Category: Politics

Hi, I’m Donald Trump.

Hi, Donald.

And I’m bein’ told… that I’m a dummy.

Yes, Donald. Yes, you are.

Like, what am I doin’ wrong?

Everything.

I mean, everybody’s blamin’ me for inflation! The whole point of the campaign was I was gonna fix inflation.

All right, there are at least two reasons why the prices went up.

Okay.

…Do you know what they are?

….

Well, let’s go over them. The first one is tariffs, which pass directly to the consumer.

No they don’t. They pass to the foreigners.

No. They do not.

The point is, the whole point of what I’m doin’ is to get away from progressive taxation. Any time you hear ‘progressive’, it’s bad. Cause it takes money from rich people. Like me. Before we had a federal income tax, we paid for everything with tariffs. And it helped that government wasn’t paying for that much. Like, say, welfare. Or highways.

So you’re using tariffs in order to phase out the income tax.

Yeah.

Which would pass all the economic burdens from the upper percentile, who have more money than anybody else but need to spend the least, to the vast majority of voters, who have less disposable income because they have less budget already.

Well, who cares about them. All they can do is vote every four years. Rich people can bribe me every day.

Okay, then the second thing is the Iran War.

That’s still on?

Uh, yeah.

I ended it.

Why is there still a blockade and why is Iran still attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz?

Beats me, I got nothin’ to do with it.

But it’s still going on.

No it’s not, and anyway, it’s not a war. It’s an “excursion.” Like, with what I did with E. Jean Carroll. Or a “special military operation.” That’s what Vladimir calls Ukraine. He’s my best friend in the whole wide world.

Yes sir. But, the reason it matters is that Iran wouldn’t have had the opportunity to choke the Strait if we hadn’t attacked them. But now they have no reason not to, which is why they’re doing it. So 20 percent of the world’s petroleum comes through the Strait. That affects prices on everything, even in this country, which makes its own oil, because of an artificial global scarcity.

Okay.

Rising fuel prices include air travel. And trucks. Airplanes and trucks transport goods. Like groceries.

Groceries! Did you know that’s a word? A word I invented. Groceries.

Yes sir. But if prices rise on transport of groceries, prices go up on groceries. And across the board. That’s why inflation is going up so much.

It’s worth it. As soon as this is all over, and we’re makin’ a deal any day now, it’s a great deal, better than Barack HUSSEIN Obama, all those prices are gonna drop like a rock. Or my polls.

Why is it worth it?

Because we can have some stress in the economy for a little while. This war’s only goin’ on, like, two months! World War II was four years. Vietnam was about twelve! I could make this go on A LOT longer! If I wanted to, it could go twenty years!

You’ll still be president then?

Yeah! The point is, we need to do this until Iran surrenders. I mean they rape women! They shoot dissidents! Even more than I do! Because the whole point is, I say this over and over, is Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

True. I mean recent history shows how dangerous it is to let a deranged government have a nuclear weapon.

Exactly!

And how are we making this deal?

Well, it’s like every other deal I make. I want someone to do something, and they better do it, or I sic lawyers on them and make them go bankrupt or put ’em in jail.

That doesn’t work with other countries.

It worked with Greenland.

We don’t own Greenland.

Yeah right. Next you’re gonna tell me Canada isn’t a state.

So as we understand it, part of this deal is the negotiation you’re having this week with China.

It’s gonna be great. I understand they have McDonald’s there now.

What are we going to do there?

Well, we need to give them incentives. Like Congress had a bill authorizing 2 billion or so in military aid to Taiwan. President Xi doesn’t like that. I could kill the deal. That would be one thing we would offer.

But sir, a lot of your own Republicans support Taiwan. Siding with mainland China would be abandoning a friendly democracy and turning it over to a brutal one-party regime.

You’re saying ‘brutal one-party regime’ like it’s a BAD thing.

And there’s something else. We got into the Iran war at the behest of Bibi Netanyahu in Israel –

No no no no no. I’m not taking orders from Bibi. We got into this war because we knew they were going to attack Iran anyway.

But we had to join in?

Why should they have all the fun?

But Israel is even more determined to destroy the Tehran government than you are. If you and China make a deal for peace with Iran, how do you know Israel won’t just attack anyway?

They need to go along.

Or else?

Look, all these people, like Jaimie Diamond and Miriam Adelson, who support me and Bibi, they need to take sides. They can take or leave Bibi. They can’t take me for granted. He’s younger. I’m pushing 80 years old and need to cram for a test so I can tell a doggie from a horsie.

Serious question, regardless of which president is in charge, why do we need to build our foreign policy goals around Israel?

Well, all the preachers who counsel me, they say it’s important for Christianity.

Do you know what Christianity is, sir?

Yeah, sure.

Explain it then. Who is Jesus and what is his purpose?

Okay, great. Well. Once upon a time there was this guy named Jesus. Real great guy. He could heal sick people without making us pay taxes for health care. He could turn water into wine, or sugar into cocaine. And he came to preach about God in Jerusalem. And all these ‘experts’ in the priesthood didn’t like that. So they accused him of blasphemy. Total setup. Rigged. Like the Joe Biden election. If he had my lawyer, I woulda gotten him off. So they wanted to kill Jesus, but Israel was under Roman occupation and they needed them to do it. The Jews, they needed to have this big, strong, imperial power do their dirty work for them.

Mm hmm.

So they got the Romans to nail him to a cross, which is what they did to Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. Real nasty. You just get stretched on a frame hanging so that your body collapses on its own weight and you die. I’m pretty sure that Jesus took a shit then.

Really.

Well, they say that’s what happens, when you lost your automatic functions, the bowels just give out. I’ve been thinking a lot about losing control of your bowels lately.

But anyway.

So, the neat thing is, he came back! He came back to life, cause God loved him so much. All those Democrats thought he was done for good, but he showed them. So, he wakes up, in the tomb, he rolls the stone from the entry, and he walks outside. And he turns around. And he sees his shadow. And that’s why we celebrate six more weeks of winter.

Yes sir. So – do you know what they call a leader when he deliberately jacks up prices to make himself rich, wrecks the economy even more by starting a MidEast war that endangers the global oil supply, and undermines his own strategic position in the hopes that other nations will help fix the problem he started?

No, what?

Well, the polite word is ‘dummy.’

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in assuming that the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where Viceroy Donald Trump appeared last weekend was staged to make him look like a victim, or for that matter that the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting in his 2024 campaign was a setup.

We are being told that we should not rush to judgment simply because this “administration” has lied to us before, is lying to us now about every other subject, and Donald Trump lies like he breathes, which is to say, on reflex, and if he ever tried to stop himself he would blackout and maybe die.

Upon reflection I can think of two serious reasons why the shooting was not set up by anybody in the government. The first and less obvious is that nobody in this three-ring circus can keep a secret, especially not Whiskey Pete Hegseth. On the other hand he seemed remarkably happy after the event. That would also explain why FBI Director Kash Patel was at his table looking totally lost. Hey, maybe somebody should brief THE HEAD OF FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT when there’s a shooter in the building with the president? It would also explain why Stephen Miller was shown being led off by Secret Service while holding his pregnant wife in front of him. And holding her boob. I’m not kink-shaming.

The other reason is the suspect himself. Unlike the Butler shooting, the shooter was taken into custody without needing to be shot. His name is Cole Allen. Apparently just ten minutes before everything went crazy, he sent an email to friends and family as a short manifesto as to why he was going to attack. He certainly seemed cheerful. It started “Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused. I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.” At one point he mentioned that it shouldn’t have been as easy to get through security as it was, which the conspiracy side is saying is support for Trump’s demand to build a secured ballroom at the White House. But there was other stuff he said that Trump wouldn’t like as much. Namely: “On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

At this point I need to ask: What does it say about the president when the misogynist tyranny in Iran and a would-be assassin both seem more reasonable and moral than he does?

The email later made news with a preview of 60 Minutes where Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump just after the event and asked about Allen saying he didn’t want to be represented by a rapist, pedophile and traitor. Trump said, “I knew you would ask that question, because you’re horrible people. I’m not a rapist.” And as he talked over her, O’Donnell was heard asking, “oh, do you think he was talking about you?”

It’s like somebody saying “I hate this redheaded clown who sells junk food to children” and Ronald McDonald says “Is he talking about ME??”

One point on the manifesto that a lot of skeptics have made: One of Allen’s relatives informed local police as soon as possible, and procedure where a potential attack on the president is concerned is that the Secret Service and FBI be informed as soon as possible. But Allen still got ten minutes to act, and wasn’t caught until after he made his first move. Some folks thought this was evidence that the government wanted to set up an event and let him act. Others thought this was a simple case of law enforcement not acting quickly enough.

One Facebook friend put it very well: “Before we get too paranoid, remember that he fired every single intel and counter-intel expert in the government — probably because all of them could see how easy it is to manipulate him. He’s surrounded himself with yes-men rather than professionals, and that almost certainly applies to his security detail as well. They were most likely picked for loyalty rather than competence, and this is the result.

“Or it was staged. 50-50 either way.”

It brings to mind Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Certainly a lot of what we saw is a case of not managing the security event competently. However Hanlon’s Razor has two corollaries: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice” and “any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.”

Was it staged? Based on what we know of the shooter, likely not, but as The Rock would say, IT DOESN’T MATTER. Despicable Me and his minions base everything on ulterior motives and how they can game a situation, no matter what it is. If it seems like the event was staged, it’s not just because the regime has lied about everything else, it’s because THEY are the ones acting like it was staged for their benefit.

Because after the shooting, the Dinner host announced that the president was going to hold a press conference in just 30 minutes. (And everybody laughed.) And Trump used the occasion to say this is why he needed to have his one big beautiful ballroom, when the White House has never hosted the Correspondents’ Dinner, the judge who halted construction did allow for the construction of a bunker, and drone-proof bunkers are not going to help against a shooter who managed to get a longarm and shotgun past security.

Not to mention that even before the shooting, everyone was wondering why Trump wanted to attend on this particular year when he’d never attended the event as president before. And everyone was speculating on whether he could even make a speech to what was bound to be a hostile audience.

And then over the weekend through Monday Trump and other Republicans blamed the evil Democrats for inciting a climate of hatred as opposed to reacting to it. For instance, before the weekend, Jimmy Kimmel did a fake roast speech to the Correspondents’ Dinner where he said that Melania had “the glow of an expectant widow.” And for this His Majesty demanded (again) that Kimmel be fired by ABC.

A Trump supporter halfway beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband to death, and nobody claimed Trump had anything to do with it. When Trump gave his speech on January 6 saying that the Vice President should go along with his fake elector scheme, and he didn’t, Trump tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do the right thing, and all of a sudden all the people who were at the speech busted into the Capitol chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!”
But that wasn’t considered an example of free speech inciting violence. Although by Trump’s “standards”, it should have.

“They must’ve been talking about some other fast food clown!”

That hypocrisy is yet another one of the reasons why the president cannot command sympathy and support for his demands, however much he uses his Republican Party cult to make up for that. It keeps coming back to the fact that people believe that Trump would fake a shooting just to hustle for sympathy, whether he actually did or not, and he is acting like he set this up for his personal goals whether he did or not.

Why would we believe Trump would do that?

Well, what kind of person would stage a shooting at a journalists’ event just to get the public to support his demands?
The kind of person who would let a guy get shot at one of his rallies just to gin up support for his presidential campaign.

What kind of person would let a guy get shot to get support? The kind of guy who would pal around with convicted pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and who has done everything in his power to cater to Maxwell, short of pardoning her, which is still not off the table.

What kind of person would hang out with the likes of Epstein? The kind of person who as president would laugh at the War Powers Act, kill fishermen in international waters, violate sovereignty to abduct one head of state, start a major war in the Middle East, target their head of state for assassination, target a girls’ school in the country, killing over a hundred children, and in his own words, threaten to end an entire civilization if they don’t bow down to him.

The problem is not that the Correspondents’ Dinner was a failure of security and a real assassination attempt. The problem is not that it looks like a staged assassination attempt. The problem is, it only looks like a staged attempt because the ruling class of this country are lower than scum, and the longer they stay in power, the more damage they will do to the entire world.

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.”

You know how I said my New Year’s Resolution was to not focus so much on Trump?
So much for that idea.

Overnight between Friday and Saturday morning, the Prince of Peace invaded Venezuela. That in itself is not a surprise, given that our Simple Simon Bolivar has been telegraphing moves against that country for most of his first year back in office. What amazes me is that it worked. Apparently they dropped in some commandos and captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and are hauling them back to the States on charges of machine gun possession, drug smuggling and other stuff that Boss Trump doesn’t seem to mind if you’re rich enough to bribe him for a pardon.

And sure, even some Republicans are sputtering over the fact that their President is acting without Congressional approval, but we had several votes come up before this to invoke the War Powers Act and they didn’t vote for it then. Trump operates, always has operated, under the old saying “it is better to get forgiveness than permission.” Just DO the thing, and permission is moot. After all, we’ve already done it, and it’s going to be a lot harder to undo. Same thing as getting rid of USAID, the Department of Education, the East Wing, all of it. So in the next few days Trump’s media shills are going to go on full court press to tell us all that anybody who opposes this new campaign for freedom is a Commie Muslim atheist tranny who just hates Our Lord Donald Trump, America’s Greatest President since Jesus Himself.

And our Liberal Media has been showing several incidents of locals cheering in the streets because Maduro is gone, but anybody who thinks this country cares about liberty, especially under our own wannabe dictator, is going to be very disappointed by the new management. These guys are less altruistic than Ayn Rand.

Speaking of whom, Rand did say that a free nation needs no permission to liberate a collectivist slave state, and few people would dispute that Maduro was running a collectivist slave state, but then that being the case, and given that we are clearly not acting on ideological motives, it comes back to the question of who benefits.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but has had only about 1 percent of the global output, partially due to US sanctions and largely due to mismanagement of facilities. In his press conference, where he sounded more wheezy, slurred and fatigued than ever, Trump openly declared that the country would be directly managed by the US on behalf of our oil companies. There was of course no mention of María Corina Machado, the right-wing opposition leader whom many observers thought won Venezuela’s last election, won the Nobel Peace Prize of 2025 (in exile) and publicly said that Trump should have gotten it. I am posting the transcript of Trump’s “speech” here in order to spare the reader Trump’s Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. Given again how much potential the territory could yield compared to current production, there might indeed be room for improvement.

But it’s just like thinking you can get rich in Las Vegas. The trick is not to make the money, the trick is to get out of town with it. It was almost as easy to conquer Iraq because that country was also a human rights nightmare and people were glad to see us come. But then we decided we didn’t need stuff like a local support base, let alone an exit strategy, because while in theory we were going to liberate the population, in practice all the connected people in the Bush Junior Administration were going to run the place as an industrial colony for the Empire. And that’s what strengthened the guerrilla campaigns against us, because whatever our troops on the ground wanted, they weren’t there to save orphans and give them Hershey bars. And they of course paid the cost, along with hundreds of thousands of locals. And keep in mind, the Bush people actually DID have some folks who believed their own hype about Iraqi Freedom. Trump clearly just wants to treat an entire country as his personal property, and his underlings make the Bush team look as competent as the actual British Empire. And they didn’t last forever either.

The difference is that Iraq was hot, humid and infested with guerrillas but was a nice, open desert for our troops to operate in. Venezuela is hot, humid, infested with guerrillas and a country consisting mostly of deep jungle with a coastline.

Can anybody say “Vietnam”, boys and girls?

Not like Trump would have any experience with that place.

The real disturbing aspect of this invasion is not that this is somehow a break with precedent. Of all Trump’s aggressions, invading a Latin American country is one of the more typical examples of American foreign policy. This is NOT a new action in American history. Remember when we invaded Panama and captured Noriega, just cause we could? When Reagan invaded Grenada in the Caribbean and overthrew its President, just cause he could?

No, nobody remembers. Because nobody reads history. This country can’t even learn from its own Goddamn history. That’s why Trump loves the poorly educated. Who else would elect him?

To paraphrase again from Ayn Rand, what this country needs to do is not preserve the Constitution, but to discover it, because we haven’t been running things according to the Constitution for quite some time. And if the first year of Trump II: Electric Boogaloo didn’t make it clear that that approach to government is reaching an unsustainable point, his Vietnam II is going to make it that much more clear. But since it’s also becoming clear that the Congress and the media won’t treat this as anything more than another Surprising Plot Twist episode of The Trump Show, this country may have to completely destroy itself in order for us to start fresh. It’s starting to look like a better and better idea. Maybe if we didn’t call ourselves “The United States of America” we’d quit assuming we had a legacy right to invade people in this hemisphere.

Of course that raises the question of what we call ourselves. America is taken. Columbia is taken. I don’t think most of us would appreciate being called California and All These Other Guys.

Personally, I’m partial to “Freedonia.”

Over Christmas Week, God’s Chosen Servant Donald Trump claimed his junior sibling’s title of Prince of Peace, by bombing Islamic militia camps in Nigeria, allegedly because of their strikes against the Christian majority. Raising the question of why Trump won’t authorize strikes against Russia when they have been bombing Ukrainian Christians for years. This happened on Christmas Day, after Trump and Melania participated in NORAD’s Santa Christmas watch, with Trump saying inappropriate things like claiming to win Pennsylvania in 2020, saying “We want to make sure that Santa is being good – we want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.” (He does live around Canada, after all) and then telling one eight-year old girl that she sounded “cute” and “beautiful.”

Speaking of which: Among Viceroy Trump’s many, many Truf Senchal posts over the holiday, he excreted a hysterical defense of his position regarding the Epstein Files ™. I do not care to go over this in full, I am just going to link https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115782891296626533 and invite you to read this as I do, as if Trump’s posts are being voiced by Eric Cartman.

One reason our Invincible Sun seems so threatened is that the Trump Files are not looking any better for him. His Department of Justice (a name that it was given before Orwell) released another huge document dump on Christmas Eve, which as Beltway insiders will tell you is standard procedure for presidents of both parties, hoping nobody will pay attention to the news over the holiday or the weekend. But some of this stuff is really bad, even by his standards. There’s one statement from a prosecutor saying Trump “traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a [Ghislaine] Maxwell case”, there is a document supposedly sent by Jeffrey Epstein before his death to fellow prison pedo Larry Nassar as a good-bye greeting saying he has taken the “short route” out. And there is a document listed as file EFTA00025010 where an alleged victim of the trafficking ring, who was thirteen at the time, said she got pregnant, and the conspirators, including Trump, murdered the baby and dumped it in Lake Michigan from his yacht in 1984.

And because apparently there’s nothing else we can do – like, IMPEACH THE MOTHERFUCKER, ALREADY – people are just speculating. Like, supposedly the Nassar letter is fake because it wasn’t stamped in New York (never mind that letters in the federal prison system don’t always have the same origin as the sender). Because the details are so sketchy, and the details are pushing the envelope, some commenters seem to think that the DOJ is deliberately fronting the most horrific and sensational material in order to discredit any accusation against Trump. It’s what Steve Bannon would call “flood the zone with shit” and Vlad Vexler would say is creating a false narrative not in terms of believing the government’s truth, but in terms of believing there is no truth.

I posit that if that is the case, then this maneuver is not the flex that they think it is, because posting the most appalling stories about rump in the hopes that people will be numb to them only belies the point that these stories are not surprising because we have already seen enough examples of his personal evil and corruption to believe he could do such shit, whether these particular cases can be proven or not. Remember, everything against Trump is fake news. Until it isn’t. Russia Russia Russia was fake news, until we found that “perfect phone call” where Trump tried to force the Ukrainian president to create dirt on Joe Biden to get an arms deal from us against Russia. The intimidation campaign against Republicans after November 2020 was fake news, until the Georgia Secretary of State released his recording of Trump’s phone call to him. Trump’s pictorial birthday letter to Epstein was fake news. Until the Wall Street Journal produced their evidence.

And at that point it just comes down to two questions: What is going to be enough for the Church of Trump to quit supporting him? And, what is it going to take for the disaffected majority to say that this cannot stand?

See, Trumpniks, this is why the rest of us think you’re idiots. Not because you oppose abortion, or oppose aid to Ukraine. Those are actual political positions, and you used to have intellectuals who could make serious arguments for them. Not anymore. Now all you care about is Trump. You agree with everything your God-Emperor says, even if he changed his mind three times today. And the joke is that you’ve built your entire philosophy around a mortal man who is that much more perishable than the rest of us. Pretty soon he’s going to need more life support technology than the “real” God-Emperor of Warhammer 40K, and if he dies it will do more to wreck your universe than it would the Imperium.

Seriously, Trumpniks, what will you do when he’s gone? Are you seriously going to tell me you would storm the Capitol in the name of JD Vance and his Liz Taylor eyelashes?

You have nothing else but Trump. You ARE nothing else but Trump. And the laugh here is that “his” positions aren’t really his. Cutting off aid to Ukraine is only acting in service to your Master’s Master, while abortion only became an issue for the non-Catholic contingent as a dodge from supporting institutional racism, and this was one of the areas where the Captain of the Princess adapted to your team and not the other way around.

Everybody knew how much Trump fucked up the first time, and they knew he was gonna fuck it up again, that much worse. He actually announced it, with his tariff policies, and with hiring on Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Nobody cared. They were tired of watching boring Democratic professionals fuck things up in boring professional ways. They wanted to watch their favorite celebrity fuck things up in hysterical and unpredictable ways. (The joke here being that however much the Right accurately snipes at empty-headed Hollywood liberals who think their stardom validates their opinion, they decided to worship a fake TV billionaire who embodied their sense of ‘real’ America, created for them, as Trump would say, straight out of Central Casting.)

People just wanted to keep watching the Trump Show. They didn’t want their favorite celebrity to serve his well-deserved sentence. The fact that this required putting him back in charge of our foreign policy, economic policy and nuclear weapons was just incidental.

The issue is that way too many Americans do not know, or do not care to know, the difference between reality and entertainment, which means that not only does morality not even enter the picture, neither do the consequences of their own actions.

I actually can’t put this any better than Jermaine Fowler could, so I’m just going to link his post:

https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-celebrity

What it comes down to is that we are in this situation because a critical mass of non-critical thinkers in this country decided they wanted their favorite reality TV game-show host/wrestling heel/pedophile to become an omnipotent and unaccountable GOD.

Verily, can we doubt that Our Divine Sovereign is a wise counselor, wonder worker and font of miracles? Just consider, in the summer of 2024, perhaps coincidentally the weekend before the Republican National Convention, Our President was holding an outdoor speech and got shot across the ear, ducked and came back up with blood streaking across his face from the ear. And yet, the very next day, he was spotted at his usual golfing spot with no bandages. And while he did have one at the Convention, not long after he was revealed to have completely healed, even though most physicians will tell you that a body can’t regenerate ear cartilage after it’s been damaged.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE HE WAS NEVER SHOT AT ALL!!!!

Such is the power of mindless celebrity worship that it elevated the most pathetic unqualified lowlife to the world-historical figure of our age, the Colossus who strides the earth. Or at least, spreads his ass across two seats in an airplane.

And yet, Our Lord’s lizard-like powers of cartilage regeneration apparently don’t extend to his hands, as he was recently sighted with concealer on his left hand after having bruises and bandages on his right hand for months. Allegedly this tracks with the fact that an Alzheimer’s treatment drug called Leqembi is administered through injections in the hand and may cause drowsiness, and also requires frequent monitoring with MRIs. This decline may be why Trump is becoming that much more grandiose, rattling off ever more expansive plans for a “Golden Fleet” and a Versailles-like palace where the East Wing used to be, and assuming the Kennedy Center for himself. It’s what you do with Grandpa to keep him occupied, let him go to the office and act like he’s doing his job so that he’ll still have a daily routine and not get any worse. Not like the real architects of Project 2025 wanted Trump as anything more than a figurehead, but soon they might not even have that. And as the agenda gets further and further away from crowd-pleasing and more and more towards Trump’s vanity and the architects’ sinister designs, the support base may flake away, as we have seen in the off-year elections.

So this is my New Year’s Resolution, if it’s actually possible to keep: Talk less about Trump. Stop focusing everything on that decaying bag of pig manure. He is a known factor, and probably not long for this world. (But maybe he is. As I say, God is real, and He hates us all.) This is not to say I will not talk about politics. On the contrary, it is all the more important, because as the midterm election season arrives, we need to talk about what happens after Trump, given how many people did not vote for Harris because they were sick of the Democrat establishment, and the fact that Trump really has destroyed the entire premise of American government, the idea that there is a professional class of people, including politicians, that place patriotism and the public good above fealty to their Mob boss. That is gone, even if a Democrat is elected president. We all know how much the Church of Trump hated the Biden Administration when it did follow the law, imagine how they will react if the next president follows their role model’s example. And after all, what could stop him?

That’s what we need to face, sooner rather than later, because Trump’s demise is more in sight than ever.

But for now, let us all celebrate the best thing about Trump’s first year in office:

It ended.

Of all the disgusting and offensive things Viceroy Of Russian North America Donald Trump has done, while exceeding the threshold of disgusting every waking hour, the one that attracted the most social media attention was early last week when he was on Air Force One and a reporter, Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News, asked him what Jeffrey Epstein meant when he said Trump knew about “the girls”. Trump just said, “I know nothing about that”, and when she asked if there was anything incriminating in the Epstein Files, he put a finger right in her face and said, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

First off, let’s get the obvious out of the way: In Trumpworld, every accusation is either a confession or a projection.

Secondly, that woman is on no level as overweight as Trump.

This was the same week that he hosted the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, at the White House. Which one does for an acting head of state. But Bin Salman is usually referred to by his initials, MBS, which also stand for “Mr. Bone Saw.” Because a Saudi dissident reporter, Jamal Khashoggi, went to the Turkish consulate for Saudi Arabia in October 2018 – during the first Trump Administration – and was killed there, after which according to intelligence reports the murderers, some of whom worked on MBS’ personal detail, dismembered Khashoggi’s body. Saudi Arabia of course was also the homeland of the 9-11 terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center. So when Trump had him in the White House, an ABC reporter pointed out to MBS that a lot of 9-11 survivors were angry at this visit, and Trump stepped in, first to badmouth ABC, and then in reference to Khashoggi, “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it … You don’t have to embarrass our guest, asking a question like this.”

Of course Trump was going to take MBS’ side on this. His comments were a direct message to all the professionals in the room: If I could, I’d do that to any one of you. I mean, it makes sense that Trump would emulate an Arab oil prince. More money than God, you get to grow out your beard and wear a bathrobe in public, and you probably have 14-year old Filipino girls serving your every whim on pain of death. Of course you can’t eat pork in a Muslim country, but rules never apply to Donald Trump.

It’s of a piece with Trump’s lackey Steve Witkoff forwarding a 28-point “peace” plan for Russia and Ukraine that requires Ukraine to disarm and bans it joining NATO while at the same time forcing no concessions on Russia whatsoever. The authorship of the “American” plan was put in question given that much of the text uses idioms that are more common to Russian than American English. But the fact that this is presented as a State Department plan only confirms that Trump shares, or wants to emulate, Vladimir Putin’s approach to the world, in two respects: The idea that Russia, as a bigger, stronger nation, has every right to take little pieces out of a smaller, weaker nation at its leisure, which is not true, and that if Ukraine continues to resist, Russia will crush them, which is also not true, because Putin couldn’t do it three years ago when Russia had a fresh military with a million-odd less casualties.

And of course the more legally serious manner was where Democratic legislators with military/intelligence experience, including Senator Mark Kelly (D.-Arizona) and Senator Elissa Slotkin (D.-Michigan) made a media post addressing the military saying that they should not obey illegal orders from the government. Trump responded to this by twitting that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR” that should be punished by “death!”

And sure enough Slotkin, for one, started getting bomb threats at her house. Of course everyone in the Trump Party was quick to take their Lord and Savior’s side when the same people were screaming that if we showed the least disrespect to the memory of the slain Charlie Kirk, every Republican was fair game for any trans person with a gun. But Trump is a simple man operating on the simple logic of a personalist dictator: Anything I do is legal, since I own the government. L’etat, c’est moi. If Donnie could speak French.

I am quite serious when I say that I can think of no more loathsome humanoid in world history.

I mean, even Hitler liked dogs.

You might say, Hey, didn’t Hitler kill millions of people? Well, we haven’t given Trump a chance to commit real genocide! That stuff with the fishing boats and the detainees in custody, that was just testing things out! We have to trust in the PLAN! Remember, Hitler didn’t have nukes. What, you don’t think Trump would use nukes on Venezuela just to stay out of prison? Look at what he’s done so far! You KNOW what they do to pedos in prison!

Yet for all the things that our magical emissary from God is able to do in defiance of our laws and traditions, he is not yet omnipotent and it looks like his near omnipotence is starting to go the way of his actual potence.

Of course, this month Trump had to sign the discharge petition on the Epstein Files. (‘What’s that illegible scribble under his autograph?’ ‘It’s Russian for ‘I sign under duress.’) How that happened is pretty amusing in itself. First off, it almost justified the Senate Democrats’ cave on the government shutdown because it took away House Speaker Mike Johnson’s pretext to hold up the business of Congress. Johnson, who is the answer to the question ‘What if Waylon Smithers were a live-action character?’ agreed to allow the vote on the assumption that the provisions of the bill allowed the Republicans in the Senate to attach all kinds of conditions to delay it even further. Instead Senate Majority Leader John Thune made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass the thing under unanimous consent. Never let it be said that Schumer is good for nothing. But I think this was also Thune signaling that he’s just as sick of Johnson as he is of Trump.

And while Trump’s threat against “SEDITIOUS” heretics in Congress was clearly intended to incite stochastic terrorism (since after all he was not legally liable for inciting a riot on January 6), that requires having an army of brain-dead followers willing to commit violence in your name. And their loyalty is no longer assured. This was made clear when his primary brain-dead follower, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, made a big announcement Friday that she is leaving Congress on January 5 (staying in just long enough to be eligible for the Congressional pension). This also means that at least in the short term, Republicans have one less seat in the House, which may be another middle finger to both Trump and Johnson.

This resignation may also have implications for the long-term. Mainly, that Greene isn’t quite as brain-dead as she acts. She has even gone to the media to publicly apologize for many of the intemperate things she has said as a zealot in the Church of Trump. Why? Supposedly the Epstein Files. Again, it comes down to the point that there are only two kinds of Americans: Trumpniks, and people who live in reality. And the only thing they can agree on is: “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” People like Greene have indulged in the sick conspiracy fantasy that a cabal of Jews are sexually trafficking good Aryan girls, and it turns out not only are they right in Epstein’s case, but the hero they thought was going to put a stop to all that is at the heart of the whole thing – if not a participant himself, definitely willing to use his power to protect people who were part of the conspiracy, namely Ghislaine Maxwell.

But it goes beyond that. Greene also said after Congress passed the One Big Bullshit Bill that she only realized after the fact that cutting Obamacare would make insurance prices go up for her own family members. In this she is pretty represenative for everybody who voted for Trump when the rest of us were telling them that’s like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. In the long term though, this really started when Greene overestimated her ambitions and asked Trump and others in the Inner Party about running for US Senate. Most Georgia Republicans know that running in a safely gerrymandered district is not the same as a statewide race, and shot her down. Trump, who at his best has better political instincts than most experts, agreed. And Greene’s been taking little steps away from the plantation ever since.

But the biggest point of Greene’s resignation speech was: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”

First, that’s an acknowledgement that Republicans will likely lose the midterms. Secondly, that in her otherwise safe, “sweet” district there would be a contentious primary that would require Republicans to raise millions of dollars they need to spend elsewhere. And while she would likely win that election, as Paul Ryan likely would have won re-election in 2018, it wasn’t worth it. Because a Democratic majority will almost certainly impeach Trump. Why? Maybe destroying the East Wing without permission. Maybe if he starts the You Know What They Do To Pedos War. Maybe because his Mama shoulda got an abortion and saved the entire planet cosmic levels of grief.

And Greene would be expected to defend Trump after he repaid all her loyalty with spite and threats, because she couldn’t tell him two plus two make five.

Greene, like Trump, has been a moron for public consumption, because that’s what it takes to appeal to a voter base of morons. But unlike Trump, she doesn’t seem to have gotten high on her own supply of stupidity. And she, like the rest of the cult, went along with the stupidity because it was profitable for her. In her case, literally. What all this says, after everything else, is that it’s not going to be profitable for much longer, and she’s jumping ship.

Again, Trump only seems invincible because he has a mob of mouth breathers willing to shed blood in the name of Our Lord. But when most of them are about to have their insurance premiums skyrocket and a roll of ground beef is passing seven dollars, while they see Trump living high on the hog with Elon Musk and the other elites, some of them might start to look around and think “Hey… mebbe he lied to me.” Now, these are the people who think that their Nickelback albums should come with a five-cent rebate, so basic deduction may be beyond them. But if Margie can learn, so can they. Trump should hope not. In the future, probably sooner than any of us think, our Dread Sovereign might make some all-caps imperial proclamation that he expects his followers to enforce, and the response might be:
“Quiet, Piggy.”