James Gillen

The term “enshittification” was popularized by leftist writer Cory Doctorow to describe the degradation of service on online websites and apps. His piece is quoted in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

“In a 2024 op-ed in the Financial Times, Doctorow argued that “‘enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything” with “enshittificatory” platforms leaving humanity in an “enshittocene”.

For a while now I have seen such a process occurring in most capitalist endeavors, not just online platforms. Only I don’t call it enshittification, I call it strip-mining the market. Basically, in order to maximize profit, a company’s owners will cut back on customer service and inventory, and charge for things that used to be perks, that causes people to quit going to the business, that leads to more cost cutting to maximize profit, that makes the business unprofitable and it goes terminal, then the owners sell it for parts. This was a business strategy of investors like Bain Capital, and it is why the once omnipresent Sears department store filed for Chapter 11 and is now reduced to a holding company for its remaining assets.

In this spirit I propose that a similar process is occurring in world government, in particular the American government. And for reasons that will become clear I call it: Enschmittification.

Carl Schmitt, upon being asked how well he knew Adolf Hitler.

Carl Schmitt was a legal scholar and professor in the time of Germany’s interwar “Weimar” Republic. Prior to the takeover of Hitler, Schmitt had written pieces that scholars now regard as both influential to the growing Nazi movement and useful to it. In 1932 Schmitt wrote The Concept of the Political, which detailed his central concept that politics is a case of friend versus enemy, considering liberal notions of non-conflict based political philosophy to be “utopian.” Liberal writer Mike Brock recently wrote on another central work of Schmitt in regard to authoritarianism:

“In 1922, the German jurist Carl Schmitt published a short book called Political Theology. Its opening sentence is among the most consequential in the history of political thought: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

What is meant by this is that sovereignty means the power to create exceptions to the legal system. Wikipedia goes over one of Schmitt’s earlier works, Die Diktatur (On Dictatorship) in which he stated among other things that it is in fact the purpose of the executive to bypass the formalities and limitations of parliamentary democracy. “If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.”

To Schmitt, the fundamental premise of government is the distinction between friend and enemy: “This distinction is to be determined “existentially”, which is to say that the enemy is whoever is “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible”. The essential dynamic is that government is not a public service, but rather exists to reward and protect one’s friends and punish one’s enemies. This aligns with the cynical Internet interpretation of conservatism: “There are those whom the law protects but does not bind, and there are those whom the law binds but does not protect.”

For Schmitt, capitalism is to be opposed because he sees it as exploitation – “The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.” At the same time that enmity is based on the opposite of the leftist critique in that free trade seeks to create a universal value rather than stoke conflict: “All liberal pathos turns against repression and lack of freedom. Every encroachment, every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competition, is called repression and is eo ipso evil. What this liberalism still admits of state, government, and politics is confined to securing the conditions for liberty and eliminating infringements on freedom. We thus arrive at an entire system of demilitarized and depoliticized concepts.”

Even in Randian terms, capitalism and business are not simply about making money; making money is the means to the end. Success in capitalism means providing a service no one else can deliver, or with better service than anyone else can deliver. Developing a business is just as much a personal pursuit as athletics or art, from the standpoint of an entrepreneur. It is goal-directed. Competition may lead to the merger of a business with a smaller one, but that is not necessarily the goal. When making money is the whole point, all the other stuff that a given business does is secondary to what is ostensibly the company’s reason for being, and a company and its product can be sacrificed for the sake of greater mergers and sell-offs. At this point capitalism indeed becomes what the Left claims it to be: A cancer.

Enschmittification is nothing less than the application of this mercenary behavior to government.

While Schmitt is the thinker most often quoted by recent analysts, the anti-liberal or “post-liberal” approach to government in the modern era has been developed the longest by Russia, which should be no surprise to anyone seeing how Vladimir Putin’s government operates with Hungary and the United States. In an article for The UnPopulist, theorist Tom G. Palmer discussed how Putin’s guru Aleksandr Dugin deliberately referred to Schmitt’s theories in works that were studied by Putin and his men. Palmer did say that the “contingency” of conditions in the United States made it that much easier for Donald Trump to become president, but he and his advisors were very much operating from similar playbooks:
“The accretion of cronyism is not only a problem in Russia—it’s very real almost everywhere and it is very much a function of the state privileging those who are already “in” at the expense of those who are ‘out.’ That’s not just about the old stereotypes of cigar-smoking industrialists in black silk top hats; it’s far more systemic and is found wherever state interventionism creates a space for what political economists call ‘Directly Unproductive Rent-Seeking,’ now usually just shortened to ‘rent-seeking,’ that is, securing wealth without actually creating additional value for others. “

The mechanism for such actions in authoritarian regimes – such as this government – is the standing assumption that the executive’s authority means the ability to interpret how the laws apply. This is an informal norm in many countries but Schmitt specifically articulated this as deliberate policy.

For instance the Constitution specifically states that only the Congress can declare wars but places the President as Commander in Chief because decisions in a wartime situation have to be made with immediacy. But given the prospect of nuclear war or surprise attacks (such as 9-11) it has been more and more the assumption since World War II (where Congress did declare war after Pearl Harbor) that the president has to have authority for military action even in advance of an existing war or casus belli, effectively transferring the warmaking power to the executive. The War Powers Act, passed in the wake of the Vietnam War, merely authorizes or reviews presidential military action taken after the fact, and even this has rarely been invoked since passage. The premise is that in case of emergency, the government needs to bypass the law. As many people have observed, especially these days, if you give the government the power to break the law in an emergency, they will create an emergency when they want to break the law.

But on many levels it is the second Trump term, far more than the first, which demonstrates the true practice of enschmittification in action. It already started before the 2025 inauguration with the ascension of Trump’s main financial backer, Elon Musk, who was given blanket authority in government by Trump with no Cabinet office (and thus, no Senate authorization) for no other reason than that he was an elite capitalist who had already perfected the process of enshittifying Twitter after he purchased it, changing it from a flawed but universal platform into a vehicle for the distorted views of himself and fringe fellow travelers, legitimizing racist and fascist-adjacent opinions by their presence on his established platform, and not incidentally promoting the Trump 2024 campaign. After the election, Trump announced the creation of “DOGE” – the Department Of Government Efficiency, under Musk and Republican entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy was quickly pushed out, perhaps because people realized that a department to eliminate inefficiency didn’t need redundant leadership. As soon as Trump was sworn in (and Musk saluted our Roman ancestors), the current occupant of the Oval Office established DOGE by executive order (not an act of Congress). The legal status of DOGE remains unclear and most of its agents serve on an “acting” level without Congressional authorization or approval. While Musk had asked payments of millions for his staff, it remains to be seen how much unnecessary spending has been trimmed from government. DOGE was however given unrestricted access to everyone’s Social Security and financial records, set previously independent bureaucracies under direct presidential control, cut staffing for offices investigating Musk and his businesses, mostly dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), eliminated over 300,000 government jobs and cut budgets at various departments including SSA, Treasury and Health and Human Services, by eliminating all that “waste, fraud and abuse” that previously was known as “providing services to the population at large.”

The latest manifestations of the dynamic are in Trump’s Iran war (aka The You Know What They Do To Pedos In Prison War). Reporters discovered that just before Trump announced a threat to bomb Iran’s civilian energy facilities, someone bought $1.5 billion in oil futures. Or as it’s usually called, insider trading, since you would have to know what was going down beforehand in order to time the maneuver. And after he got talked out of nuclear annihilation, he seemed willing to entertain the idea of leaving a postwar arrangement where Iran would charge tolls on passage through the Straits of Hormuz if America could get a cut of the proceeds. So the whole thing started with any of various pretexts, such as the threat the Tehran theocracy posed to its people, or the threat it posed to Israel, or rival Sunni governments, and the Iran cutoff of shipping is a blatant violation of international law. But Trump was willing to throw both principle and practicality aside if he thought he could monetize the situation, even if it meant a ‘joint venture’ with the nation he started hostilities with.

It’s almost as if Trump thinks the most important government on the planet is just a vehicle to make him more rich.

But not only is Trump’s war of choice cutting off the world energy lifeline at the Strait of Hormuz, his partners in the region are endangered as Iran fires missiles and drones at their own oil facilities, causing damage that will take years to repair, and in the process, causing many of the Arab princes to rethink their ties to Washington.

The irony being that the late stages of this process are undermining its reason for being: If enschmittification means changing government from a public service to a vehicle of personal enrichment, continued manipulation will only serve to undermine profits as the outside world reacts to the manipulation.

That is, control of the markets by right-wing rent seekers can undermine a country’s economy at least as much as socialist intervention. This can create a vulnerability to the government even greater than the weaknesses created by enshittification in the private sector. The first sign of this occurred recently with the parliamentary elections in Hungary. There, Prime Minister Viktor Orban had been in charge for 16 years, and thus had gotten that much farther along in co-opting private media, industries and the courts than Trump has over 10 years. He had also gotten that much farther in fixing the government, by changing the election rules to grant even more seats to the majority (such that in 2022 Orban’s Fidesz coalition got 54 percent of the vote but two-thirds of the parliament seats). This made Orban the darling of not only Vladimir Putin but serious anti-liberal thinkers in the West (such as JD Vance and Rod Dreher). But by 2026, Hungary’s economy was weaker than that of Romania or Bulgaria. Despite national health care and other provisions America does not have, basic services and consumer goods are lacking. “The main reason for Hungary’s poor economic performance is an autocratic government that has subordinated its economic policy to systemic corruption and the organized theft of public funds, undermining fair competition,” said József Péter Martin, Executive Director of Transparency International Hungary, at the presentation of their 2025 report. But in 2024, Fidesz member Peter Magyar decided to protest a scandal in which the Minister of Justice pardoned a defendant in a child sex abuse case.* He also made news by helping to expose a bribery scandal where the same Minister – Magyar’s ex-wife – admitted on tape that records had been altered on government orders. Riding public outrage, Magyar joined the existing Tisza opposition party and gained a seat in the European Parliament. Preparing for this year’s campaign, Magyar and Tisza adopted the critical strategy of getting all the opposition parties to unite under their coalition (since Hungary actually has more than two political parties), canvassing the nation in person instead of relying on state media, and sending an online questionnaire proposing 13 specific actions. Notably, Magyar is not a leftist, being a center-right politician who agrees with a lot of previous Orban policy (such as immigration restriction) but “liberal” in demanding public investment and the rule of law. The Tisza campaign focused not so much on Orban’s so-called illiberal social policies as the decline of the economy, the blatant corruption and self-dealing of the government, and the fact that these are the same problem. The end result, after 16 years of Orban rule, led to Tisza winning in a landslide. Ironically, the margin of the vote turned Orban’s rig against him, with Tisza gaining two-thirds of the seats in parliament and thus allowing the new party to change the Constitution as Fidesz had done in 2010.

The situation for America is not exactly analogous, especially since Hungary is a parliamentary system which meant that the head of government is determined by majority control and not election of a separate office. But as Trump continues his war of choice against the nation that controls 20 percent of the world’s access to oil, the prices of gasoline and diesel will continue to increase, which will increase the cost of transportation of goods, which will increase the price of everything else, and all the while Trump and his family and cronies monetize the situation every way they can. It has already been predicted that Republicans will lose the House in November, assuming the number of dead elderly Democrats doesn’t outpace the number of Republicans being expelled before then. Trump’s bad behavior is a known quantity. But now that it directly affects American voters where they live, it’s more likely than ever that he will lose his main enabler in consolidating the government, the Republican Congress. Ethnic cleansing, putting your face on every building in Washington and dressing like Jesus may be tolerable, but gas at 5 dollars a gallon is something else.

Or as was said quite some time ago:
“It’s the economy, stupid.”

* -P.S. And it doesn’t help when your government enables pedophilia, either.

So. We have not started a nuclear war. Yet.

Just to recap: Easter Sunday, Our Lord and Savior, Donald Trump, rose from his bed to twit the following: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump”. Because this government is basically The West Wing as scripted by David Mamet and directed by Martin Scorsese.

“This made a lot of people angry and was widely perceived as a bad move.”

No less a right-wing whackjob than Marjorie Taylor made an extended post saying “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness,” the former Georgia congresswoman responded on X on Sunday. “Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.” She also said “This NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most. This is not making America great again, this is evil.”

Bee itch, this is EXACTLY what you and yours voted for. You wanted a president who would remake the country in your twisted image and that required someone who was both shameless and oblivious enough to put himself above the law. And now you know what that means, but it’s too late now, cause you elected him God.

Same thing with Alex Jones: ““The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people!” Jones wrote on X, following Trump’s threats to eliminate Iranian civilization Tuesday. “Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!”

Things are really bad when you hope, “Gee, I hope Alex Jones can talk some sense into this guy.”

And as Trump ALWAYS does, he heard the feedback and decided to double down on stupid. Easter Monday they held the White House Easter Egg Roll and Trump decided to pontificate to children about how America was “dead” but thanks to him it’s “hot”, while flanked by his wife and the Easter Bunny (in the picture, the Easter Bunny is on the right). Overnight he twitted this winner: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” (He did not specify if he meant Iran or the United States.) This on top of his previous posts led to that many more calls to invoke the 25^th Amendment and remove Trump from office for incapacity. Jones went further. On InfoWars, he asked his guest Robert Barnes, “How do we 25^th Amendment his ass?” Barnes pointed out that under the rules for invoking the 25^th, (Section 4) it’s actually harder to do than to get an impeachment conviction in the Senate. So Jones asked what else could be done and Barnes said they “tackle Trump and let him pretend he’s president and publicly report that he’s going through a health issue … It literally needs to be something like that. It’s that bad.” “I’ve known you for a long time,” Jones replied. “You’ve never called for an internal coup before.”

Republicans in Congress of course would not go that far, but Trump supporter and fellow Putin fanboy Senator Ron Johnson (BR.-Wisconsin) said Tuesday, “I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure … We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.”

Meanwhile there were filmed events of Iranian civilians coming to key power plants to act as human shields or at the very least let American airmen know that they are ordered to kill non-combatants. To this Trump whined, “They’re not allowed to do that.” Thus expressing his inner five-year old. Which in his case is his outer five-year old.

Maybe that’s why, less than two hours away from Trump’s self-imposed 8 pm deadline to genocide, he agreed to a proposal from Pakistan to hold off civilian strikes for two weeks “subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz”.

TACO Two Weeks strikes again!

Only that level of shrewdness could have bankrupted six casinos!

Although as Andy Borowitz points out, this just means Trump is giving himself two weeks to come up with an even bigger distraction for the Epstein Files. ™

Basically somebody gave Our Very Stable Genius an out from an action that would have not just destroyed Iranian infrastructure but infrastructure in Israel, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere from Iran’s inevitable retaliation strike. It would have broken relations with our allies, leading to denial of military base access, a breakoff of relations, or even a very strongly worded diplomatic message. And given how much even Republicans are taking the 25^th Amendment seriously, he might not have been able to maintain support in a Congress where Moscow Mike Johnson cannot spare any defections.

None of this changes the fact that while the current status quo is not as bad as Trump carrying through his threats (at least not as bad for Trump, which may be why someone finally got him to chicken out), it’s still pretty bad for the world. If the goal was to prevent a deranged lunatic from getting a nuclear weapon, well- way too late for that. It’s that much more likely that Iran will feel the need to get one, knowing that the US and Israel will not stop bombing them until they do. (The history of North Korea, or for that matter the history of Ukraine vs. Russia, indicate that Western attempts to stop the spread of nukes might actually be counterproductive to world peace and security.) That being the case, Israel will feel even less secure knowing that the Islamic tyranny in Iran, an anti-Semitic regime that has sought to destroy them for years, is an existential threat, and now knows that Israel is an existential threat to it. Whatever happens to the Strait of Hormuz, Iran gets a say, and the world’s fossil fuel supply is that much more under their control than before. The Gulf states that now host our military bases, mainly as a deterrent to Iran, are seeing those bases as more of a liability. And we have already depleted our military supplies to the point where we have less defense against future Chinese and Russian expansionism. Assuming that wasn’t the idea.

Again, rump promised on Tuesday that a whole civilization would die tonight. It wasn’t Iran, but in a way, it was the United States. Thanks to this clown, we and the rest of the world can no longer trust that the Americans are the good guys or that our leadership can be trusted. Because this is NOT a republic of laws, but a democracy of men, and far too many Americans actively chose this, or knew better but chose not to vote for Kamala Harris because she supported Israel too much. (You think Harris would have got snookered into Bibi’s new war, kids?) So before I conclude, let me just say to all you Trumpniks and “anti-Zionists”, as diplomatically as I can:

DIE.

Slowly and painfully.

Which is very likely given how many of you take your medical advice from RFK Junior.

While you’re at it, castrate yourselves. Just take out a butter knife and lop it off. Take yourselves out of the gene pool. If you’re really pro-life and you think that every baby has a soul and God intends them all to go somewhere, make sure they don’t go to stupid parents who will raise them to be stupid. You need to get flushed out of the body politic, the sooner the better.

As it is, it’s hard to see how we survive to the July 4 250^th anniversary of the United States, at least if We, the People, are so passive and sheeplike that we continue to allow this feeb to keep misruling it. And it’s gonna be pretty hard to celebrate our revolt from British North America when most of us are looking at Canada and thinking “You know, maybe putting extra ‘U’s in words doesn’t seem that bad.”

My Fellow Americans, and All Our Ships At Sea,

We got a real serious situation in Iran, and to make sure everybody takes it seriously, I am addressing the nation on April Fool’s Day.

We are very close to achieving our military objectives against Iran, which is not a war, cause you gotta go to Congress to have a war, not like I give a fuck what Congress says, they’re all a bunch of sissy bitches who bend over when I say, just like I do with Putin. We are gonna hit ’em real hard, harder than anybody’s ever been hit before, right back into the Stone Age where we belong. They. I mean they. They being Iran. I’m real serious.

Also, next week is Infrastructure Week.

I got somethin’ to say to our so called “allies” who wouldn’t step up and help with the war I started without Congressional authorization, choking the world’s access to fossil fuel and wrecking the global economy cause it was my time of the month and also cause I needed the press to stop talkin’ about the Epstein Files. I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I? DID I MENTION I’M TERMINALLY SENILE AND HAVE NO INTERNAL MONOLOGUE??

To all those other countries, I’m telling you if you want that oil, you gotta take it. Cause I don’t care anymore. I’m bored. I’m like a five-year old on a sugar crash. Anybody who knows me, they knows I don’t care about nothin’ except me. You can just take it. Iran’s got no military. Just ask the people at that Saudi airfield who saw an AWACS get cut in half. You think Iran did that? It was Joe Biden! Or George Soros! Maybe both! PIZZAGATE!

You can just walk in and take it. Take it. They got nothin’. They got no cards. No cards! You can trust me. I’m an expert on playing cards. That’s how I bankrupted six casinos.

We’re gonna destroy Iran and it’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon! Just like I did a few months ago! You wanna know how! I’m not tellin’ ya! If we don’t know what we’re doin’, then neither will the enemy!

Nobody knows what I’m gonna do! Not even me! You wanna find out? You just gotta keep watchin’ the Trump Show!

BE THERE. ALOHA.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

By the time that I’m through singin’

The bells of the schools of the wars will be ringin’

More confusions, blood tranfusions

The news of today will be the movies for tomorrow

And the water’s turned to blood, and if you don’t think so

Go turn on your tub

And if it’s mixed with mud

You’ll see it turned to gray

And you can call my name

I hear you calling my name

-Love, “A House Is Not A Motel”

Donald Trump, Russia’s Viceroy for North America, decided to start yet another war of choice, this time in Iran. (‘You can’t have Iran, Donnie, you haven’t finished your Venezuela.’) And apparently because “Operation Midnight Hammer”, the latest in a series of military missions named after straight-to-video action movies/gay porn videos, did NOT end Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity despite Our President bragging for days that it had, he decided to go along with Israel’s effort to take out Iran’s senior leadership, blanking out the point that they had junior leadership under them, such as the late Ayatollah’s son, who also lost his mother, wife and several other relatives in the strike.

This made a lot of people angry and was widely perceived as a bad move.

Because compared to Midnight Hammer, Iran now correctly perceives the attack as an existential struggle for the survival of their regime, and is attacking the US and its allies accordingly. Not only are the Iranians mining the Strait of Hormuz, which is basically their entire coast, they are bombing Israel. So Israel decided to bomb a major Iranian oil facility and Iran retaliated by bombing a Qatar oil facility. So Wednesday, Rex Mundi twitted “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL” unless (of course) Iran retaliates, in which case we’re gonna hit back with “an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.” All of which is telling in that a, Trump is admitting that Israel acted independently of us (or that he knew what they were doing but will not admit it), b, Trump, as with Venezuela, is more concerned about saving the oil fields for future exploitation than any civilian or military costs, and c, making demands on Israel because they endangered Qatar means he has to choose between Israel and Qatar, his two favorite bribers.

It’s almost as if nobody has any idea what’s going on. Not as if anyone with half a brain (i.e. Most adults other than Trump) didn’t know that Iran always had the option to threaten the Strait if attacked. This week Trump actually whined that it was “unfair” that Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz, saying “you win a war, but they have no right to be doing what they’re doing.” (He keeps using this word ‘win’. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.) Apparently one of Trump’s favorite generals, Dan Caine (whom Trump had appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his loyalty) specifically told him that an attack on Iran could prompt them to block the Strait of Hormuz. But apparently Trump, based on his fluke success couping Venezuela, assumed that once he took out the head of state, everyone would just do what he said, and because they haven’t, he doesn’t know what to do next.

Why did Trump think this was going to be just like Venezuela when everybody was telling him otherwise?

Because he’s a moron.

Quad Erat Demonstrandum.

Meanwhile Secretary of Bombing Schoolgirls Pete Hegseth has been giving talks trying to prop up the war effort while denying that there’s been any blowback. Last Friday Hegseth told a press conference, “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

A bit like saying, “the only thing prohibiting crossing the field is all the mines, barbed wire and drones.”
Or, “the swimming pool is perfectly safe, apart from all the loose razor blades.”
Or “there’s no reason you can’t drive across the Grand Canyon, you just have to watch out for all the potholes.”

Why does Hegseth actually seem to believe what comes out of his own mouth?
Because he’s a moron.

So now at least 20 percent of the world supply of oil is being cut off by a war of choice, that we don’t know how to get out of, and the production of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others is threatened, and the cost of everything that depends on transport, that is, everything, will keep exploding, because Kamala Harris had girl cooties and Americans decided they would rather trust a retarded pigboy even knowing he wrecked his last “great” economy by giving us all Trump Virus. ™

And on the off chance that an actual Trumpnik is reading this, you might ask, “Hey, why you gotta insult Our President like that? Callin’ him a pigboy, when he’s the greatest president we ever had since Jesus Himself?”
There’s a reason why I call Trump a pigboy.

Because he’s a pigboy.

Squinty little eyes, looks like a pig, eats like a pig, his favorite environment is wallowing in mud and shit. AND, if you want to work with the pig, you have to get down in the shit with him.

For example, Marco Rubio. Nominally Trump’s Secretary of State, not like he had any say in the events leading up to this. Somebody who had a certain level of respect as a Senator from Florida, and for telling off Trump in the first part of the 2016 campaign. But we’re not taking about what Marco Rubio is planning for Cuba, or whether he’s going to run for president in 2028. No, the main Rubio news in March was when Trump gave all his men Florsheim shoes, without checking their size, and expected them all to wear them. And all the pictures of Rubio last week showed him wearing shoes that are clearly too big for him. Not like Rubio couldn’t have looked up that model and ordered the same shoes in his size. But he didn’t. Because then Trump would know. He wore the shoes Trump ordered so that Trump could see that he was wearing those specific shoes. Because Trump demands absolute loyalty, and the surest way to prove your loyalty is to let your Master absolutely humiliate you. Day in, and day out.

If Trump told his Cabinet to wear lipstick and lingerie on camera, they’d all look like the cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Why does Marco Rubio act like such a simp when the whole reason he’s there is supposed to be because he needs to provide the president expert advice that he may need?

Because Rubio is a moron.

You may be sensing a pattern here.

Well actually, it’s not like Rubio is mentally subnormal, unlike Trump or half his Cabinet, but he like JD Vance and other people who had brains and were able to think critically about Trump sold their egos and their minds to get proximity to him, cause they wanted to be on the side that’s winning. Or more likely, out of ingrained pathological hatred for Democrats, because what’s happening right now is the exact opposite of winning.

So now our bear of very little brain has his head stuck in the hunny jar. And it’s not like he’s ever going to get out by himself. Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times said we might be able to gracefully back out of this with concessions, but if there were reasonable people on either side, we wouldn’t be here. The whole premise of Donald Trump’s psychology is that he is perfect and can never make a mistake, therefore he will never admit to making a mistake. For example, Eric. Plus which, the Pars Gas Field attack indicates that Israel’s Prime Minister has at least as much say in the direction of things as Trump, and both Israel and Iran, with some reason, see the other as a threat to their existence. Beyond the collective threat, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have one more thing in common: They need to keep their countries in a state of emergency in order to avoid prosecutions that could kick them out of office, which would almost certainly lead to them going to prison.

Surely the needs of the few, or the one, outweigh those of the tens of thousands?

But don’t worry. As Our God-Emperor says, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.“

I saw somebody on YouTube, can’t remember exactly who, but they said that we need to make sure Trump’s motherfucking enablers do not get away with this when it is all over. And they mentioned the end of Inglourious Basterds. This was where SS man Hans Landa agreed to spill his secrets to the Allies to save his own skin, and commando leader Aldo Raine agreed to this, but then did something to make sure that he wouldn’t be able to just live a normal life from then on. So he took out a knife and carved a swastika into the Nazi’s forehead.

(Oh, sorry about the spoiler. By the way, in the movie, Hitler goes to a movie theater in France and the Resistance blows the place up and ends the war.)

Now, I don’t think we need to do anything that bloody. After all, Trumpniks are like vegans in one respect: You don’t have to ask their alignment, THEY WILL TELL YOU. Plus which, it’s not like The Daily Show hasn’t based much of its humor on the fact that videotape exists and Republicans seem blissfully unaware of it.

That being the case, these tweezer dicks might still try to blend into the background, in which case we all owe it to dig up their past and throw it in their faces every time they try to attain a respectable public position again. How long did the Hebrews have to wander the desert for defying God? Forty years? The Republicans can be at third-party status for at least that long. They should understand, they’re all Good Christians. Forty years or however long it takes until they, like the Democrats, figure out that white supremacy doesn’t work.

Speaking for myself, I don’t expect to live that long. So I will NEVER forget.

And I will never forgive.

This Wednesday former Trumpnik Joe Walsh (no, not that one) did a comment on the Wall Street Journal article confirming that the Justice Department (a name it was given before Orwell was born) not only concealed Epstein Files mentioning Donald Trump, it did so specifically at his behest. “Do you understand—and I’m an old guy—but do you understand that there would have been a day where this alone, this story alone, that the President of the United States ordered the Justice Department to keep his name hidden from the Epstein files, would have been enough to remove a President from office back in the day?”

Well, that’s because Trump is so media savvy. He is an idiot savant of manipulation. Emphasis on the idiot. His strategy for avoiding consequences for one scandal is to create an even bigger and better one, which has worked on our superficial media time and time again. “Never mind that teenager I raped. Lookit here at all these kids I killed!”

Speaking of killing kids: Among the targets of last weekend’s “precision strike” on the Islamic Republic of Iran was an all-girls school near Tehran, cause apparently Republicans hate educating women even more than Islamic fundamentalists do. We did at least kill the loathsome theocrat Ali Khameini, who was 86 years old and probably ready to die from I’ve Fallen And Can’t Get Up. But as a result you’ve got Iran firing rockets all over the region, hitting Israel, threatening Cyprus (which is an EU country), and hitting our troops at a Gulf base, killing at least four. So the Straits of Hormuz, essentially the coast of Iran, are a no-go zone for oil shipping, and we have yet to see how much damage that’s going to do to the world economy.

Our bear of very little brain broke open a hornet’s nest cause Israel and Saudi Arabia told him it would be full of tasty hunny.

The problem is, Iran is way too big, way too mountainous and way too populated to take on in a land invasion. For similar reasons, just hoping that Iran’s people will rise up and overthrow the theocrats is very unlikely. We supposedly had a list of people under Khameini that we were willing to deal with in the event of his death, but according to Trump, we were SO successful in killing that they’re all eliminated. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” Making it that much less likely that we’re going to have a negotiated settlement. And the pretext for all this was that the regime which has been an “imminent” threat to the US since … 1979 … was just “a week away” from getting a nuke. Which is contradicted by the point that we staged a strike on the hierarchy of the government and declared our intent to destroy them, and they haven’t used nukes yet. If they had them, they would use them, and if they can’t reach us they would hit Israel or Europe. And, incidentally, making it less likely that they will ever stop trying to get a nuke because they know that’s the only way the US and Israel will stop bombing them.

All this does is make the situation worse. Of course making everything worse is the reason that Donald Trump was sent to Earth by God Almighty, whom as we know, hates us all and wants us to suffer.

Not only that, the missiles Iran has been using are causing so much damage that we’re actually running out of air-defense missiles, since Iran builds for cheapass quantity over quality and we build the most expensive stuff possible to pad somebody’s business contract. It’s actually gotten to where our military asked Ukraine’s government for help with defense tech, since they have a similar policy of building as many cheap drones as possible to counter Russia’s attacks, which are usually made with Iran-designed Shahed missiles.

Gee, Your Majesty, Ukraine seems like they might be able to help us out here. I hope nothing bad happens to them!

Of course now I see all the Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor types posting that they oppose this war and “this isn’t what we voted for.” Kids: THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR. You voted for Clownboy cause he was going to do all the things the other presidents didn’t have the guts to do. And why didn’t they? Why didn’t anybody start a global tariff war before? Why didn’t they kill the Iranian command when they’ve been a “perennial” threat for years? Well, cause up till now, the American people hadn’t elected a president who had a two-digit IQ before dementia and the emotional control of a five-year old with rabies.

And of course when a War Powers resolution came up for a vote in the Senate, it got shot down on Party Lines, with all 47 Democrats but John Fetterman voting for it and all Republicans but Rand Paul voting against it. So, in effect, Republicans, you DID vote for this and YOU CONTINUE to vote for this. (Meanwhile, Mike Johnson’s House shut down a Congressional bill to release all internal sexual misconduct reports.)

We are in something of a limbo. We are certainly not a constitutional republic, not in the Founders’ sense and not even in the modern Beltway sense. We are a democracy only in the pejorative sense that the most irrational and emotional mobs get to anoint their favorite reality TV demagogue a tyrant in order to dunk on the people they hate (which is everybody, ultimately including themselves). We are still a free country in the sense that we are free – for now – to say publicly that the demagogue is not only an incompetent but a career criminal who is, if not an actual pedophile, clearly covering up for people who were convicted of such acts.

What we are not free to do is DO anything about it.

Why is this? Partially because the Democratic Party is as useless as an entire store full of left shoes. Part of that is that they are obliged to be “liberal” in the sense of both “free healthcare and gender transitions for everyone” and the more classical sense of liberal, like “maybe we should be under the rule of law and the president shouldn’t just get to treat an entire nation like he treated E. Jean Carroll”. So they’re not as focused and united as a Trump Party that is all in on “make liberals cry, even if we lose our jobs from Trumponomics.” And Democrats are not an effective party due to a combination of controlled opposition, learned helplessness and the fact that they ARE the conservative party in government. They just don’t seem like the conservatives because their Founding Father is not James Madison or Alexander Hamilton but Franklin Roosevelt. But they want to preserve the system they inherited. And they want to maintain the perks of the system and their offices. To preserve that access they will make any compromise to keep a seat at the table. Even if it’s the kids’ table. And ironically, their fecklessness is a big part of why they couldn’t get anybody to vote for them in 2024, which is why the Republicans have the majority that they have in Congress.

(Those downballot results are why I don’t believe the theory that Republicans stole the presidential election, though by the time all this is over, the idea that Trump cheated to win is going to be the received wisdom with most of the country, probably including Republicans)

But the real issue is that Trump Party, because they’re the ones in charge. Trump would be over in a second if 67 Senators agreed with an impeachment resolution, and that’s never going to happen as long as at least one third of the Senate is in Trump’s cult. As we know from Clinton, party loyalty always trumps loyalty to the Constitution. But this goes a lot deeper. A lot of these guys are operating on blind faith, and a lot of them are operating on fear. After all, before January 6, they only suspected that any disloyalty to their Messiah would cause him to send a mob of mouth-breathers into the Capitol to lynch them. But now they know.

It goes back to a debate that historians often have as to whether some figure like Napoleon or Hitler is a “Great Man of History” who shapes the world or whether he is simply a product of material circumstances like everybody else. I don’t think it’s either-or. I think it’s both. Look at what happened to Soviet communism once Lenin died and Stalin took over.

With Hitler, for instance, would somebody else have been able to turn Germany into the racist warmongering power that it became? Probably not. German parties of both the Left and the Right were fighting for control with little result for most of the 1920s. But would Nazism have happened somewhere else? When you consider that the Nazis took much of their inspiration for anti-Semitism from Henry Ford, and that in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler praised the United States for keeping its White population mostly pure and segregated while Spanish America had colonials and natives merge into a mestizo population, it’s clear that the US pioneered such institutional racism a long time before Germany did. So why did Nazism happen there and not here?

In large part because we won the “Great War” (World War I) and they lost. From that point the German republic had to rebuild from disarmament and humiliation. It was a lot easier to push the idea that some terrible “they” were the reason for the country’s misfortune. So when the Great Depression ruined everybody Germany turned to Hitler and Jew-hatred where America decided to challenge capitalism not from the paranoid Right but from the center-left position of Roosevelt. And certainly the way things wound up here says a lot about both the character of America and Roosevelt in particular.

It isn’t just the (L)eader or the movement. One requires the other. One doesn’t really develop without the other.

The movement here is the paranoid, persecution complex strain of anti-liberalism thrown in a burlap sack with the Evangelicals and the elites who don’t care one way or another about civil rights or the Constitution as long as they don’t have to deal with taxes and regulations. Some of these groups overlap, but not always. And the one thing they had in common was Donald Trump, because he is a shameless flim-flam man who could pretend to be all things to all customers. He could be the racist for David Duke and the Israel supporter for the Adelsons. He could tell the farmers he would bring prices down and then start a trade war for the donor class, telling us that tariffs are going to replace progressive income tax. The fact that he was both tactless and a vulgarian convinced a lot of people on the fence that he really wasn’t going to go all in on the Religious Right while he was also going to do the “hard” stuff that conventional politicians weren’t going to do.

If it doesn’t seem to make any sense, that’s because it doesn’t. But marks are not known for their common sense, and the last thing they want to do is admit they were conned. So even after Trump gave us all Trump Virus ™ lots of people went to the polls to re-elect their Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man cause he was going to fix all our problems with his magic wand and his Patented All-Purpose Miracle Snake Oil.

Again, that reflects on the character of the movement as well as the leader. But the problem with the con scheme is that you run out of people to con while you build the list of people who get mad that they were conned. They may not admit it publicly, but they may not vote for you anymore either. And that seems to be an issue.

It was pointed out that in the Texas US Senate primary this week, both Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico in the Democratic race each got more votes than the top two finishers in the Republican race, challenger Ken Paxton and incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Daily Kos pointed out “if the state held a jungle primary like in California and Louisiana—where all candidates run on the same primary ballot and the top-two finishers advance to the general election—then Republicans would have been shut out of November’s election.”

Kos also reported on Wednesday that Utah Republican Congressman Burgess Owens is retiring as is Republican US Senator from Montana Steve Daines. Earlier this week Montana Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke announced he was retiring after this term.

It’s similar to how former House Speaker Paul Ryan didn’t run for re-election midway in Trump’s first term. His seat was safe. But however much you may think you gain by selling your soul to Trump, it raises the question of how long you can tolerate being under his eye. Even now, with Cornyn and Paxton set for a runoff, the Clownboy Caligula is trying to bully the result telling the country that “soon” he’s going to endorse one or the other and then the other one had better get out of the way. It must be hell, being so dependent on a tyrant who is less dependable than a teenage girl on her first period.

Of course the other reason Ryan didn’t run is because he figured his party would lose the House majority and he would no longer be Speaker. That’s the same calculus a lot of these other guys are making, even when their seats are safe. There’s just one problem: Their seats are not safe.

The famously one-eyed Republican Congressman from TX-2, Dan Crenshaw, lost in the primary round to former state representative Steve Toth, apparently cause Crenshaw wasn’t right-wing enough. In a special election this week for state District 70, Democrat Alex Holladay beat Republican Bo Renshaw. This is Arkansas. A state so redneck they had to add an “Ark” to “Kansas.” And to reiterate, neither Paxton nor incumbent Senator Cornyn got as many primary votes as Jasmine Crockett, who lost to Talarico.

And that’s in Texas. The stereotypically right-wing state that has spent damn near two generations using the legislature and judiciary to create a Venezuela-style permanent majority.

Oh, AND, just as of Thursday, Slayer of Canines Kristi “Garden” Noem got fired, excuse me, transferred, from her post as Secretary of Homeland Security because her adultery, corruption and mismanagement got too embarrassing for the Trump regime. Which at this point would be a contradiction of reality. And God-Emperor Trump decided that her replacement would be Markwayne Mullin (BR.-Oklahoma) sitting Senator and former Imperial Space Marine. So while Mullin resumes the fight to purge the Imperium of Chaos Mutants illegals, that means we have yet another formerly safe seat that is now going to be contested, meaning the Republican campaign fundraisers are going to need to spend that much more money.

So the good news is that all we have to do is wait this regime out. Of course victory is not guaranteed. Again: God is real, and He hates us all. More to the point, some of the Trumpniks have brains and know exactly how unpopular they are, which is why in Texas they’ve been ginning the system for years, and why they had their little district redistribution scheme that the Roberts Court kindly let them pursue. Just this primary, the previous system where voters got to use any legal polling place was effectively scrapped when Republicans refused to use it, which obliged Democrats to only use the polling place they were registered for, which (coincidentally) caused a great deal of confusion. Democrats had a court extend voting in a couple of places, and Ken Paxton, who is (coincidentally) the Attorney General, appealed to the state Supreme Court to suspend that order. So that’s what we’re dealing with, and in the general election the state is actually in charge of monitoring the systems. So any appeals go to Ken Paxton. Nice work if you can get it.

Things trending as they are, though, Republicans may need to cheat this much because the non-Trumpnik part of the country is that fucking pissed and they’re going to get that much more pissed as gas prices (and related prices) skyrocket over Iran and Americans and Israelis get killed by Iranian rockets. What’s more important, the movement or the leader? It doesn’t matter. You can’t get the leader until 2028, but you can get the movement in November.

Kill the body, and the head will die.

And have you seen Trump’s head lately?

The following is a transcript of President Donald Trump’s January 21 speech at the Davos Economic Forum, or as much as could be translated from his native language:

Hey there. So anyway, I gotta lotta complaints. I had to switch flights before I even got here. Somethin’ about electrical issue. Somebody should do somethin’ about that. Who’s the Transportation Secretary? Who elected him?

Anyway, I land here in Davos, and they got the big red carpet rolled out for me, but there’s no honor guard. There’s no heads a’state. Nobody to greet me. It’s like I’m bein’ snubbed. Like when the last time Zelenskyy came to see me in Washington. But when I had Putin in Alaska, I pulled out all the stops. I had the military roll out a red carpet for him themselves. I came out to greet him. That’s how ya show respect to a real man. Putin’s a real man. He’s so forceful, so strong… so masculine … Hyh. Huh. ‘Cuse me. Sorry, just talkin’ about him makes me so wet…

So anyways, I came here to talk to NATO about Iceland. I mean Greenland. Why do I, I mean we, we need Greenland so much? Well, there’s this story. One Viking’s talkin’ to another Viking, and he goes ‘Sven, you named this place Iceland but it’s all grass and volcanoes.’ “Ya.” ‘And you named this other place Greenland but it’s all ice and rocks and tundra.’ “Yas.” ‘Why?’ “So da bandits raid da Greenland and leave my Izeland alone.” ‘But people aren’t gonna get confused just because you switched the names! You’d have to be unbelievably STUPID!’

So anyways, that’s why I’m goin’ for Iceland.

Greenland is a source of rare minerals. And lutefisk. Can’t forget the lutefisk. We must never allow ourselves to enter a lutefisk gap. But it’s all under threat now, it’s all under threat from Russia and China. No really, you see them China navy vessels all trawlin’ around the Arctic, you know it’s them cause they all smell like roast duck. And the Russians. You tell me, ‘Russians aren’t patrolling the Arctic. In fact this whole thing seems like it’s straight designed to turn the rest of NATO against its biggest military asset so Putin can move in.’ I have NEVER worked with Putin. I have never wanted him to succeed. Only America. I have never wanted Putin to dominate the United States, bending us over, pounding and pounding, making me wish I could have his baby…

Sorry, where was I?

So I says this and everybody’s all mad. Like the Nobel committee wouldn’t give me a Peace Prize, cause I keep threatenin’ to invade everybody. I don’t need them. I told the Kingdom of Nobel, cause you wouldn’t give me a Peace Prize, I don’t need to think about peace anymore. But nobody agrees with me. They’re so ungrateful. Like the Swiss. And the Germans. If it wasn’t for us, they’d all be speaking German now.

[offside] What, they ARE speaking German? Proves my point.

They used to love me. They used to call me ‘Daddy.’ Girls love it when you call them Daddy. Nobody calls me Daddy anymore. Well, maybe Eric and Tiffany, but who cares about them?

I told everybody here, I could use force. I really, REALLY wanna use force. I wanna see blood in the streets and people cry. Like Minneapolis. Women love it when you use force. Did you know that? My lawyers are sayin’ don’t elaborate. But I wanna use force. But I won’t. Cause I’m a nice guy.

See, I can do all this cause I’m the most popular president ever. I won the popular vote this time! By LOTS! Nobody will stand up to me. Cause everybody loves me. If I ever die, and I made a deal with God, so that’ll never happen, but if it did, my birthday would be a national holiday! It’d be bigger than the Fourth of JULY! That’s how much America LOVES me!

I won that election. And the one before that. And the one before that. And all the others. Washington? He cheated. I woulda won. All of them, they cheated. Reagan winning 49 states in 1984? Cheated. Lincoln winning the Civil War? Cheated. If I’d been Jefferson Davis in 1860, I’da won that election. Then we’d all be the Confederacy. But don’t worry, I’m doin’ everything I can to make that happen.

All I’m sayin’ is that you owe me. I mean us. The United States. And by that, I mean me. You owe us. We give you protection, we expect a cut. We expect a piece of the action. I’m just askin’ for Greenland. It’s just a rock. Just a piece of ice. It can’t be that important to you. I’m willing to destroy the greatest alliance in world history over it, it can’t be that important.

Yeah, people say all this makes me a dictator. Sure I’m a dictator. Some times ya need a dictator. Why did ya need a dictator? So he can make as much money as he can squeeze outta everybody else and fuck over anybody he wants with his government to make up for the fact that he’s so old and feeble he can’t find his own dick under his dunlop with a set a’tweezers. That’s why ya need a dictator.

Did I mention I’m almost eighty years old, clinically senile and have no internal monologue?

Well, anyway, that’s the speech. I’m late for my golf game. I hear the golfin’ is great in Switzerland this time o’year. Where AM I? Am I elected yet??

—

On the CBS Evening News, anchor Tony Doukopil remarked, “Today, Donald Trump truly became president.”