November, Republicans will claim communists have taken over the Democratic Party, which is as false as Trumpic authoritarianism taking over the Republican one is true.

As a Constitution-respecting American, I believe in fairness, opportunity, and equally accessible voting by all citizens; even Republicans who, in the era of Trump, are the ones committing voter fraud. I approve of helping those struggling in an increasingly heartless system, thanks mostly to Republicans. I support regulations on pollutants and other poisons, on drugs and automobiles; occupational safety. Child labor laws. Public education. Separation of church and state. And I recognize that immigration is an indispensable part of American progress.

I vote Democratic, and I’m horrified by the attempts of today’s Republican Party, having bent over to Trump, to eliminate every one of those law-, morality-, and empathy-based values. Christian values, one might have said, until Trump.

Until Trump, the central issue separating our political parties, debated honestly, legislated with compromise, was the role of government in our lives. Should it be hands-off other than providing roads, police, and soldiers? Or should it, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, “Promote the general welfare”? Across the philosophical spectrum, disagreeing Americans were once considered Americans.

No longer. For a democracy, what we have now is suicidal: a self-centered, narcissistic, vengeful, know-nothing-but-thinks-he-knows-everything “president” who vilifies the opposition in the most obscene, embarrassing, and childish terms, and, weaponizing his Department of “Justice,” seeks to punish them. Try them for treason. It’s dictatorship, and MAGA loves it.

Which makes it critical that Democrats regain control of Congress in November and the White House in 2028. And which explains my concern over the NYC results. I don’t love the leadership of the Democratic National Committee. They’ve been as uninspiring as they are unable to form a coherent, approachable message to voters. The need for a new generation of leadership is apparent, younger and enthusiastic. But “Throw them all out” is a pathway to loss. So is basing votes solely on one’s view of Israel. America is a big country and, unless Trump and Steven Miller have their way, free. What will happen will happen. But please, Democratic Socialists of America: don’t do a Green Party thing.

Now, a brief return to Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco: So committed is he to convincing everyone his failure is due to unseen vandals bearing unseen knives and “criminally made algae” (in commie labs at Harvard?) that he’s fenced it off, added cameras and, as is his wont, troops. So now we’ll see. If it was vandalism, the pool should clear up like outgrown teenage acne.

And finally, a new definition of schadenfreude: Observing the failures and scant turnout for Trump’s “all about me,” puny Great American State Fair; and the number of people bailing out when, substituting himself for self-canceled musicians, he gave a lazy speech recycling his sad lies about turning America into the “hottest” country on Earth. (Climate change reference?)

Happy Birthday, America. Don’t blow it.

Dirty Pool

 

If you’re looking for the perfect metaphor for Trump’s “presidency” – I’m not first to say it – it’s his Reflecting Pool debacle. From start to whatever the finish will be, it has it all: hubris, incompetence, insider graft, lying, blaming. Some things are emblematic enough that they bear repeating; trying, futile as it may be, to bring sight to the unseeing.

Yes, it seems trivial compared to his lie-based, ill-conceived, vanity-motivated Iran war; nor has it, like the war, cost America and the world countless billions, jobs, and security. Unlike the war, it hasn’t left the terrorist nation of Iran in a stronger position than it was before his senseless embarkation. What it has done is provide shorthand for the dark, fibrillating heart of Trumpism.

It began, predictable as sunrise does the day, with Trump bragging that he alone had the know-how to “fix” the Reflecting Pool, adding that Presidents Biden and Obama, of whom his jealousy is boundless, are responsible for everything wrong with the pool; as he has with everything wrong in the world he created. Then, as with climate change and vaccines, he ignored the science of adding a dark, heat-absorbing base beneath a primordial soup. Which rejects evolution and climate change, as well. Because of course.  

It’s US law that government contracts can only be no-bid when there’s an emergency. But he handed one out, to the tune of millions, when no emergency exists. To a donor. Which demands something that’s lately become rare here: a link. Voters should know who the guy is. Gaze upon him. Read of his Trump-approved background.

Trump promised it’d cost less than two million (for what is Trump if not one who keeps promises?) It’s heading toward fifteen. So far. People who know things, a disqualification for anyone in Trump’s employ, predicted the outcome: water coming raw from the Tidal Basin, heated perfectly to brew algae already contained in that water, would produce blooms in amounts, as Trump likes to say, “never seen.”

Then Iranesque damage-control escalation: in this case, teams of workers dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the organisms (also, it appears, ducks). Which lifted the blue stuff off the surfaces of the pool. Fortunately for Trump, who denies responsibility for each of his lifetime of failures, a 62-year-old former Olympian, having biked 50-some miles before arrival, decided to see the blue floaters. Touch one, even. He was immediately arrested, giving cover for Trump’s election-level lie that bloom and blue proved vandalism, clear as the pool isn’t. Then, adding credence to lies, as is his wont, he sent in the National Guard.

I was once a devoted cyclist. On fifty-plus-mile rides, I carried energy bars and Gatorade. I never considered adding pollutants. Too much weight. We’ve seen how many people adding how many gallons of bleach had how little effect on Trump’s blooming botchery. How many vandals, unnoticed by 24/7 cameras, would it have taken to do what Trump is claiming? Putting how much of whatever into a pool that holds 6.75 million gallons would be required to have an effect? Possible? Maybe. Coming from Trump, though, who, insulated by his true believers, lies about everything, doubt is the proper stance. They cut it with knives, he tells us. Having, weeks earlier, bragged that the surface he’s installing was impenetrable by blades.

I worry for the biker, who’ll probably face trial. Hopefully, he’ll be exonerated for lack of proof. But he’s in for a rough time. As are the people arrested, like “round up the usual suspects” dictators do. Consistent with his election lies, Trump has offered no credible proof of their sabotage. There, hilarity ends. It’s exactly the scapegoat-fueled authoritarianism into which Trump and his enablers are dragging us, cheered on by MAGA and their media, facilitated by silence from millions of uninformed, disengaged voters. Compared to Trump’s manifold and worse botchery, it’s small, but it shows exactly who and what he is. Americans must no longer stand for it.

Or for the pathetic capitulosity touted by Trump as “ending” his Iran debacle. Like this Swiss cheese from J.D. Vance, ace negotiator: “This is probably what we’re most excited about as Americans, the Iranians have agreed to invite IAEA inspectors back into their country. That is a major milestone for the American people.” Lucyfying the peace football yet again, Iran denies it; once more making Trump and Vance look stupidly gullible. Maybe it’s true. If so, it’s just a return to the agreement forged under President Barack Obama and ended by Trump.

Including the other giveaways Trump approved, like ending sanctions, a broken promise to help the Iranian people, praising Iran's leaders, handing over billions of dollars, allowing ballistic missiles, and nuclear power, selling their oil (to America!!), and ceding control of the Strait of Hormuz, it’s worse. Much worse. It’s a rare Trump promise kept: total surrender.

To repeat the undeniable: Trumpism’s incompetence and mendacity end in November, or never.

Not So Cagey

 

In honor of himself, the emperor built an arena festooned with corporate logos and ordered gladiators into it, to bloody each other before his majesty and consort. Perfectly encapsulating the tone and tenor of the event -- indeed, of an entire “presidency” -- one of the hand-picked combatants, an announced favorite of Trump, took to the microphone after his win and shouted, to MAGnafied cheers and, reportedly, a “half-smile” from Trump, “Michele Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Thus did Trump celebrate his birthday, adding a taxpayer-funded military fly-over. No American president has spent taxpayers’ money in such a paean to self. The desecration also included the Lincoln Memorial, on whose hallowed ground half-naked men posed for their weigh-in, after which they accessed every room of the West Wing. There are no words.

Disgraceful. Insulting. Embarrassing. Humiliating. Desecration. Shameful. Disgusting. Exploitative. Shameless. It’s foolish even to try. Degrading. Egomaniacal. Indecent. Reprehensible. Vile. Contemptible. Self-enriching. Repugnant. Grotesque.

It renders me wordless.

Debasing. Obscene. Vulgar. Tasteless. Self-aggrandizing. Unbecoming. Travesty. Shamelessly corrupt.

MAGA.

Happily, we needn’t dwell further upon this debauchery (wish I’d thought of that one). Other than reverberations through history and lingering stupefaction around the world, it’s over. We may now turn our celebratory attention elsewhere.

Our national artist of the deal has capitulated his way back, for sixty days, anyway, to where things were before his lie-based vanity war. It’s a “Memorandum of Understanding,” not a deal. The Strait of Hormuz will re-open, as before Trump’s folly, except for the fees Iran may still charge. Iran’s nuclear future remains unresolved. The regime stays in place. It can resume selling oil. Bewailed by Republicans when President Obama did it, Iranian assets are unfrozen. In the eyes of the world, Trump’s war has made Iran stronger and America weaker.

At best, our dealer might even art his way back, nuke-wise, to the situation extant before he trumped the Comprehensive Agreement achieved under President Barack Obama, international inspectors and all. If not, algaeic reflections on what we witnessed on the South Lawn may have to suffice.

But Trump’s amaranthine debasement of the White House is trivial compared to his deadly war on democracy’s definitional fundament: free and fair elections, equally available to all citizens. Having hired amoral sycophants helping Trump destroy everything America once stood for, people like Kash Patel and Todd Blanche and Russell Vought, plus overt racists like Stephen Miller, it’s proceeding apace, unchecked by Congressional Republicans, some of whom know better. Two, maybe.

Coming from Trump, to repeat a truism, accusation is confession. Like having lied for a decade about rigged elections for which he’s presented neither proof nor explained how it was accomplished. Aided by repetition of the lie by Foxian media, every cabinet member, and nearly all Republicans in Congress, he’s tilled MAGA’s intracranial soil, implanting unquestioning belief. Every election MAGA loses in November will be called rigged; every MAGA will believe it.

He’s not settling for the big lie. Under his command, the US Postal Service says it won’t deliver ballots in blue states, like ours, that refused his illegal demand to hand over their voter rolls. And he’s declared mail-in ballots illegal. Were the Supreme Court’s ideological, regressive majority not rewriting our Constitution, those efforts would be down-slapped in a Minuteman minute.

In what’s certain to be the first of many, Trump’s Kash-poor FBI raided an Ohio institution dedicated to registering eligible voters. The raid included homes of its leaders and staff, and the intent is obvious: intimidation. Not just of people wanting to register, but people helping them. Just as obvious: Democrats work to protect voting by all citizens, while Trump’s MAGAfied Republican Party wants to scare them away. Otherwise, they can’t win.

The sabotage includes SCOTUS-blessed gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states, where Black-majority districts are being systematically legislated out of existence. Some blue states are trying to counter it, even as Congressional Democrats have, repeatedly, produced legislation to outlaw gerrymandering, predictably voted down by Republican majorities. “Otherwise, we can’t win” should be their official motto. 

To their list of electoral corruption, add accessibility-skewed voter ID laws and purging legal citizens from voter rolls, potentially disenfranchising millions around the country. Their lying about Democrats rigging elections serves to mute allegations of their own obvious malfeasance. Is it time to suggest elections won by Republicans were rigged? What Trump and his party are doing is as obvious as an FBI raid. They hope to bury recognition under a pile of lies.

Oh, but Trump loves America. Just not the one in which laws were followed and court orders obeyed; in which the Department of Justice enforced our laws impartially. He kisses the flag, though, posts pictures of himself doing it on his Truthless Sociopath platform. And he put on a cage fight to delight testiculated Americans, right there on the lawn of the People’s House. Sure, he’s getting richer from investing in the sponsoring corporations and planting his crypto grift’s logo around the octagon. But, hey: what’s love if not that?

Also: nipples.