Month: May 2025

“Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think, or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”– Malcolm X

This is another Trump rant. But not entirely. Over a week ago former FBI director James Comey posted to social media a pattern of seashells on the beach that he supposedly just found, and the seashells were arranged to read “86 47.” Well, apparently Our Lord and Savior and incidental president thought this was a call to assassinate him (because ’86’ means ‘get rid of’ and Trump’s non-consecutive term makes him the 47^th President), as did all of his courtiers on social media, leading to Comey getting called in for questioning by the Secret Service. He actually got on the Stephen Colbert show to talk about this.

And of course lots of people on social media who are not Trump worshipers got on to say, no that’s not what “86” means, the common use of the term is when restaurant crews have to cancel an order so they “86” it.

Yes, but I remember another origin of the term. There was this one Gore Vidal play that was made into a movie starring Jerry Lewis. The movie was called Visitor To A Small Planet. In the movie, Lewis played a space alien with seemingly magic powers, sorta like with Mork & Mindy or My Favorite Martian. And one of these powers was to make a gesture and fire an invisible energy beam. Setting “86” was disintegration.

Maybe that’s why Trump thinks Comey wants to kill him. I mean, if nothing else, Trump’s voice sounds a lot like Jerry Lewis, so he was probably using those movies as speech coaching.

Not that it changes the fact that a year ago, Republicans had no problem with selling “86 46” shirts on Amazon, so apparently they’re all assuming we have the same Oceania-has-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia mindset that they do.

But that’s not really the subject I want to talk about here. A day or so afterward, Canadian author James Fell, whom I really like, posted on his Facebook page: “Fuck, from the bottom of my heart, James fucking Comey. He posted 8647 on insta(gram). Guess what, fuckface? You don’t get to do that. You’re the reason we’re in this fucking mess. Your stupid email investigation days before the 2016 election almost certainly threw it towards Eric’s dad. Danger Yam is your fault. You can fuck right out of the solar system. Be sure to say hi to Uranus on your way into deep fucking space. Asshole.”

You can see why I like him. But would you rather have somebody like Comey repent of his work for Trump or do you want all the Trumpniks to be like Bill Barr, who said he would still vote for Combover Caligula in 2024 even knowing what he knew about him and even after he’d been repeatedly insulted by Trump? And I said that. I asked Fell, “Would you rather Comey be another Trumpnik who keeps sucking up to the God Emperor no matter how much he abuses him?” He responded, “I’d rather he shut up and got cancer.” Another guy said “James Gillen I’d rather Comey and his ilk not act innocent, like they didn’t create this whole problem to begin with. You know, maybe the members of the ‘personal responsibility’ party should start with a sincere apology and take, you know ‘personal responsibility’. Joe Walsh is another one.”

Make no mistake, I blame, and have blamed, James Comey for the 2016 election (and by extension the continued reign of Our Lord Donald Trump in the present) more than I blame the Russians or even Hillary Clinton’s own incompetence. And I think that anybody who continues to support Trump, knowing what they know, ought to be taken out and walked through the streets with their heads shaved, like the Frenchwomen who “fraternized” with German occupation troops.

And that goes double for courtier journalists who want to sell tell-all books about the Biden White House and how everyone was covering for Joe Biden’s age-related issues, when the same people already hounded him out of his campaign and out of the White House, yet refuse to raise similar alarms about Trump’s much more obvious signs of clinical dementia.

So what is the difference between rejecting everyone who has ever served Trump and rejecting those who did serve Trump and now publicly regret it? The difference is that they’ve changed. They have changed their allegiance and endorsed Democratic candidates and declared so publicly. Guys like Joe Walsh and Adam Kinzinger. They have made apologies and taken responsibility. The key point is that they have to reach out to us. You do not reach out to them. The Trumpnik position is steeped in bad faith, and it requires the rest of us to buy into it. When you reach out to the other side, to “understand” them or “break bread”, you normalize an illegitimate position. You become Bill Maher. But when one of those people actually understands us, and realizes where we are coming from, and weighs the benefits of staying in the cult versus the threats they will face if they reject it, and they reject it anyway, that needs to be acknowledged.

And as much as I want to say “fuck everybody who voted for Trump with a jackhammer”, they already did that to themselves when they voted for him. We’re all living in the same country. James Comey is living in the same country as the rest of us, and we need as many of him as we can get. Because at least up till this point, that’s how elections have worked. The person with the most votes wins. Even in terms of the Electoral College, in 2016 Trump needed to win that many people in just the right states to win enough Electors. Last year, he didn’t even need the Electoral College, because we didn’t get enough people voting for Kamala Harris. Which is the other part of the equation.

On Substack, the heterodox Jesse Singal had an essay about the various unkind things that were said about Joe Biden in the wake of his cancer diagnosis, not from the Trumpniks, but from the Left. Like, because Biden favored Obamacare instead of all-out socialized medicine, Taylor Lorenz said “Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piss.” Singal said: “But my broader point here is that anyone who has watched lefty online spaces in recent years knows that they have devolved into something really ugly, and likely repellent to the average normal person. If you are curious about leftism, you are very likely to get funneled into spaces that have a lot to say about, well, piss, but very little of substance to chew on.”

This matters because a lot of us have found ourselves in “lefty” spaces these days because nowadays the American definition of “lefty” is not believing that Donald Trump was sent directly by God to reign over us forever and ever and his holy touch can cure cancer and hemorrhoids.

And this matters because the only reason we’re in this mess is that Donald Trump was almost as unpopular with the American public as the Republican Party he leads, but in the actual election, neither were as unpopular as Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole. And a big part of that was due to the “rest in piss” leftists who didn’t vote for Biden’s party this time cause it wasn’t pure enough for them.

Given that the Trump Party has made itself that much more unpopular by their actions since January, anybody who doesn’t like them really needs to figure out how we’re going to get from Trumpworld to notTrumpworld. And that requires the majority of the country to agree on that goal even though we clearly see that we can’t agree on anything else. And while some of us might have been “radicalized” to where we now believe that paying for national health care is less expensive in the long run than not paying for it, and maybe billionaires don’t need a tax cut more than the other 99 percent of the population, that doesn’t mean we agree with the Left on everything, including the need to enforce purity tests or struggle sessions on the people who don’t agree with you on everything. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson in a slightly different context, you need a majority to win.

This week, after the mourning period for Pope Francis in the Vatican, the College of Cardinals gathered for the task of electing his successor. A media favorite was Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who is Latin head of the Church in Jerusalem, which is a pretty important posting these days. Plus: There’s the name. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that he would be elected, and even if he was, it has been the case since after the fall of the Roman Empire in Italy that the Pope takes a “regnal name” other than the one he was born with, so it’s doubtful we would get a Pope Pizzaballa, however much we would want to.

In any case, Thursday May 8, the conclave elected Robert Francis Prevost, an American cardinal (although he spent much of his ministry in Peru and speaks Spanish) who took the name Leo XIV. The good news is that having the first American Pope probably means that Vatican City is no longer subject to Trump tariffs.

Which raises the question of Donald Trump as Pope. I’m sure that if he were appointed, he would simply take his own name, in honor of the patron saint of all Seven Deadly Sins, along with hypocrisy, self-pity and willful ignorance.

Around May 2, just days after falling asleep at the Pope’s funeral in Rome, Trump posted an AI picture of himself on his wannabe Twitter site, and apparently this was after reporters asked him earlier in the week whom he would support as Francis’ replacement, and he said “I’d like to be pope, that would be my number one choice.” And because the Church of Trump is more fanatically loyal than the Catholic Church laity at this point, Senator Lindsey Graham (BR.-South Carolina) said we should “keep an open mind” about the idea.

Of course, when Trump was pressed on the issue later by reporters, His Assholiness dodged. “You mean they can’t take a joke? You don’t mean the Catholics, you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it,” he said. And on another round of questioning, he said, “Somebody made up a picture of me dressed up as the Pope and put it on the Internet. Maybe it was AI. I just saw it last evening. My wife thought it was cute.”

MAYBE the picture showing Trump dressed as the Pope was AI. Maybe he dressed up in the papal attire deliberately and posed for the camera and just totally forgot. After all, he IS senile.

Which gets to two points. One, this is yet another case of Trump being Schrodinger’s Comedian, creating a quantum state of uncertainty between seriously posing a truly stupid and awful idea and demanding that it be taken as a joke when the rest of the world does take it seriously and roundly rejects it.

But more troubling, it’s one of many, and more frequent, instances where Trump is called to account for something he did and says it wasn’t his idea or he had no knowledge of it. Like when Kristen Welker of NBC asked him if he thought it was his job to uphold the Constitution, and he said, “I don’t know” and said his policy was based on what his lawyers told him. Now, part of this may be what he learned from role models like John Gotti and Vladmir Putin in always attempting to avoid legal liability, but given his many, many MANY other on-camera examples of non-sentience, such as not knowing what a stroller is, it just cements the impression that the government is the way it is now because Trump is a doddering old pudding brain and such work that actually gets done is executed by even crazier people whose ideas Trump just signs off on.

And there are many other stupid and offensive things that Trump did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

But it is frankly tiresome to keep going over all the ways in which Trump and his ‘administration’ are being stupid, offensive, and offensively stupid. Going over Trump being offensively stupid is like going over the fact that the Earth revolved around the Sun again. The question is whether anything that happens makes a difference with the people who elect our politicians, and so far the answer is: Not yet, and maybe not ever.

Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute (taken before March 20) says that 92 percent of those who voted for Trump are still satisfied with their vote. In April 14, a University of Amherst poll showed only 2 percent of Trump voters regret their vote. And Pew Research Center reported in a poll that while Trump retains a slightly positive approval rating (51 percent) with white Catholics and non-Evangelicals, white Evangelicals give him an approval of 72 percent. Not all Trump voters, especially in 2024, are hardcore Christianists, but many of the people who actually make policy are, such as Russell Vought, a veteran of the first ‘administration’ and currently director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought has described himself as a Christian nationalist and was quoted as saying his position is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society. In this regard he seeks to correct a government that he sees as “post-constitutional” due to its long domination by the liberal-left. Other right-wing influencers who are Catholic call themselves integralists, seeking to create a civil law based on Catholic dogma, as it was in Ireland before they realized that that wasn’t working out.

For some reason, I have been seeing more and more of a quote from the Book of Job, Chapter 13, verse 15: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.” Now, reading over the Book of Job, and all the tribulations Job goes through, the main thing I notice is that Satan put God up to it. But the denouement is that God appears and simply tells Job that it is not his place to question: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” The point of the book is not to question God’s destruction of mortal life and happiness, but to have faith in his actions: “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”

It is hardly a coincidence that Trump’s rise is supported by an Evangelical religion whose approach to faith has always been anti-humanist and anti-rational. As opposed to Catholicism or mainline Protestant churches, a belief in biblical inerrancy means that the Bible is taken literally and therefore the faithful should still believe in miracles. These people have always thought of the ultimate authority as a mercurial tyrant who dispenses favor and wrath in equal measure and eradicates all who will not serve him, and it just so happens they’ve got one of those guys right now. Their religion teaches them that we are made to suffer and obey, and they expect to live in hardship, unlike the rest of us, who believe in capitalism, abundance, and America. Which is why the American way of life is what Trump needs to undermine in order to stay in power.

And while Christianity, unlike Judaism or Islam, tells us to believe in a God who is an individual personality rather than a bodiless abstraction, Jesus in Heaven is still too much of an abstraction for these people. They would rather worship a God in the flesh. And Donald Trump has a lot of that.

And I’ve also been thinking a lot about something I said when I first started this page, because it has never been more true than now: “When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”


Blind faith and spite. An unbeatable combination.

So, really, if you control an apocalyptic religion that in turn controls the richest and most powerful country on Earth (for now), why would you need to be Pope? Getting back to that subject, I’m sure there are plenty of technical reasons why the College of Cardinals wouldn’t have accepted Trump as a candidate. Like, the whole not being Catholic thing. But it really comes down to the point that the College of Cardinals is that much more of an old-boys’ network than the US Senate, and unlike the Senate they aren’t going to bow down to some parvenu celebrity, especially not because commoners voted for him. I’m sure their collective reaction to the idea was like, “Please. We may be corrupt hierophants who live like princes and enable child abuse in our parishes, but we DO have standards.”

Everybody’s worried about the future

Don’t take that vaccine, man

They’ll turn you into a computer

Well out here in your local jungle, ain’t nobody vaccinated

We spend our time throwin’ shit at each other

And hangin’ out masturbatin’

• Viagra Boys, Return to Monke

Thursday was May 1, which most of the world celebrates as International Workers’ Day. In America workers’ day is Labor Day in September. Which was specifically invented to avoid any association with May Day. Because while May Day is more a left-wing or European socialist thing, it was actually marked to commemorate the May 1 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago in which labor protestors were killed by police.

It is testimony to how much of a phobia this country has towards the Left that we hardly know anything about our own history. But some of that phobia is justified. Based on the example of Leninist countries, Americans think of “socialism” as a system where the government is run by one party, and that one party is controlled by one man, and that one man can tell businesses what they can trade, can tell teachers and libraries what they can teach, can tell newspapers what to print, can tell you who you can marry and whether you get to live or die.

And the irony of so many leftists going out on May Day 2025 to protest the Trump regime is not just that they are protesting a man whose policies are everything non-socialist Americans have been taught to hate, it’s that he has the “right-wing capitalist” party backing him up because of those very policies.

And as for those liberals who cry that Trump is trying to destroy everything FDR was trying to do, FDR is half of the reason we’re in this fix. To be sure, Franklin D. Roosevelt is the real Founding Father of the modern United States pre-Trump. And it is his model of social democracy and redistribution that Trump is ultimately trying to destroy. But to get the powers he needed to remake the government, Roosevelt did more than anybody before him (or before Trump) to turn the federal government into one where Congress follows the President’s agenda, and not the other way around.

Nevertheless, if “small government” Republicans actually cared about that fact, they would be doing more to restore Congress’ powers under Article I of the Constitution, as opposed to only caring about them when a Democrat is in charge and giving the President that much more unaccountable power when he’s their guy. Which of course bites them when a Democrat gets back in charge. Which is why it seems like their project for the next two years is to make sure a Democrat can never win an election again.

All of which helps to explain the current situation. Ultimately, there are two reasons for Republican servitude, which are equally prominent:
One, they live in fear of the literal Mob that Trump commands, a mob that would take any legal and constitutional effort against Trump as “the Deep State” trying to overthrow their favorite reality TV star and incidental president;

Two, the Republicans who are not themselves part of that Mob might be more intelligent than Donald Trump but are no less evil, and they see Trump as their vehicle for absolute power, which they would not have without his magic mind control skill for selling total bullshit.

If you don’t believe me, consider the stuff that the Republican Congress has come up with in 2025 on its own initiative.

The House passed the SAVE Act, ostensibly to curb illegal voting by noncitizens, but does so by requiring any voter to produce their original birth certificate, which most of us don’t have, and such information would not apply to any woman who married and took her husband’s name. Trump had signed an executive order to similar effect, but it can be challenged in state court. This is an action by Congress to change the election rules on a federal level. Apparently this is being blocked in the Senate by Democratic quorum to filibuster, which was uncertain given that four Democrats in the House actually voted for this.

On the other hand, for the same reason Senate Republicans would not approve the bill from Rand Paul (R.-Kentucky) to end Trump’s emergency declaration justifying his global tariffs.

The House Judiciary Committee sent approval on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” for the coming budget, but Politico reports the committee added a new wrinkle: Their version of the bill would hand Trump more power than he’s (a) already been handed and (b) taken without asking. The new version takes the power to write major regulations from agencies and gives it to Congress — and hands Trump what Politico calls “sweeping powers to erase existing federal regulations from the books.” (Hat tip: The Fucking News. )

So the point is that even left to their own devices, Republicans are not just refusing to assert the Article I powers of Congress, they are using them to give the current president more authority than he even asked for.

And that is because, despite their name, they do not believe in preserving a republic, unless the government is a banana republic.

When Americans say, “we have no kings”, well, Canada technically is still under the King’s Governor-General, and they just rejected a Trump wannabe in their federal election, so they’re doing a better job with this democracy thing than we are. Republicans might call themselves “conservative” or the current catch-phrase “post-liberal”, but what they are is pre-liberal; they don’t want to restore the monarchy of King George III, they want their Leader to have more powers than the British monarch could have after signing the Magna Carta. And they want this because they have the culture-war goals that they directly stated in Project 2025 and they need to undermine democracy so that the government only represents the people who are on board with that agenda.

The movers and shakers of the post-Tea Party Republicans again might be smarter and more in touch with reality than Trump, but only in that they aren’t perpetually spoiled, congenitally stupid and progressively senile. They are that much more motivated to ideological goals that the public will not support, as opposed to Trump, who doesn’t care about ideology and can occasionally do the popular thing for the sake of expediency. What replaces Trump in the Republican Party is not going to be an improvement on the first 100 days. It’s going to be worse.

But just as Democrats coasted on the mass appeal of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while each president lost Congressional representation for his party, Republicans rely heavily on the president to get success for their party. Because that’s what works.
Why? Because you take Trump away and the Republican pre-liberal agenda isn’t that popular outside states where their party is guaranteed to win. Since the Civil War, the president’s party has lost ground in the House in 38 of 41 midterms, with the only exceptions coming in 1934, 1998, and 2002. In the first Trump midterm, 2018, Republicans lost 40 House seats. (In 2010 under Obama, Democrats lost 63 seats.) Even in 2024, voters affirmed state initiatives to guarantee abortion rights against the Republican platform. In 2024, Democrats won Senate seats in states Trump carried because Trump voters either split the ticket or simply didn’t vote for other Republican candidates. With Trump, that much more than Democrat presidents, elections are a referendum on his popularity, and if he’s not on the ballot, nobody cares about his Party.

Republicans can’t sell their goals as good in themselves. These goals don’t even appeal to most working-class folks because they’re just as tied to ideology as the old free-marketeer politics. Their premises are based on a small number of people with minority views that would not succeed on a national consensus, but they need a national consensus to get power. So they need to go outside ideology and ideas, since most voters don’t have ideology and ideas. They need to go on the basis of appeal, which they don’t have. They need somebody who isn’t tied to a philosophy, because he doesn’t have one. Someone who is just as uncommitted and distrustful of “the system” as the average voter.

In short, Republicans need Trump, who can convince everybody from Joe Rogan to Richard Hanania that he’s somehow outside the system and thus a better choice to improve things than a default Republican, let alone a default Democrat.

In any case, they have a problem. Trump is now older than Joe Biden was when he was first inaugurated and there is a non-zero chance that he will die of old age before 2028, making any talk of an unconstitutional third term moot. At which point there are four possibilities: The least likely is that Trump will resurrect after three days and prove himself to be the returned Messiah. Somewhat more likely, he could die normally and then spend the rest of the 21^st Century as a zombie while he ties up his case in litigation with God. More likely than that, Trump’s ‘administration’ could pull a Weekend at Bernie’s routine using AI fakes for non-live events and animatronics on his corpse for interviews and fundraisers. If the AI spews out word salad and the body smells like rot and perfume, few will notice the difference.

The fourth and most logical possibility is that JD Vance takes on his constitutional role and succeeds Trump. And at that point Republicans would have to hope that the American public will be as charmed by his Liz Taylor eyelashes as Peter Thiel was. But it’s not looking like it. To review, JD Vance is a very good writer, and he is capable of articulating a social philosophy, which is more than Trump can do, but nobody cares about that. And Vance himself is so personally repellent that he destroyed our diplomatic overtures to nations ranging from Ukraine to Greenland. And so the Republicans will once again be confronted with their dilemma. The Party without Trump is actually more evil and destructive but it also wouldn’t be able to sell the agenda.

If you wonder why Republicans goose-stepped back in line after January 6 2021, when Trump sent a mob of goons to break into the Capitol and kill them, this is why.

And if Trump dies tomorrow, you have Vance. And if anything happens to Vance, his successor in the system is House Speaker Mike Johnson. Who would probably be worse than either of them. Next in succession would be Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) who has a brain but is just as ideological as the rest of them, plus, he’s old enough that Noah owes him money. With the exception of Robert Kennedy Jr. (technically not a Republican but very much a MAGAt) it’s Republicans all the way down.

Republicans couldn’t get elected without Trump, but since they have him, they can do whatever they want. Trump is so radical and incompetent that he’s accelerating the agenda too much, but he’s already been impeached twice, and he’s never going to be convicted in the Senate, because Republicans will always be there for him.

One without the other is doomed. Together they are invincible.

But one is an individual, not an institution. The latter will survive the former. And when the individual is gone, this country is going to have to come to a reckoning with the institution that served Trump, not just because many Republicans saw him as an aspirational role model, but because he was actually the most moderate and popular candidate that the Republican Party had.

Trump is the symptom.

They are the problem.