Turning Point?

 

When it was revealed that Tom Homan, Trump’s Border and Brutality Czar, accepted a bagful of $50,000 in cash for promising to facilitate deals with Trump, and that Trump quashed the investigation, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline “It’s my party and I’ll lie if I want to” Leavitt, speaking through lips conveniently placed above her crucifix, said, “He did nothing wrong.” (It was recorded, Ms. Leavitt. Release it.) Not lying, Megan Kelley wrote, “WE DO NOT CARE.” Hey, MAGA, there’s a new slogan in town.

At the half-hate, half-memorial for Charlie Kirk, Trump, doing God’s work, followed Erika Kirk’s remarkable words of Christian forgiveness and grace, with, “He did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them. (Ed note: For over half of America, Kirk didn’t want the best.) That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” There followed louder cheers from the collected Christians than there’d been for Mrs. Kirk.

Were any worshippers repulsed when demonic Stephen “You-can’t-call-me-a-fascist” Miller defiled the memorial with his signature demagogic putrefaction? 

Ghoulish: it’s the G in MAGA.

Previously asked if killing those seagoing, alleged drug-runners was illegal, V.P. Vance said, “I don’t give a sh#t.” Because he’s full of it enough to give freely, that was puzzling. Examples: Former FBI director Wray “should have been investigating the networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk’s murder.” Facts? He don’t need no stinkin’ facts. After “Haitians are eating pets”: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention ... then that’s what I’m going to do.” And he has, ever since. On the assassination of Charlie Kirk, he lied that “statistics prove” most violence comes from “the left.” As he can’t not know, they show the opposite.

“He did nothing wrong.” “We do not care.” “I don’t give a sh#t.” MAGAs need bigger hats. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them” will require T-shirts. And Autocorrect. This Trumpic gem demands an entire billboard: "When 97% of the stories are bad about a person, that's no longer free speech." It’s in the Constitution! Like “I have the right to do anything I wanna do. I’m the President of the United States.” Article II. 

Jimmy Kimmel’s return to the air (except here, where Trump-loving, news-censoring, newscaster script-writing Sinclair owns KOMO, refuses to run it and doesn’t want you to know things) suggests Trump’s censorious dictatorship might be reversible. What went on behind the scenes is unknown. In front, people canceled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions, hundreds of thousands of protestations were sent to ABC (and to Australian Broadcasting Corporation, proving decent people get confused, too). Even Travelin’ Ted Cruz was critical. That’s the lesson: If enough people freed their souls from FoxoMAGAfication, Trump’s totalitarianism could give way to democracy.

It’s a big “if.” The people who cheered Trump’s blasphemy at the deification of Charlie Kirk will never choose enlightenment. But maybe some attendees, and, one could hope, residually thoughtful Trump supporters observed the last couple of weeks of contrived, weaponized vengeance and persecution of free speech rediscovered what having second thoughts feels like. Remembered when they knew democracy, freedom, and free speech are inseparably intertwined. Who’ll think, sure, seeing those brown people being rounded up roughly is nice, but there’s something more important at stake here.

People aware that, years ago, opposing parties worked together and accomplished great things. Ones unwilling to keep ignoring the protrusive corruption of this administration, enriching billionaire Trump pals, selling them control of all media; the lying, the undisguised peddling of hate to ensure an ever-stronger grip on power; the ridding from government people of integrity, finally recognizing how treacherous it is. Able to entertain the thought that, for love of country, it has to stop.

Maybe those people recall Trump promising, “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” Maybe, after Trump lied that he had nothing to do with the firing of Jimmy Kimmel, they’ll be reminded that, immediately after the cancellation of Stephen Colbert, he said Kimmel would be next. Maybe they’ll discover they’ve been duped from the beginning.

Perhaps those who don’t deny the Holocaust heard echoes of it when Vance, hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast, implored Americans to turn in anyone they hear saying anything negative about Mr. Kirk. Maybe, even though it’s not (yet) affecting them, they’ll decide, “This isn’t the America I thought I loved, not the one I want to live in. I need a president who upholds rather than ignores the Constitution, who’s truthful, whose White House isn’t a gilded cesspool of greed and corruption, and who didn’t just embarrass America before the UN General Assembly. I can no longer be a part of it.”

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Revenge Is Mine, Sayeth The Loud

 

When gun violence occurs, Democrats point to easy access to lethal weaponry, Republicans point to, well, anything else, and nothing changes. This time, though, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump and his accentuators trod new ground, demanding wholesale retribution against “them.” They’ve always scapegoated everything wrong with everything, but this is different.

“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” wrote Laura Loomer, Trump’s new-favorite autocracy specialist, before knowing anything about the assassin. Implicitly calling for eradication of liberalism, his other favorite, Stephen Miller, called it “... an ideology ... which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” J.D. Vance has been conflagrating ever since it happened. Asked on Fox “news” about toning it down, Trump, who once mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi and who pardons violent felons, said, truthful for once, “I couldn’t care less.” The public, yes. But America’s government has never been so intentionally malignant.

“You own this,” raged Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) to Democrats, on the floor of Congress. (Who owns Minnesota’s Democratic state Representative Melissa Hortman’s and her husband’s assassination, Nancy?) Later, atop a pre-beaten horse, she fingered university brainwashing. The killer spent one online semester before enrolling in tech school.

One after another, rightwing media declared “war” on “the left.” Disregarding the deaths of JFK, MLK, RFK, innocent Black children and freedom workers during the Civil Rights struggles, Jews in synagogues, the Hortmans, Officer David Rose defending the CDC against a brainwashed anti-vaxxer, and innumerable more, Elon Musk explained, “Democrats are the party of death.” Trumpists say comparing people like Miller, Loomer, and Musk – and Trump! -- to fascists crosses a line. Where on which line does their rhetoric fall? Based on what information are they blaming “the left”?

In detestable contrast to presidents who rose to tragic occasions with words of comfort and calls for restraint, Trump lowered to this one, attacking “radical left lunatics,” adding “we have to beat the hell out of them,” explicitly sanctioning violence. From which his in-pocket DOJ, already promising retribution, would surely look away. 

After the murder, a Facebook “friend” messaged me: “... You unfortunately by your constant negativity encourages a breeding ground for this type of behavior... you are part of the problem with your constant negativity. hatred breeds hatred. Your posts are consumed by hate you view it as journalism but its not.” (sic, severally.)

I’m unworried that thoughtful readers of my column will be driven to violence. Given Trump’s provocations and threats from less thoughtful readers, I’m unsure about the other way around.

Perhaps we can agree:

One: Killing Charlie Kirk was horrible, despicable, and antithetical to democracy, even our dying one. It made me physically ill, as it should everyone, but didn’t. Anger, I understand and share. Gloating, I abhor.

Two: The perpetrator must be deeply disturbed, whatever his “ideology.” Friends had noticed his gradual social withdrawal, spending time in dark recesses of the internet. If, in his disordered mind, he thought he was helping the cause of anti-fascism, he accomplished the opposite. In any case, his actions seem to have been his alone. Don’t tell that to Trumpists, though. They want “they.”

Three: In no way justifying his murder, Kirk’s oeuvre was discord. If my rhetoric is “hateful” (it isn’t: it’s outrage), his belittled everyone not white, male, native-born, heterosexual, and Christian. He even advocated death for President Biden. I won’t list more here. You can look them up. Nevertheless, he ought still to be taking his combat evangelicalism to campuses, alive and well.

The response to 9/11 excepted, events like this have separated Ds and Rs for decades. Despicable comments pollute social media from the fringes of each; but, contrasted with Democratic leaders when Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, Trump and many high-ranking Republicans are calling for extermination. It feels familiar.

Political violence should horrify everyone who believes in democracy. So should leaders suborning unbounded revenge, for the same reason. Trump glommed Charlie Kirk’s murder as an exploitable windfall, supercharging his anti-democracy aims, extant long before. He’s using it, enthusiastically, to justify more suppression of dissent, while MAGAs cheer him on. Opportunistic geopolitical foes are exploiting it, too, as always.

Well-meaning words to the contrary, violence is who we are. It birthed America and has shaped our history thenceforth, infecting, at one time or another, people of all political persuasions. But if the arc of violence is long, in the time of Trump it bends toward the right, by actual count. (Those data have suddenly disappeared from the DOJ website.) 

In response to an unspeakable atrocity, MAGA Republicans promise Trumped-up, scorched-earth retaliation upon half the country, with brutal totalitarianism the intended result. Coming from our government, it’s without precedent in the US. But it’s exactly how Trump is perverting Charlie Kirk’s death, with malice aforethought, seeking absolute authority.

As Charlie always said, “Prove me wrong.”

Weaponized Fluffery

 

The murder of Charlie Kirk makes me feel ill. So does Elon Musk’s response to it. Beyond that, nothing useful can be said, so we move on. 

Trump’s recent made-for-MAGA “Cabinet Meeting” was nothing about policy and everything about serial assculation, a showcase of Trump’s bottomless need for fawning sycophancy. If MAGAs don’t see it for what it is, namely a gaping vulnerability in an American “president,” other world leaders do.

Like many clear-eyed observers of Trump’s obsequious deference to Vladimir Putin, I once assumed there must be blackmail behind it. The rumored “pee tape,” for example, or recordings of likely “ungentlemanly” behavior while he was in Russia, tending to his Miss America ladies. There were hidden recording devices in my room in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow while on tour in college, so I’m certain there are recordings of Trump when he was there, too, whatever the content. I was talking with a young artist, wrongly unworried about speaking in my room, who spoke longingly of America, where artists are free to create. Immediately after accompanying us to the train station, he was arrested.

The recent showcase in Beijing, featuring Putin, Modi, Kim, and representatives of many other countries, including some of our pre-Trump allies, all aligning with China’s Xi, made me realize Putin didn’t need blackmail to get what he wanted from Trump. For Putin, a former KGB operative trained to take the measure of people, sizing up Trump was easy as pierogi. He saw a man so in need of flattery, so prone to bragging undeservedly and lying unreservedly, that manipulating him must have been lesson one of KGB Spying 101. So, seizing the opportunity fate handed him, using fake media and other methods, he helped to get him elected.

Unlike Trump, whose thought timeline measures in seconds and who suffers from premature emanation, our adversaries think long-term. Grooming Trump, for example, for years. It’s taken decades for China to achieve world economic and scientific dominance. By happy coincidence, Trump’s self-pleasuring tariffs sealed it, convincing the world to abandon America for more reliable trading partners.

There’s no strategy to Trump’s spur-of-the-mouth declarations. His destructive tariffs were meant to bully other countries into respecting him, consequences to our country be damned. The result, predicted by politicians and economists of both parties, is that our economy is shrinking like his approval ratings while prices rise like global temperatures. The latest jobs report showed net job loss in every sector except healthcare. Because he has the same understanding of economics that he has of Constitutional law, he promised supercharged job growth at home, spurred b y his ill-conceived, ego-driven tariffs. Instead, manufacturing jobs have declined for six straight months. We should be grateful for growth in healthcare jobs, though. RFK Jr’s attacks on science-based medical institutions mean we’ll need every one of them.

If Putin didn’t foresee that Trump would weaken America by imposing tariffs (or maybe he did), he knew it’d happen some way. He probably saw that, in Trump’s need for adulation, he’d seek democracy-ending authoritarian power at home, no matter how destructive. We “Never Trumpers” saw it and predicted it. So must have Putin. It wasn’t subtle.

The content of Trump’s private meetings with him remains unknown. But it’s a solid bet that bolshoi stroking of Donald’s ego was included, flattering him into wanting more. And he knew how to get it: by doing whatever was asked of him. The firing, by unqualified DNI Tulsi Gabbard, of 37 CIA Russia experts immediately after the Trump/Putin/Alaska fiasco didn’t go unnoticed by Putin’s state media, who gloated that Trump and Gabbard did exactly what Putin wanted. More recently, Trump announced his intent to end financial support for Europe’s security initiatives, including border fortifications intended to discourage Russian invasion from the East.

The pattern is clear. In the Kremlin, they must be doing high pyahts. Unlike so many other players, Putin didn’t need to buy Trump’s bitcoins or stay in his hotels. Just well-placed but insincere, approbation turned the trick.

But, some might say, Trump seems finally to be getting tougher on Putin. Doesn’t matter. Thanks to Trump, Vlad has what he wants from the countries he needs.

Putin’s kind of weaponized flattery trickles down. Trump uses it on his besotted followers. Certain of their credulity, he’s posting signs at infrastructure projects under construction because of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, against which Trump bleated vociferously. “President Donald J. Trump,” the signs lie, shamelessly, “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure.” It’s disgusting.

MAGAs, whose news sources are Trump and his fawning media, will accept it as God’s truth. As they will his “hearing it now for the first time” lie regarding that botched Seal Team Six operation in North Korea. Right. Incursions into enemy countries are always undertaken without sign-off by the president. MAGAs will believe that, too, just like they’ll believe that raiding a Hyundai plant in Tennessee is consistent with encouraging foreign investment.

It’s embarrassing. And frightening. The putative “Leader of the Free World” is an easily manipulatable liar. Our global foes exploit it. Millions of Americans continue to believe him, unwittingly validating the long game of those foes.

Brain Worms Everywhere

What’s a sociopathic narcissist to do? Poor Trump: In the before times, he rightfully bragged about getting the Covid vaccine up and running at “warp speed.” He hadn’t spent much time with beakers and Petrie dishes, and he benefited from the prior twenty years during which the groundwork for mRNA vaccine development reached its zenith right on time. Nevertheless, initial fatuity aside (disbanding President Obama’s pandemic preparedness team, it’ll be over in weeks, bleach, light, etc.), he deserves credit for that.

So, what to do when the craziest of his crazy patronage hires claims those vaccines were ineffective, deadly, and should be banned, replaces vaccine experts with quacks, and defunds further research? Does he defend RFK, Jr.? Does he fire the guy he touted before, saying he’d let him “go wild” at HHS? It’s a horned dilemma. He’d rather be grifting.

Junior Bobby Kennedy is nuts. Has been for a long time, well before Trump put him in position to kill Americans; well before every Republican senator except one, including four medical doctors, voted to confirm him. The exception? Mitch McConnell, the hypocrite’s hypocrite most responsible for keeping Trump in office.

Bobby Junior Kennedy claims he can tell which children are “overburdened with mitochondrial challenges” (not a thing) just by looking at them. He quotes medical research reports that don’t exist, and misquotes and misunderstands those that do. He couldn’t tell properly-run science research from the roadkill in the trunk of his car. There’s a worm in his brain that died after eating part of it, possibly killed by the heroin that once poisoned his bloodstream.

Bobby spreads misinformation like a farmer spreads manure, but, unlike farmers’, his manure ends, rather than stimulates life. Bobby-J is nuts. Truly, deeply, dangerously nuts. Nevertheless, Trump, who hugs the flag, hugged him, too, putting him in charge of America’s health. Republican senators who knew better confirmed him. For a country purporting to be great again, it’s shameful.

Pathological liars know they’re lying. “I’m president,” Trump recently said. “I can do whatever I want.” It’s not supposed to be that way. The Framers believed they’d prevented it by creating “checks and balances.” But they couldn’t imagine sociopathic narcissists being unchecked by the unbalanced.

Contrarily, because he’s nuts and can’t tell the difference, Junior believes what he says, thinks he’s saving lives rather than endangering them. If Trump cared about anyone but himself, he’d have fired him by now. If there were even a dozen Republicans in Congress who weren’t self-serving cowards, they’d have joined Democrats to impeach Junior K the minute he started firing all the competent people at NIH and CDC, replacing them with conspiratorial know-nothings.

Unless every red state and every district within those states has managed to elect only stupid people, which seems unlikely even given the political insanity running amok in those states, there must be at least a handful who do recognize the danger RFK presents. Not to mention people like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth in the White House’s orbit. And Steven Miller, who calls RFKJ the administration’s “crown jewel.” Removing those other threats to bodies politic would require a level of integrity lacking even in the theoretical few.

Elected Republicans won’t act. There can be no clearer proof of the descent of a once-respectable political party than the spectacle of K-J doing incalculable damage to the health of Americans while that party’s Congresspeople, elected to further the interests of their constituents, sit silent and afraid.

The same applies to standing up to Trump as he systematically overruns the constitutionally-mandated guardrails meant to keep an incurious authoritarian from unbridled power. And if the existence of Bobby K in government is proof of the fall of the Republican Party, the reelection of Felonious Trump is confirmation beyond doubt.

The downward economic impacts of his immigration policies are just beginning to be felt. Pocketbooks aren’t yet as thin as they’ll be due to his tariffs. Worse still is the end of America’s ability to influence world affairs, to remain a respected leader in science and technology. And benevolence. Instead, Trump is sidelining our country, making it dependent on others, disrespected and dismissed. The implications are grave.

Witness the gathering in China of leaders of our economic and political adversaries: Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and India’s Modi, forming an anti-US trading alliance. NoKoKim showed up, too, bearing his own toilet. India’s and China’s technological and scientific advancements are surpassing ours. Trump’s policies couldn’t be more favorable to them. It’s almost as if handing them the world was his intention all along.

As he inflicts his bizarre, reality-rejecting vendetta on renewable energy, those countries are racing ahead with better harnessers of sun and wind, developing battery technology that will end concerns about dark nights and windless days, while making electric cars cheaper, faster charging, and with more range than a full tank of gas.

Maybe, if our next president ends Trump’s “see-me-flex,” economy-killing tariffs, they’ll even let us buy some.