Standoff

 

                        AI-prompted image

Here’s reason number 48, which is one past 47, why America needs to join the rest of the civilized world and provide single-payer, universal healthcare for its citizens. But first, let’s dispense with pre-programmed responses:

One: Unless the government were to take over every hospital, clinic, and pharmacy, and unless it were to employ every doctor, nurse, and other providers of health-related care, which NO ONE is proposing, it would not, by definition, be socialism. Caregivers and hospitals could remain independent.

Two: Yes, taxes would certainly be raised, presumably on a sliding scale, but insurance premiums would disappear. And, by eliminating enormous and unnecessary costs interposed by insurers between providers and patients, it might even break even. The total amount of health insurance premiums Americans pay is around $1.5 trillion!

Three: Government takeover. Assuming we retain fair elections, we can elect legislators who’ll keep it patient-oriented.

Now to the issue: Thousands of area seniors and tens of thousands more elsewhere in Washington and Oregon enrolled in United Health Care Medicare Advantage programs will, after January 1, no longer have access to Providence-owned hospitals. As reported in the Herald, and as members learned in mailings from UHC, the Sisters have announced they’ll no longer accept those plans. At the moment, other than downgrading to “regular” Medicare, which the Sisters will accept, or traveling miles to other facilities, UHC customers must find and sign up with other plans that the hospital and their physicians will accept. Which, for old folks like me, can be daunting.

Health insurance companies provide no care, much less value. But they suck up billions of our healthcare dollars, disappearing them into the pockets of administrators and stockholders, paying employees, buying back stock, and other corporate expenses. Quoted in the Herald article, UHC’s explanation is priceless: “... [W]e must make decisions that help maintain long-term viability and access.” Right. Maintain access by reducing it. Maintain viability by cutting reimbursement so much that hospitals can’t afford to do business.

Our predicament was occasioned by Providence’s decision to stop accepting UHC Medicare plans. As a former partner and board member of the late-lamented Everett Clinic, I sympathize. We faced continual, increasingly unworkable decreases in reimbursement from insurers. In a case that made national news, we fired one whose proposed cuts would have cost us to deal with them; sent announcements to affected patients, and helped them find alternatives. Since we were large enough, desired enough, and had enough patients to make a difference, the company backed down. Whether Providence’s move will have similar results seems unlikely. Time is running short to change Medicare plans, and United Health Care, with tens of millions of enrollees nationally, needn’t care about several thousand. Here’s an example.

UHC is the insurance component of United Health Group, which includes UHC and Optum, which, in turn, owns physician practices, pharmacies, and other services. In 2025, UHG took in about $448 billion and paid out $314 billion to providers of care. The rest went to multiple overhead costs, including $1million in salary and $60 million in stock for its CEO, and profits distributed to investors. That’s around $130 billion not spent on healthcare.

There are hundreds of health insurance providers in the US, huge and small, similarly taking money away from actual care. In addition are the enormous costs to providers in dealing with them; costs far lower were there only one payer. Mega-billions of healthcare-intended dollars, disappearing into a cosmic void.

It’s a hugely complex system, which, rather than providing otherwise unobtainable benefits, stands between patients and providers. Imagine paying someone to hand you groceries before you pay the cashier. What’s happening with Providence and UHC shows how at the mercy of an irrational system we are, and how vulnerable to their business decisions.

Providence is communicating with patients who use their network physicians. Here’s a link to plans they’ll accept. Optum, so far, has been silent; perhaps because, as a major profit center for UHC, helping is a conflict of interest. Maybe local branches will commune with their Everett Clinic ancestry and offer assistance in making the change. And then, we’ll hope the need won’t happen again. (The care we get at Optum is outstanding. We don’t intend to change.)

Surely, many UHC subscribers have, heretofore, considered universal healthcare communism or socialism or some other ill-defined anathema. Maybe a rethink is in order. As long as Republicans retain control, universal healthcare won’t happen. Nor, if it were ever enacted, would it be problem-free; it’s a monstrous beast. But it’s doable, especially if a Trumpless America reorders priorities.

In the before times, we solved problems rather than creating them. Notwithstanding the current administration, America retains the expertise and means to make it work. A good start would be undoing Trump’s deficit-increasing, wealthy-benefitting tax cuts. Without risking security, we could reduce Hegsethified military spending. In the age of drone- and missile-based warfare, we could definitely do without useless “Trump-class” battleships. We could even stop unprovoked invasions of other countries. Our nation would become healthy in more ways than one.

Commie Lover

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“America will never be a communist country,” Trump says with words. ‘But I will grovel before the world’s communist dictators and do all I can to emulate them, while giving them whatever they want,’ says he with actions. Figuratively belly-up like a dog submitting to its alpha male, Trump, as no president had done for decades, made a pilgrimage to Andrews AFB to stand below Xi as he exited his plane, to walk on a red carpet cleaned by American troops on their knees, while Chinese diplomats looked on. 

Then he honored the dictator, the man providing weapons and other support to Iran for use against America in Trump’s stupid war, with a White House ceremony on the South Lawn involving more than 400 military personnel, both national anthems, a military review, and a flyover by a B-2 bomber and four F-22 Raptors, the latter of which kinda scared our “president” as he saluted the Chinese anthem while Xi didn’t.

It was supplication akin to what he’d previously orchestrated for “President” Putin, in Alaska. The “president” of the United States lowered himself before a dictator actively aiding our enemy and another actively attacking our friend. And, because he’s blinded by all-consuming jealousy of President Barack Obama and, in his role as HOTUS (no need to guess what the H stands for), he put on the most lavish state dinner for Xi, having, years ago, blasted BHO for doing the same. 

Last week’s column mentioned Trump banning mainstream media from the White House, immediately struck down, on Constitutional grounds, by a Trump-appointed federal judge. Over the weekend, Attorney General Todd Blanche, sworn to defend the Constitution and the rights of American citizens but not, as he does, to excuse Trump’s lawlessness, lied that the ban hadn’t been a ban, and denied that Trump described it as such, which he had. How dutiful are Trump’s appointees, no matter the needs of our country.

Laughably, after the courts reminded him of the Constitution, Trump went on to say, “CNN shouldn’t be allowed into the sacred White House.” Sacred! So sacred does he hold it that he illegally took a wrecking ball to it, intent on desecrating it with a monstrosity, a tastelessly towering, gilded, and, as it turns out, unsafe ballroom. To Trump, nothing is sacred but his own gratification and greed. Certainly not American law or its foundational tenets, or the honorable obligations of his office.

Not laughable is the clearly illegal, self-promoting television ad Trump has been running; illegal because it was paid for by our tax dollars, bannered as such, proudly. But it’s not just about confirming his dictatorial dismissal of American law, which is bad enough. It’s about its chilling content: Walking down a dark hall, scowling like his post-arrest mugshot, he warns, “With you at my side we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” 

That’s exactly that mendacious, undemocratic authoritarianism that animates the straggling still-approvers; but to anyone who actually loves America as aspired to by our founders, it’s sickening. Close your eyes, and you’ll hear Mussolini. Open them, and see a straight-arm-saluting and hateful cult. Watch newly-launched “Trump TV,” managed by the White House and, therefore, paid for by us, and imagine it in Russian, Chinese, or Korean.

What our country has become under Trump isn’t America, and it’s far from certain it retains the will to do the work to make its way back. If many of us consider ourselves separate from what it now is, can the rest of the world also separate America from Trump, believe it to be a one-off malfunction that will, as long as we continue to have free and fair elections, self-correct?

The thing is, “we” elected him. Within our constitutional system, conceived, in large part, to prevent a Trump from descending to power, it happened. For exposing the weakness of a Constitution that presupposes virtuous politicians and reasonably educated citizens, we owe him embittered thanks. But now, with limitless money from an unimaginably wealthy and selfish American oligarchy controlling what people see and hear, who can say it’s reversible? It was the inevitable result of compromised courts, cowardly Congressdwellers, and shamelessly propagandistic, dishonest media. America has let itself and the world down, and may no longer have the means to lift itself back up.

For a sobering view of the worldwide impact of Trumpism, spend a few moments watching this video, from Rufus Gifford, Ambassador to Denmark under presidents Obama and Biden. These links are ignored by many, but this one is worth a click. In it, he analogizes a heartbroken person finding, with great sadness, that their best and most trusted friend is stabbing them in the back.

No Words

 

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The English language is plentiful and rich. For centuries, its depth and breadth of words have inspired poets and novelists, academics and orators, providing much of the world’s most enduring literature. It’s a living thing, too; adding to its lexicon to meet the needs of passing time. And yet... And yet it harbors a frustrating lacuna: English hasn’t the words to accurately describe Donald Trump or the ruination he inflicts upon everything he gropes. We need new terminology, neologisms able to encompass it all.

Without resorting to pallid cliché, how can we describe a psychopathic, jealous, retaliatory egomaniac who looks at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, an institution named for a martyred and revered president, that celebrates the boundless spectrum of American art, and besmirches it with his undeserving moniker? Creepy? Repugnant? Sure. Abominable, nauseating, loathsome, sick? All of those. Overindulged toddler? Absolutely. A deeply damaged, resentful man who surrounds himself with greedy unethicants willing, for personal power, to funnel unearned accolades that, growing up, he neither received nor deserved? That, too, if a bit too clunkersome. Our language is inadequate to the demand. I’ve neo-ed a few logisms, but when it comes to a proper description of Trump, words fail. To employ a pallid cliché.

When I think of what he’s done to the Kennedy Center, I seethe and I mourn. I want to believe it can’t be happening; that his punitory nihilism, his toxic concatenation of arrogance, vengeance, psychopathy, malignant narcissism, jealousy, and fragility would have been arrested before reaching the steps. JFK was everything Trump will never be. He knows, and hates him for it.

I feel the same about what he’s doing to the White House, whose architectural perfection, its picturesque symmetry were meant to instill pride in every American, honoring not the men (and, someday, women) within but the nation it represents. What an unholy, pretentious atrocity he’s made of it. How tastelessly gross; what desecration of beauty that would have been embarrassing for any decent person even to have imagined, much less actuated.

“At the strong request of the military,” Trump lied, he plans to turn that vulgar, grotesquely outsized, self-celebratory, dictator-mimicking arch into a ridiculously unneeded platform for snipers and drones. To shoot at whom? To protect which place from what threat? Sure, Penile Pete might have yessirred Trump’s disingenuous justification. Maybe, absent all the principled ones he fired, a couple of subservient generals, too. In what way do we need that overbearing monstrosity overshadowing the hallowed resting place of America’s fallen heroes? Only in Trump’s disassembled mind.

Arlington Cemetery is reverentially quiet. Whispers tell its stories. Trump’s erection, shouting “Me, me, me,” would, as intended, drown out the hushed voices of those who deserve honor in ways he never will. For that, he resents them as he does all decent and admired people.

So we must assemble fitting combinations of words, like “sick, disgusting, pathetic, destructive, horrible, narcissistic, and catastrophic,” creating not-too-unwieldy ones to describe the shamelessly unrestrained monster among us. Trumpzilla? Too lazy. How about these: Sickastrophic. Disasickulous. Catastrothetic. Pathesicktrophic. Disgustorribathetic. Pathesisstructive. Or maybe none. Probably the original premise was right: there’s no way to adequately describe the apocalyptic horribleness of Trump, then and now. Even following a Blue Wave November, there's more to come.

We don’t have to wait that long. Trump’s “most transparent, free speech protecting administration” has, yet again, wiped its ... feet on our Constitution. Banning major news organizations from the White House, an act he actually referred to as “the ban on the free press,” merely because he doesn’t like their coverage of him, is a clear violation of the First Amendment. We’ve known since the first time he used the term, “fake news” means journalism that replaces right-wing propaganda and disinformation with accuracy and, when deserved, criticism. It’s no surprise that Congressional Rs pretzelled themselves into defending it. Trump was banned from Twitter, spouted Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo), deliberately and stupidly conflating the action of a private company with that of the government. Others were just as bad. 

A free press, allowing even Fox, et ilk, is fundamental to democracy. But Trumpism rejects everything about democracy, like free speech, equal access to voting for all citizens, and competent, truthful leadership. The opposite of what’s currently emanating like greenhouse gases from the other Washington. It’s consticraponic.

If Democrats retake Congress, which, except for the unaccountable millions of dark dollars buying dishonest attack ads everywhere, ought to be certain, Trump won’t have his inhumane domestic agenda to sign into law anymore. So he’ll likely focus on his impulsive, egocentric, incoherent foreign “policy.” Which means more instability, death, and destruction in the Middle East, more distrust and withdrawal by our once-and-former allies, economic uncertainty, and higher prices due to ill-conceived tariffs and stemmed flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea. In his bragging, bullying, and embarrassing speech at the UN this week, he promised it. 

Fradulunhingecreepathetoxidiomendadespoticorruptomaniacal.

Donnie Does Dallas

 

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Not long ago we agreed: Trump’s Reflecting Pool calamity was the ultimate metaphor for his “presidency.” It had it all: incompetence, cronyism, arrogance, lying, blame-avoiding, scapegoating. Now, just as it was fading from public awareness, comes the admission by his hand-picked, underqualified, overpaid purveyors of poolwater pulchritude that the failure of the coating in Trump-picked blue was entirely on them. No vandalism. Just tragic inexperience and unskilled workmanship, for which they took full responsibility. (All true.) Trump retracted his confabulation of boxcutters and razor blades, and apologized to the innocents he’d had arrested. And for lying. Offered his own money as restitution. (All false.)

But the Reflecting reflection was, applying the term Trump recently used to describe his disastrous Iran war, “small potatoes.” Last week’s Desperation in Dallas, to be known as Trumpapaloser, became the new standard, the sine qua non of metaphor. It had all the aforementioned characteristics, plus Trumpism’s trademark worshipful idolatry.

From his pulpit, Trump announced the arena was “filled to the rafters,” even as cameras showed thousands of empty seats in the upper tier. Had the ensorcelled audience turned their collective heads to see, which they didn’t because they’re believers, they’d have convinced themselves they saw it, too. He went on to prevaricate that his “convention” garnered higher TV ratings than the NFL season opener, featuring our Seahawks. Since the NFL hadn’t yet released that information, it was a pre-refuted lie. Later, data showed that his doggerel and puny show had around two million viewers, while the game garnered over twenty-five million. Whether Trump was hallucinating or lying is immaterial. Nothing he says can be believed, not a single word; yet he remains in office.

Then, with no gob left unsmacked, there came the most outrageous, reality-disconnected agglutination of words ever uttered by a Cabinet member and, likely, by any human not in a chemically-induced coma. Referring to Trump, Junior Arfkay, manager of our national institutions of health, said this: "I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues in molecular detail. And most of all … cared about transparency in government and free speech." With the possible exception of “an” and “of,” there’s not a word in that declaration that’s within a light-year of truth. It’s an aggregation of antonyms without precedent. It was like a realtor trying to sell you a house engulfed by fire, telling you it’s move-in ready.

Trump’s lies are pathological. Vance’s and those of every other Cabinet member are intentional. In Dallas, Vance out-disgusted himself. But Arfkay’s lies are so outrageous that his brainworm must have dined on the parts that kept it connected to reality; history’s most premonitory meal since The Last Supper. Trump incabinetted nothing but lying incompetents. Because democracy requires better, we are well and truly screwed.

Before addressing Trump’s even more ridiculous effluent in Dallas, let’s review the words of 18 United States Code section 597: “Whoever makes or offers to make any expenditure to any person either to vote or withhold his vote or to vote for or against any candidate, and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure ... shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 2 years ...” Thus, we understand that besides being economically disastrous and stupidly impossible, Trump’s promise to lavish $5000 on every adult American if Rs retain control of Congress is clearly illegal. Were he to do it, he and everyone who accepted the bribe would be subject to imprisonment.

$1.3 trillion is what it would cost, so J.D. Vance, dutifully surrendering dignity as required of every Trumpsman, said it’d be covered by the trillions Trump’s tariffs are bringing in, paying down the national debt, even as the debt just passed $40 trillion. That there’s some mathematical magic. But when has breaking US law ever been an impediment to Trump? It’s bribery, impure and simple-minded. Not to worry, though: The DOJ’s Todd Blanche is our chief law enforcer.

Trump added the proviso that the money must be spent in the US. Brilliant! Cash only, one supposes, each bill embedded with RFID, for tracking. Were it not so dangerous to have such a demented and dishonest “president” it’d be hilarious. Demanding a pledge of allegiance to the self-described “greatest president in the history of the United States,” though, telling them to “cheat like hell” when they vote, and that if they don’t vote they’ll “go to hell”? Not so hilarious.

But threats and bribes are all Trump has, now that the Supreme Court, excepting the tendentious twosome, shut down his attempt to stamp out mail-in voting; an idea, he told Sean Hannity, he got from Vladimir Putin, who knows all about fair elections, which he wins by ninety percent to ten. If Democrats retake Congress, Trump will scream fraud, and Holy Mike Johnson, after discussing it with God, will refuse to seat the newly elected. Nevertheless, until we can’t, let’s savor the SCOTUS ruling and keep hope alive.

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.