Stating The State

                    another chatGPT creation

A minute in, when Trump flat-out lied about the economy he inherited and Republicans gave him a standing O, I turned off the SOTU. Everything to follow was predictable and sad. I returned to making a list of recent events. So many topics, too many to ignore or do justice. So here’s a compendium, in shorthand:

• As if we need more evidence of Trump’s unending desire for fawning adulation, or that, with Pam Bondi’s slavish obeisance, he’s turned the Department of inJustice into a vengeance vehicle, there’s that Soviet-style, North Korea-emulating visage hanging from DOJ headquarters. Pre-Trump, Americans found such submissive, cultish idolatry abhorrent.

• The Supreme Court’s rejection of most of Trump’s unconstitutional wielding of tariffs like a child wields a toy light-saber ought to have been 9-0. Three so-called originalists dissented, ignoring clear, parchmentalized language. Justice Kavanaugh, by acclamation the least intelligent of the nonet, based his dissent on adverse consequences of returning the ill-gotten money. Which is like arguing criminals shouldn’t be punished if it would make their families sad.

• Classic Trump: after the verdict, he’s relentlessly attacked “the f..king courts” (his words), calling the justices, including two of his appointees, traitors. What he should have said, is “the f..king Constitution.” Because that’s how he sees it.  

• Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Destruction (sorry: “Protection”) Agency, proudly announced, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.” Unpacking the Trumped-up mendacity and dangerous stupidity would eat up the rest of this column. 

• As Trump hypes his Epstein-distracting warlette on Iran, recall his words after his prior dog-wagging mission: Iran’s nuclear capability had been “completely and totally obliterated,” debunked within days. The lie is reconfirmed by his current demand that they end their nuclear program.  

• Expecting airports to be named after him, Trump has applied for trademarks for gift-shop junk bearing his name, “including clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.” GOTUS. It’s pathological.  

• Ignoring the First Amendment, Pentagon Pete Hegseth holds prayer meetings there. His latest was led by a Christian nationalist who favors submissive, non-voting women and finds slavery not so bad. They’ll produce fine soldiers.  

• Sending an unrequested and unnecessary hospital ship to Greenland? The ridiculousness is self-evident. But he may have hallucinated it. The man is unwell. 

• Because they make voting more universally accessible, MAGA hates mail-in ballots, which we’ve had here, scandal-free, for years. Because it’s what he does, Trump lied again about them, including claiming the US is the only country that allows voting that way.  

• Like his tariff usurpation, Trump’s desire to nationalize elections is unconstitutional. Does SCOTUS have a two-fer in them? He lies daily about non-existent Democrats’ election rigging while planning to do just that, including sending ICE agents to polling places. Not to arrest people voting illegally, which doesn’t happen, but because many non-white, legal voters, fearing the harassment and detention for days and weeks we’ve seen, might stay away.  

• A former ICE instructor testified that ICE drastically cut required training and lied to Congress about it. Given the intentional brutality and lawlessness we see from them, it would be surprising if it were otherwise.  

• Kash Patel, the FBI’s most unqualified director ever, who loves using his position for personal pleasure, shared the US men’s hockey victory by guzzling beer with them on live TV, like a frat boy. J. Edgar Hoover, he’s not. A Hegseth/Bondi/Pirro-level embarrassment, he is, confirming, once more, that Trump chooses people for compliance, not competence. 

• If it turns out Trump’s personal law firm, dba Bondi’s DOJ, withheld parts of the Epstein files that explicitly accuse him of sexual abuse and rape, would it surprise you?  

• Decades ago, senators on both sides were honorable, intelligent, and committed to legislating for the common good. Though there’s plenty of competition, no one better represents the level of stupidity and uselessness to which the Republican Party’s choices have descended than Utah’s Mike Lee.  

• After a lifetime of scams, grifts, and ripoffs, Trump’s brazenly corrupt “Board of Peace” tops them all. In part consisting of dictators and murderers, each of whom reportedly contributed a billion dollars for a piece of the action, it’s announced-by-Jared mission is to turn Gaza into an investment opportunity for oligarchs, who’ll be protected by a huge military base. Trump will be the board’s president for life, in control of the money, including ten billion U.S. taxpayer dollars he’s committed, unilaterally, to it. For what purpose, other than enriching himself on other people’s dime? More tie clips? He gets away with such outrageous self-dealing by “virtue” of Republican silence and the manufactured devotion of gratefully suckered MAGAs. The importance of the November election he’s trying so hard to scuttle can’t be overstated. 

• End of partial list. Thank you for your attention to these matters.

Filed Under

Now what? For months, calling it a hoax, his word for facts, Trump did everything he could to prevent release of the Epstein files. Yet suddenly he asked Congress to vote to release them, which it did, 427–1. The Senate did, too, unanimously. Realizing it was going to happen regardless, was he trying to make it look like his idea? Have they been edited to his satisfaction, parts mysteriously missing?

The Platonic ideal of kind-heartedness, Trump is thinking only of innocents whose names might be found there. That's why he ordered Attorney Private, Pam of the dangerous diamond, to investigate Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and others. To clear their names, reconfirming previous FBI investigations that found no chargeable offenses. Not adding himself to the target list was the unintentional omission of a busy man. He has history and buildings to remake and arches to build, bitcoin and watches to sell.

Previous Attorneys General, the rank when deserved, would have demurred, saying, "I demur." But that's the stuff pipes dream of. For Trump, his word is his Bondi. Unlike Jim Jordan's and James Comer's accusations against President Joe Biden (they just forgot to bring charges for the ghastly crimes they uncovered), rumors of Trump's weaponization are meritless. If you see it, your eyes are lying. "You got it, Boss," said Pam. "Also, sorry about that ring thing."

I'm not one for conspiracy theories. I doubt Hillary Clinton operated a child sex trafficking operation in the basement of a pizza joint that didn't have a basement, even though Q said so. I'm pretty sure Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, although, admittedly, I wasn't there. I try to reject theories presented without evidence, which is why I suspect nothing nefarious in the timing of Jeffrey Epstein's suicide in prison. Not even after reading his words: "I am the one who can take him down." Or reading his brother's statement that Brother Jeff "had the goods" on Trump.

Notice I didn't put the s-word in quotation marks. That wouldn't be right. Reading those emails and texts from Mr. Epstein and contemplating his subsequent "suicide" triggers no alarms, not even learning that it occurred while two guards happened to be on break and that three minutes of the security tapes from that time are missing. Just one of those things. Innocent coincidence. Stiff happens.

Likewise, I harbor no suspicion about Ivana, Trump's first of several wives, falling down stairs to her death right before her scheduled testimony about his finances. I get it. She was nervous. It makes a person clumsy. Same with the suicide of Virginia Giuffre, who, as stated in recently released emails, spent hours at Chez Epstein with Trump. Nothing to do with her testimony about seeing Trump, or not, with Mister E, doing things, or not. Conspiracies aren't me. I went to medical school. You'll never catch me impugning a "president's" integrity or honesty.

There. I was trying out niceness, as suggested ever so gently by certain readers. If Trump participated in Epstein's pedophilia, would it matter? Not to them. After all, his amorality and sociopathy, the rape charges, his scams and cheating workers and alleged money laundering for Mafiosi were well-known before his first election. Before the second, his incompetent management of the pandemic, his self-dealing and racism and divisive nastiness, his pathological lust for vengeance for perceived wrongs, were unambiguous. MAGA didn't care. It can't be ignored, so it must be those things that earned their votes. Holy Mike Johnson, on a first-name basis with God, said it's a hoax, that questioning Trump's morality is just Democrats' nasty politics.

Houses are burning, fire is spreading, about to destroy the whole village. Awoke people bang on neighbors' doors, trying to rouse the occupants. From their windows, a few old men shout, "Hey, we're trying to sleep here. Stop banging. Sing us a lullaby." It's a brilliant analogy, right? Trumpists accuse truth-tellers of derangement-based, unwarranted alarmism. Smelling smoke, seeing their clothes smoldering, they don them anyway.

Apt or not, the point is that, even in this exceptionally enlightened corner of our variably-hued country, there are people who are unconstitutionally unable to acknowledge the corruption, the anti-American implications of the Trump regime, even as it incinerates the parchment on which we were founded. It worries me. Doors will require banging for decades, as occupants refuse to awaken.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Sometimes it’s necessary to beat a reanimated horse. The Epstein “situation” is about more than the horrific crimes of that man, Trump’s best buddy for years, who once received a wink-wink birthday letter from him. His denial of sending it floated like a Sherman tank in his birthday parade. The salience of the Epstein affair isn’t only the criminal exploitation and trafficking of young girls. That’s been known for decades. Nor is it news that Trump palled around with him; speculation on the extent of his involvement is understandable, but, for now, unprovable.

What’s more important is that even the most successfully MAGAfied Trumpists can no longer deny he’s a shameless, recidivist liar. Or that he and the people with whom he’s surrounded himself for protection, and his media enablers, are trying, as if everything depends on it, to hide what’s in those files. People don’t do that for something that, according to Trump’s cravenly obedient Attorney General, never existed. MAGAs are starting to notice.

Releasing Grand Jury testimony is a distraction attempt, a scam, more proof that Trump considers his voters stupid. If a judge allows the unlawful release of the testimony, it’ll contain nothing about Trump. That’s why, unlike the actual files, he ordered Pam Bondi to release it. It’s transparent non-transparency. Publishing the MLK, Jr. files, though, is transparent, proving how desperate he is to change the subject.

If Trump didn’t fear the Epstein files, he wouldn’t be calling them a hoax created by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Moreover, calling it a “hoax,” which it clearly isn’t, explains every not-hoax he’s called a hoax. Till now, lies as idiotic as that would be swallowed by Trumpists like cheeseburgers he forces on college athletes. Knowing the lies dropped from the same place as cowpies, Congressional Rs would nevertheless feed them to their constituents like strawberry shortcake. No longer. For once, some seek the truth. 

Trump doesn’t just think his supporters are stupid. He’s saying it out loud. So desperate is he to squirrel MAGA into looking the other way that he posted a fake video of President Barack Obama being arrested by ICE, hauled out of the Oval Office, and imprisoned. And another, akin to his picturing himself as Pope and, later, as Superman, as lead guitar and drummer for the rock band Journey. In addition to proving his dread of the truth, it’s a national embarrassment. For worse and worser, he’s President of the United States, and he’s beclowning himself and his voters. Having gotten away with lies all his life, he’s panicking at the thought of not, changing the subject any way he can.

Other presidents have had scandals that invited investigation. Reagan, Nixon, Clinton, for three. In those bygone days, Congress wasn’t controlled by people intent only on taking the dictations of their president. Those offences had special prosecutors and/or congressional investigations, whereas Trump’s DOJ and his congressional facilitators are doing everything they can to quash his. To avoid voting on a bipartisan demand to release the files, presumably told to do so by God, Holy Mike Johnson shut down the House prematurely, for months.

Via Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, Trump fired the prosecutors and agents who did their job by pursuing his and the J6ers’ criminality. Presumably following orders, Tulsi Gabbard, his obedient Director of National Intelligence, wants President Barack Obama and his team tried for treason, for the crime of investigating how Russia helped Trump become elected. Which, non-hoaxally, it did. Do it, Tulsi. Do it, Pam. Show us what ya got.

Democracy’s survival depends on the willingness of its citizens to follow the rules, for reasons bigger than themselves. It stumbles when people in power realize courts wield only words, not swords, and it dies when they conclude courts have no means to stop them. Trump, who knows nothing about many things, does know what to say when judges order him to stand down: “You and what army?” In increasing numbers, he and his administration are brazenly ignoring judicial orders. 

When will their Epstein-based recognition of Trump’s lies awaken MAGA Republicans to the danger this represents to every American, including themselves? For the good of the country they claim to love, when will they join the effort to vote the current crop of Republicans out of office?

Freed from judicial restraints, Trump is ending more than the rule of law. What looks like cruelty for its own sake, or, maybe, payoffs, he closed the office in charge of combatting human trafficking; federal buildings will no longer need accessibility ramps; HUD will stop investigating housing discrimination; The EPA will end research into dangerous chemicals; Homeland Security will begin deporting child victims of domestic abuse, previously protected as “Special Immigrant Juveniles.” (Links provided on request.) Is this what MAGAs voted for? Are they all as inhumane as Trump?

MAGA has finally stopped hiding its meaning: Make America Go Away. It was always the point.