James Gillen

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Donald Trump must have thought he had it made.

His pet Congress passed his omnibus budget bill to help people in his income range at the expense of everyone else. His pet Supreme Court basically takes every judicial case against him and finds some way to say that the Constitution still exists, but it just doesn’t apply to him. He got a bureaucracy that used to help with disaster relief to create an internment camp for brown people in Florida, and call it “Alligator Alcatraz.”

For lo, Donald Trump is the One Supreme Godhead, in whom, by whom, and for whom all things are made.

He even has direct control of the Kennedy Center, for he is Music, and he writes the songs.

There was actually a pretty good article by centrist Damon Linker on the general trend towards autocracy. The gist of it is that there is a lot of stuff that’s already been in the system (like the 1807 Insurrection Act) that could be used to create a dictatorship but did not because presidents previously acted in good faith. But just as there was no clear line separating the Weimar Republic from Nazi Germany, any change to the system would most likely happen laterally through existing laws and precedents and not by a clean break towards autocracy.

The punch line is: “How will we know when we’ve gotten there? Perhaps only when we come to realize the extent to which our laws—and the Constitution—have already been reinterpreted to be compatible with formerly unthinkable acts.”

This country is going to have to take radical action to reform its government. That doesn’t mean nationalizing McDonald’s and turning it vegan. And it doesn’t mean writing legislation specifically against Jeff Bezos to punish him for being rich.

It does mean that if Congress does pass some bullshit statist law (like say, banning TikTok) and the Supreme Court agrees 9-0 that the ban stands, then the ban needs to be enforced as ordered, not postponed indefinitely because TikTok bribed Trump, Trump is our president, and in our country, we let the president do whatever he wants, the law be damned.

THAT level of monarchical corruption is bigger than anything the Republicans are doing with ICE. That at least was authorized by the One Big Bullshit Bill. But Trump defies both “his” Congress and “his” Supreme Court because we just let the president do whatever he wants.

But that needs to be changed, not least because all those Republicans who cheer and jeer for their Messiah aren’t going to feel so good when some other president who isn’t Trump (it might even be a Republican) tries to go in different directions and they think they need to stop him. Like Congress or the Supreme Court might raise an objection and then the new guy can just pull out Trump vs. United States and tell John Roberts “You see this thing you wrote here? Where’s my due deference, bitch?”

That’s the problem. The radical agenda to reshape this government doesn’t just assume that Republicans will get to run this country forever, it assumes that Trump will be president forever and he will never die and he will never age, even though everybody can see him getting slower, more tired and more confused every week. But the setup is basically built around Trump and his personalist Mob boss approach to the world, and once that’s gone, it’s not going to work the same way with someone else.

Especially since Trump’s signature accomplishment was an omnibus budget bill that took benefits away from constituents in primarily red states, which he could only pull off because everyone in the cult loves him so much, but then Elon Musk told us that Trump is in the Epstein Files, which apparently nobody knew before now!

That’s the goofy thing. When I mentioned Elon’s post a while ago, the public reaction to it seemed to be kinda muted. I mean, why not? I thought everybody already knew this. Didn’t the cult already know Trump was a convicted felon? Didn’t they elect him anyway? If they didn’t know about Jeffrey Epstein, they must be dumber than I thought. Shows me for underestimating them.

Of course the real issue is that it probably would have blown over if Trump could just play cool and keep his mouth shut. And you know how that always goes.

Like having FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who’d done so much to press for the release of the files before getting into government, suddenly turn around and say there was nothing to see and Epstein didn’t kill himself.

And then Pam Bondi’s Justice Department said there WERE no Epstein Files.

And when questioned about the whole thing at a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump lashed out at a reporter, asking why anybody would care.

And then, on July 12, Trump went on Truf Censhal and posted… THIS thing… https://x.com/BillyM2k/status/1944183426598257091

Wow. With a poker face like that, it’s no wonder Trump bankrupted six casinos.

Trump is the president of the United States. He and Pam Bondi have access to all the documents. He could release the Epstein Files at any time.

If he can’t, it’s because he’s IN them.

And even the paste-eaters in the Church of Trump are not yet so stupid as to where they can’t make basic deductions. They can still add two and two to make four. For Trump to survive, he has to convince them that two and two make five. That the Epstein Files that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did so much to demand, the files that the regime made a big deal about publicizing with White House ceremonies to hand out files to Trumpworld influencers, those files not only don’t exist and never existed, they were all made up by Hillary and Biden and Obama. And in this case it may be too much to ask, mainly because the whole premise of the Church of Trump is that their Lord and Savior is saving us all from the corruption of the Deep State, and all the evidence seems to indicate that he’s part of it.

Now, I personally am not going to believe things have changed until all the Trumpniks hate their Messiah as much as the rest of us do and they go out in the street and protest him like the rest of us do and come out in public and demand that he and his Mob be GONE.

And if it ever does get to that point, we’re gonna need to decide what to do with these people. Trump and all of his underlings who’ve done nothing but break the law under color of authority. Where are we gonna put them all when they’re awaiting trial?
Hey, isn’t there that new prison in Florida?

It may not seem like it now, but I still consider myself a right-winger.

Like, I actually agree with the Trump Party that we need to kill the Department of Education. After all, almost all the people who vote for Trump are products of American public education, so clearly it’s not doing any good.

And I believe that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right to bear arms and we need this because we can’t trust the government. Especially when it’s run by Republicans.

And I believe that our culture will be overrun if we don’t get a strict immigration policy. After all, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

So in principle I should be on board with what the Trump Party is trying to do in Washington. If I’m not, it’s because I’ve not only seen how Trump operates in practice, (for more than eight years counting his time as monarch-in-exile puppeteering the Congress) I’ve seen how “fiscal conservatives” actually did things in the years before Trump assimilated the Republican Party.

As part of his personalist agenda to fuse the identity of the American government with his own ego, cult leader and incidental president Donald Trump demanded that Republicans pass his “One Big Beautiful Bill” in time for him to sign it on July 4. As it turned out, it was all Republicans could do to pass it in the Senate despite having 53 votes. In the end it went to a 50-50 tie on July 1 that had to be broken by Vice President JD Vance. In the Constitution, breaking tie votes in the Senate is the only real job that the Vice President has, other than succeeding the president in the event that he dies, which I’m sure JD Vance is hoping for as eagerly as the rest of the planet.

Why was it so hard for Trump’s devout worshipers to pass this bill? Because a lot of it hurts their constituents. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska only voted for it after Republicans specifically created exemptions for food stamp cuts in her state, but she still accepted Medicaid cuts in the final package. Many of those cuts would endanger funding for hospitals in rural communities with little medical service.

Yet despite all of the slashing to services the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit by billions, because it makes permanent the Trump tax cuts from his first term, which otherwise would have expired this year, while further increasing tax cuts for the upper percentile while eliminating tax breaks for the working poor and even upper middle class. And it further increases the deficit with billions in increases for the Pentagon and ICE.

All of this is supposedly based on the dogma that lower taxes will actually lead to greater capital generation and thus more money for the government, but what we are seeing already from Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo is a contraction. The Commerce Department reported last Thursday that the country’s gross domestic product declined by 0.5 percent in the first quarter, above the projected figure of a 0.2% decrease. Consumer spending growth was only 0.5 percent, down from a full 4 percent increase in the last quarter of 2024.

Capitalism works because we think we’re all going to get something out of it, and government policy under the Trump regime is to have a government that spends all of its money on catering to the donor class (including Trump and his inner circle) while increasing funding for the security state that Trump needs to deal with protests against the fact that capitalism is no longer working for everybody. And meanwhile as revenue increases for the upper percentile, the workers and middle class that the economy actually depends on will have less money overall (especially as they have to spend more on health care) and that will lead to a loss of consumer spending and investments, which will hurt that managerial class in the long run.

Mike Brock, quoted from CW Daily on June 30, said: “We are witnessing a capitalist class so drunk on its power that it has become incapable of recognizing its interests…so contemptuous of the institutions that created their wealth that they are destroying the conditions that make capitalism possible.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is actually one of the smartest commentators I’ve seen lately, had words to say about this in his July 1 Substack, basically on the subject of whether intelligence means making a lot of money. Quote: “There’s no intelligence in gathering great wealth if it means long-term destruction of the community. If you make money manufacturing an item that pollutes the local water table and causes cancer among local residents, that may be “smart” in the short term because you can take the money and live elsewhere. But you’ve also created a precedent for others to do the same until you’ve perpetuated climate change that makes water scarce, produces fewer crops, and creates greater poverty. The country is weaker for your children and their children. Even generational wealth has its limitations if the country is weak. That shows a lack of foresight which proves a deficit of intelligence. Of course, those living in mansions, sailing on yachts, and vacationing on the Riviera don’t see it that way. Which proves the point. They lack the intelligence to see the bigger picture which is the catastrophic effects of their myopia.”

But maybe an example will demonstrate what all of this means for anybody who relies on government services.

I work at a call center. This is in fact the same call center I mentioned in 2020 when I “endorsed” Trump’s re-election. And for obvious reasons I am still not going to give too many details. Everybody I work with is wonderful, it’s at least been steady work and more money than I previously made before in my life, which says more about my career prospects than I want to admit. But January we were all told that all of the customer care phone positions were being phased out. In fact my supervisor up to that point told us that she was one of the first people being let go. The only reason I and my co-workers are staying on, ostensibly through October, is because we work the graveyard (overnight) shift and they still need coverage. Frankly, half of the reason I wanted that shift is because I knew it had guaranteed job security. The drawback being that when somebody calls for emergency services at 4 am local time, I rarely get a supervisor on the phone because companies seem to think that people only suffer property damage from 9 am to 5 pm.

This drawdown also means that when we had a small pool of agents to begin with, there is no slack. I rarely take paid time off because there is only staffing for two agents on weekends which means only one person would be handling office emails and calls.

Well, the agent I normally work with on the weekends is no longer able to work from home, due to a home issue that I am not privy to know, and while they have a replacement to handle the call queue, she is not skilled to handle the email queue that we also have to deal with. This meant that in the last weekend I had no one to help me handle the email queue that had ballooned to almost triple digits because apparently no one was handling it on my days off either.

They still did not have anyone skilled for emails on Monday, which meant for the third day in a row I had to handle the entire email queue with no assistance. On a Monday. On the last day of the month. Which, like the first day of the month, means that every household in the People’s Republic of China, AND Taiwan, and North AND South Korea needs to be calling and emailing customer service every single minute for any reason or no reason at all.

So this meant that while I had no one to help me cover the backlog of emails, which eventually reached over 200 by midnight, I also had more than 80 calls backed up in the queue well past 7:30 Pacific, at which time swing shift left and I only had one person helping with the call queue. Which meant that we didn’t get calls done until 11:30 pm, at which point I still had to handle 200 emails in less than four hours.

Why? Because Jesus Christ is real. And He wanted to show me that He loves me more than anyone else in the whole wide world.

Or more realistically, because the company has been downscaling its operations for months now despite the fact that the customer base has not gotten any smaller, which means that when one of the regulars for the 24 hour line was not able to attend, there was no backup called because having properly skilled coverage for a Monday on the last day of the month was not that fucking important.

And this is what happens when the bean counters decide they can shave pennies by cutting back on manpower, without telling the customer base. Who, in California, seemed to be under the impression that June 30 was a state holiday called Let’s All Synchronize Our Watches And Cram The Customer Service Number With Water Line Break Emergency Calls Day.

Why did I bring up this anecdote?

We have been told by the right wing, in its more sober moments, that government needs to be run “like a business.” Which runs into the issue of how business is actually being run. That anecdote was an example of how management is running business “like a business.” That is, the directors are strip-mining all resources to maximize executive profits in inverse proportion to employee compensation and customer satisfaction. And with the Trump regime and its pet political party, we are seeing how rich guys plan to run government “like a business”: Into the ground.

The difference is that this works, sorta, with capitalism in that you can always go some place else to get private services and there is turnover precisely because someone else is able to capitalize on demand and provide services when other companies lose service quality or go bankrupt. What happens when this “management” approach happens to the only federal government we have?

We’re about to find out.

I had thought of talking about Viceroy Donald Trump’s wannabe-North Korean birthday party military march on June 14, but as the British would say, I couldn’t be arsed. In any event it was not a further escalation toward God-Emperor status, in fact quite the opposite. Because while the “No Kings” protests organized around the country had a collective attendance of at least 5 million that Saturday, the Trump event in DC (ostensibly a tribute to the US Army) might not have gotten 250,000 for the whole area. It was probably best symbolized by the reel of a Sherman tank slowly proceeding down the road, its squeaky treads clearly audible because there was hardly anyone in the stands to watch it. As for Your Own Personal Jesus, Donald Trump spent the whole time with a pinched, pained expression on his face, similar to when he walked out of the closed door meeting with Putin in Helsinki. That is, when he could bother to stay awake.

Happy Birthday, Occupant of the White House. No, I am not going to wish you any more, cause it looks like you wouldn’t enjoy them anyway.

But Trump’s No Good, Very Bad Day happened at the same time (actually June 13) as Israel’s preemptive strikes on the nation of Iran, which in the first stages took out several heads of the Islamic Republic including the head of the “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” and several directors of Iran’s nuclear development program.

And before I go on, I have to say I am of two minds about that.

On one hand, the reason the Middle East is the way it is now is really the reason that the United States is the way it is now, and that is because Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are basically the same guy. Now, to be sure Netanyahu is much smarter than Trump and not quite so obnoxious and repulsive, but they’re in much the same situation: A crooked as hell wheeler-dealer who first made his mark for media savvy (I first remember seeing Netanyahu as a talking head on ABC’s Nightline), who is involved in so much self-dealing, and has used his office for so much self-dealing, that the second he leaves office he is going to be prosecuted and most likely convicted. Which is why he will do everything in his power to never leave office. And the main part of that is catering to the coalition of religious fanatics that currently has controlling interest in his government, and pushing their agenda of ethnic cleansing all the Muslim minorities en route to turning the country into a one-party theocracy. (And if you’re asking if I refer to Trump or Netanyahu, the answer is ‘yes.’)

On the other hand, simply having an evil government does not mean a nation has no right to exist. And the problem with the ostensible “anti-Zionists” is that for some reason they think the Jewish state is the only one whose existence is illegitimate. But if history has shown anything it’s that when Jews are a minority in their nation they risk being disenfranchised and ultimately killed. (Like in the United States, if Trump thought he could get away with it.) There needs to be a Jewish state and there needs to be a two-state solution. Iran flat out wants to destroy Israel. Arab nations historically have always wanted to destroy Israel, but the Sunni nobles want to destroy the Shia Iranian republic more. And it’s not as though Iran’s government are nice guys even by Saudi standards. Indeed, this is a point of similarity between Iran and the United States. One country is technically a democratic republic but is actually run by a cabal of corrupt and ancient theocrats who want to start World War III in hopes that their Messiah will appear in the Middle East. The other is Iran.

So Israel was going to provoke pre-emptive war and get the United States to go along with it, like we always do. After all, it’s not as though anyone can make the case that Iran isn’t a sponsor of terrorism that has repeatedly declared itself committed to destroying the State of Israel. And is developing nuclear energy even though its economy is based on petroleum exports.

But given that Israel had the situation well in hand, it raised the question of why the United States needed to be actively involved. It goes without saying that the president acting unilaterally without Congressional declaration of war is blatantly un-Constitutional, but it also goes without saying that no president of either party has sought a declaration of war since Pearl Harbor, and that would be one of the least unusual things about Trump.

And all this is an example of why I’m not one of those people posting hot takes on the news every single day. (Along with the fact that I have a real job.) Because in just the last few days since last weekend, things have been changing faster than I can keep up.

From June 14 onward Viceroy Trump was making increasing noises indicating he would not only back up Israel diplomatically, but also militarily. His social media posts frequently repeated words to the effect of “IRAN MUST NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” It often happens that elderly men can’t get out of their obsessive prejudices, but few of them have their own nuclear weapons. This deathly fear of nuclear war is in fact a sincere position of Trump, which is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin has so easily manipulated him on Ukraine, because he can always threaten nuclear escalation if the US acts against him. Even if Trump has effectively been immunized to the American justice system, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.

So last weekend after his typical “two weeks” dodge, Trump actually sent bombers out from Missouri to hit Iran nuclear sites in what everyone is already calling the Nobody Came To My Birthday Party War. June 21, after world reaction had gotten sufficiently crazy, he came out of the White House to deliver an official announcement on the mission, backed up by JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, who seems to be more sad and embarrassed every time he gets on camera. The speech was notable for its brevity and for being very inarticulate and “low energy.” At some point during all of this, Trump thanked God, probably because he thought he’d just won the Super Bowl.

Ostensibly the reason Netanyahu wanted his little Donnie involved is because the US has “bunker buster” bombs that have multi-stage explosions which are intended to eliminate targets deep underground. Well, as it happens, “Despite the use of heavy munitions, initial assessment suggests the facilities weren’t fully taken out.” News articles indicated that “it appeared nuclear material at Fordow had been moved in advance of the attack.” Probably because the president telegraphed his intentions by screaming that Iran must have an “unconditional surrender” and then wavering on whether he would get involved.

But Monday, after a perfunctory Iranian attack on US bases in Qatar, Trump declared, on his own initiative, that the two nations had come to a ceasefire, yelling on Truf Censhal, “(Israel) is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

And Monday-Tuesday overnight, the ceasefire ended with Israel accusing Iran of violating it. And Trump posted, “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Less the World’s Policeman and more like the World’s Substitute Teacher.

And once it became clear that our Dominus Mundi could not make a ceasefire happen between two other nations by imperial proclamation, he got clearly upset. On the way to his flight to a NATO meeting in Europe, Trump told reporters “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Let’s all get aflutter and act like the biggest news story on Tuesday was that Donald Trump used the F word in front of reporters. Most of this country has been using the F word in private for the last ten years because of this guy. But hey, at least all the basic-cable news outlets got an excuse to play the recording unedited. It’s NEWS!

Which kind of gets to the real reason we have to put up with this and keep putting up with it: Some people want Trump around cause he’s great TV.

In one of his Bulwark columns, Jonathan A. Last went over the related issue of the Western world outside the US dealing with Russia and Ukraine, and said, “this is what nations have to do: Make long-term plans about an uncertain future based on incomplete information and constantly shifting variables. America is no longer capable of such things because the American people do not want leaders who are capable of them.”

The reason we have a tyrant toddler fucking up every aspect of the world every single day is because this country really IS a democracy and this country didn’t want its favorite “reality” TV game show host to go to prison. The fact that he would be president was incidental. The plain folks of the land selected the best representative of their collective soul.

The premise of the Republican Party and Trump in particular (who as far back as his PLAYBOY Interview praised the Chinese Communists for showing ‘strength’ in crushing the Tiananmen protests) is that democracy doesn’t work and we should get rid of it. The fact that he got re-elected in the first place shows that he might actually be right.

At the very least, millions of people who voted for the Democrat candidate in 2020 against Trump did not do so last year, either because of the Biden-Harris policy towards Israel and Gaza, because they thought Kamala Harris had girl cooties, or they just couldn’t bother to care about the future of their country, which they knew was an issue because they were at least smart enough not to actively vote for Trump. But it doesn’t matter. In our binary political system, when you don’t vote, you vote. Because not voting for A usually means B wins. If you don’t want B to win, you have to get out and vote for A. Since you know damn well that in this case Republicans are going to come out Hell or high water to vote for Republicans to keep Democrats from winning.

If we manage to get this country back without our own pre-emptive strikes on a theocratic government, we really need to change this political system to curb the chance of 2024 happening again. For example: Tuesday night, the Democratic Party primary for New York mayor (which is the only party primary that matters) was a ranked-choice vote, and the establishment candidate was the centrist (and corrupt as Hell) Andrew Cuomo, trying to make a political comeback after leaving office in disgrace. Despite having several other choices, New York Democrats rallied around Muslim “progressive” Zohran Mamdani, getting more than 7 percentage points over Cuomo, a result that caused Cuomo to concede even though Mamdani has not yet cleared the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff. Given the margin, Mamdani might have won with the traditional first-past-the-post primary, but as of Tuesday 984,859 people voted, whereas in 2017 (before the ranked-choice system was implemented) the Democratic primary that was won by Bill de Blasio got only 437,517 votes, which indicates that more people might turn out to vote if they have someone to vote for, and if their “weird” first choice doesn’t automatically throw away their vote.

That would be the main change we need to make on the federal level. Also, qualification tests for candidates. Like a psychological exam. And a civics exam. And a literacy exam. If that seems too invasive, at least make the guy post 50 times on social media without misspelling his own name.

“You had said that you saw no difference between economic power and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, between purchase and plunder, between pleasure and fear, between life and death. You are learning the difference now.“

– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The big news in America right now is that Our Lord and Savior Donald Trump decided to declare Los Angeles a war zone after he sent ICE out to an Hispanic neighborhood to barge in and arrest residents without a warrant and they encountered resistance for some reason. I say “decided to declare” because as Keith Olbermann among others has pointed out, when the LA Lakers won their last championship in 2020, the number of arrests for rioting was 76 suspects, whereas over the last weekend the number of arrests (at a Home Depot) was 42. I mean, the LAPD first put out a statement saying most of the protests were peaceful, and recently put out another statement saying “The LAPD has not received any formal notification that the Marines will be arriving in Los Angeles. However, the possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles—absent clear coordination—presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city. The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively. That said, our top priority is the safety of both the public and the officers on the ground. We are urging open and continuous lines of communication between all agencies to prevent confusion, avoid escalation, and ensure a coordinated, lawful, and orderly response during this critical time.” Basically, ‘hey, we’re the professionals at beating up civilians, and even we think this is overkill.’

[As of Tuesday evening Marines were in fact deployed to Los Angeles.]

But in my mind, this is just another example of Trump doing something big and outrageous in order to scare liberals (and conservatives) so that nobody is thinking about what’s going on behind the scenes. Prior to The Battle for Los Angeles, the big story was the apparent break-up between Our Perfect Lord Donald Trump, who was born from his mother’s side and sent by Dharma to teach the Path of Enlightenment to the nations, and Elon Musk, who is best known for spending multiple billions of dollars to actually make Twitter worse than it already was, in order to spend a mere few hundred million to elect Donald Trump and get a role in his regime (since ‘administration’ is the antonym of what we’ve got even by comparison to 2020).

But how did that break-up happen? Well, several reasons, one being that Elon’s ‘move fast and break things’ ethos didn’t work that well in reorganizing government, not that it worked that well with Twitter, and it really hasn’t been working with Tesla or Space X. Related to that is that Elon and his hired Musketeers in DOGE* became very unpopular even within the Trump regime for their high-handed actions. Related to that is the fact that Elon is, basically, higher than a bald eagle’s nuts most of the time, which was confirmed second-hand due to news exposes fueled by those offended inside staffers, and confirmed externally by just looking at him. And part of that is the specific rumor that Elon poached the wife of Stephen Miller, both professionally and romantically. This may account for the non-rumor black eye that Musk sported in his White House event announcing his alleged retirement from the Trump Team, although he said it was caused by his son, whom I believe he named after a quadratic equation. That kid’s got a mean left. But then, I think of A Boy Named Sue, and when Elon’s son grows up, he’s gonna be able to kick Sue through a wall.

Well, that’s just the behind-the-scenes mess. But then it blew up on social media, which is the only thing either of these two care about. Why? Because Elon objected to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

For one thing, the official title of this thing in the House version is One Big Beautiful Bill. Because apparently the average IQ in the United States is still over two digits, and something MUST be done about that.

The bill in its current form barely passed the House by one vote, partially because two Republicans voted against it which they could afford to do because three Democrats died of old age or sickness during this term of Congress. The current dispute is how much of it the Senate is going to use and how much of that bill will be approved when it comes back to the House for reconciliation. To complicate things further, reconciliation in Washington means that a Senate majority can override an otherwise prohibitive filibuster but only so long as the bill affects mandatory spending, revenue, OR the federal debt limit and can only pass one such bill per year for a maximum of three reconciliation bills, although the subjects are frequently combined, hence Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Now prior to the Celebrity Divorce, this bill was best known (or not) for all the cuts it is going to make to social-spending programs like Medicare. But the Big Bullshit Bill also has little provisions that were either buried in the dross so as not to be noticed, or added in at the last minute, which caused even some Republicans to object after the fact. Like Section 70302 (that’s how big this thing is) stating that: “No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.” In effect this would mean that judges would need to create a bond amount in order to make injunctions enforceable, and since this is retroactive, any current injunctions against the Trump regime in court cannot be enforced. (Technically this applies to ANY contempt citation, not just against Trump, which is a great example of The Law of Unintended Consequences.)

This is not so well publicized, especially by our ‘liberal’ media, cause let’s face it, Donald Trump won the most votes without the Electoral College, so clearly Americans don’t care about homo commie shit like ‘rule of law’ or ‘the Constitution’ anymore.

But Elon Musk still seems to think of himself as a classical capitalist and thinks it’s a bad thing for government to overspend and waste money. I mean, that was the ostensible reason for DOGE, not to send college kids into every bureaucracy’s database to get all their info so that Peter Thiel and Palantir** could have access to it. But apparently the increase in the deficit not only disturbed some Republicans (in private, of course) it disturbed Musk enough to speak publicly. And it’s a real issue.

Largely at the behest of people like Musk, the Big Bullshit Bill (hereafter referred to as BBB) changes the tax laws (including state and local exemptions from federal tax) so that all but the highest income levels will have a net tax increase, Medicare would be cut by $500 billion over eight years, and Medicaid would be cut by $880 billion over time.

The end result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that over the next decade, the federal deficit, which is currently almost 2 trillion dollars, will increase by an additional $2.4 trillion.

You can look at CBO’s pie chart for fiscal year 2024 here. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 In that year, defense spending was only $850 billion. It is dwarfed by the combined cost of Social Security ($1.5 trillion), Medicare ($865 billion) and Medicaid ($618 billion).

For those of us who still consider ourselves right-wing (on the standard that right-wing means ‘there are objective realities that cannot be changed by politics or social consensus’, not ‘Trump is my Shepherd; I shall not want’) the big question over all this is: how does a bill that specifically targets entitlement spending end up raising the deficit by a factor of trillions (with an s)?

Because:

military spending is $150 billion above and beyond normal budgetary increases such that for the first time the military budget would be 1 trillion dollars in itself;

spending on ICE alone is increased $9.5 billion in addition to increases in support funding for Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security;

Republicans are going to renew the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act tax cuts, mainly on the upper percentile, that otherwise would have expired after 2025. (Republicans may fear the wrath of voters but they fear the wrath of the donor class more.)

And in the midst of this, let us not forget that all of this will end up undermining America’s living standards and economic performance, which will undermine our bond market, which will increase the national debt. When the whole premise of conservative anti-tax theory is that economic growth will make tax cuts pay for themselves. (If that was ever true, it was in the glory days of JFK and LBJ when ‘progressive’ taxation was so high that it demonstrated the Laffer Curve.)

So Elon decided to twit about this. First, he declared he could be silent no longer and declared Trump’s budget bill a “disgusting abomination”, a phrase that usually brings to mind Trump himself.

He said that Trump wouldn’t have won without him and he wouldn’t have more than 51 Senators without him. Which is probably true.

And then Musk pulled out the BIG news: The reason Trump hasn’t released the Epstein Files is because Trump is in them. And the country’s collective reaction was: yeah.

Look, Trump is a convicted felon and while technically not a rapist, was found in a civil case to have committed sexual assault. Clearly that wasn’t enough to stop him from getting elected again. Saying that Trump is in the Epstein Files is like saying that your cousin is an alcoholic whose “sister” is really his mom- everyone in the family knows it, you’re just not supposed to talk about it.

And yet that was probably enough to get Trump to pull this stunt in LA. It probably has more to do with Stephen Miller (aka Pee-Wee German) trying to get quotas for arresting “illegals” because there aren’t enough violent criminals to go around. But it’s still part of the Trump technique of flooding the zone with shit and making sure you can’t deal with the last outrage cause there’s always a bigger one around the corner. “Hey, don’t pay attention to that teenager I raped! Lookit all these orphans I killed!”

Who’s going to win the catfight? Who gets custody of JD Vance? Trump, easily. Trump has control of the federal government, and he can and has threatened to cut Musk’s lucrative government contracts. Musk has no equivalent leverage. It’s already looking like Musk is backing off, mainly by deleting a lot of his comments on X, which is apparently supposed to make everyone forget they saw them (or saved them). And this weekend, Musk decided to share a post by Trump against the rioters and the officials in California, apparently finding new solidarity in their shared fear of dark people.

But Musk still has Twitter. Which has undermined most of its reputation and business model under Musk, even before his fusion with Trump, yet it is still used by many influencers, especially the type who care about both Musk and Trump. And those are exactly the sort of people who still care about conspiracy mongering and who were rather annoyed when the FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did an about-face and told the press that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact kill himself.

Meanwhile on June 8, Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky), having some ancestral memory of being “libertarian”, objected to the BBB’s increased funding for ICE. About the same time, Cato Institute think-tank writer David Bier posted that the costs of deportations would by themselves add almost 1 trillion in costs to the BBB.

This week there was a column in The Hill (another outlet that has undermined its reputation in the Trump Era yet still has a following for that reason) saying that the fallout between Trump and his sugar daddy could still have long-term consequences for Republicans as a whole: “Trump was counting on the bill’s passage to be a significant political tailwind that would boost his polling numbers and Republicans’ midterm hopes, particularly given the ongoing chaos over tariffs and trade policy. Now, whichever version of the bill eventually passes, Republicans look like the party of chaos.”

All of which is leading up to the June 14 parade in Washington, ostensibly as a celebration of the US Army anniversary (though they never asked for it), but really as a birthday parade for Donald Trump, because a military parade is the gift you give to the man who has everything, including the most powerful country on earth. Is it right that we turn our military, and our country as a whole, into a monument for one man’s shriveled manhood and even more decrepit brain? Well, we could have had a president who was your stereotype career social democrat who would have run everything business as usual but at least wouldn’t have run every aspect of this country into the ground.

But no, you had to prove you were so much smarter than people who read books and stuff. Well, at least we don’t have a president who’s a doddering old man who can’t keep track of one sentence to the next, who doesn’t know what direction he’s facing and who can’t even climb the stairs.

* – pronounced like the Venetian ‘doj’ by the press, though I always preferred it like ‘dough-GI’. Shoutout to Jonathan Capehart at MSDNC, who has pronounced it ‘dodgy.’ And then of course there’s ‘douche’.

– ** ‘Palantir’ of course comes from the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien, referring to a crystal-ball communications and surveillance device developed in the First Age. According to Wikipedia: “A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to “possess great strength of will and of mind” to direct the stone’s gaze to its full capability. The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy’s hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.”

“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.

Bill Maher announced weeks ago that he’d agreed to have dinner with the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump. This has made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move. On his Friday show for April 11, he took the first part of the show to give a ‘book report’ detailing exactly what went down.

I should link it, but that would mean giving his show more exposure, so no.

He started by saying that this all started because he got an invitation to the White House “from my good friend Kid Rock” – and I imagine a lot of liberals would say ‘there’s the problem right there.’ Not necessarily. Remember when Kid Rock played with Sheryl Crow? He used to be cool, or at least not AS much of a douche as he is now. I actually liked Kid Rock before he started rhyming “things” with “things.”

But Kid’s cultural relevance has declined in proportion to his political alignment, and maybe Bill should have taken that as a clue. Maher said that Trump had a sense of humor and could laugh at himself. Which was a tell that Maher isn’t as clued-in and informed as he believes. Even I have seen speeches where Trump could make jokes at his own expense. Bill said “I never felt like I had to walk on eggshells around him, and honestly, I voted for for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump.”

Maher’s own conclusion, that Trump is a different person in private than the image he projects, ought to have told him something. One of those presentations is an act. Probably both.

The real tell I see in the long term was in what happened afterward with the guests and the Overtime debate panel after the scheduled show. On the Overtime bit played on CNN and YouTube after the HBO show, Maher had Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin on with none other than Steve Bannon and courtier journalist Piers Morgan. Bill’s previous idea of hearing out both sides was to have a debate panel with one token conservative on with two establishment/media liberals, and Bill would gang up with the liberals on the conservative. This week it was the other way around.

Rogin said “I think you’ve fallen into the trap, and I think I represent 99% of the internet when I say this: you’ve played the game of proximity is principle.” Rogin said that Maher got buttered up to get Trump’s approval. Himself recognizing this tendency, Rogin started to play to the crowd, saying “We all love Bill, right?” And Bill just said, “Don’t patronize me … I don’t even know you, I never met you.”

I mean, Bill did enough of a heel turn last Friday that I thought he was going to hit Josh Rogin with a steel chair.

Trump might not be book smart, but he is an idiot savant when it comes to conniving and grifting. Emphasis on the idiot. If Trump is reasonable and self-aware in person, why does he act like a half-orangutan for the press? How did Trump enthrall the entire Evangelical movement, when he is that much less an Evangelical than Bill Maher? Because he played to them, he flattered their expectations, and he told them what they wanted to hear. So now they serve him. And now, so does Bill Maher.

Like any other con man or stage magician, Trump has no miraculous power in and of himself. He needs his marks to buy in to what he’s selling. They give him power by giving him validity.

Bill Maher of course said years ago, “Look, conservatives: I know you don’t like it when I call you stupid, but you’ve really gotta meet me half way and quit being stupid.” They didn’t, so Bill decided to meet them halfway, and started being stupid. Or at least, willfully oblivious to the things he has already observed, and which have not changed. I like the take from Vlad Vexler: “Maher said insubstantial things and made substantial conclusions from them.”

Is the important take that, yeah, Trump acts like a goon for the camera but can be a real human when he wants to? What’s on camera is what’s making policy. Why is the allegedly pro-wealth, anti-socialist president forcing economic controls that will destroy the global market? Why can’t the president pressure the dictator of a tiny country to release one legal resident who was sent to him by our leave, if he can pressure Ukraine to surrender its provinces and thousands of citizens to Russia?

Perhaps these questions should be a stronger focus than whether Mr. Trump extends his pinky when drinking a Diet Coke?

In the abstract, yeah, I can see Bill and Kid Rock’s point that you need to have dialogue with the other side. That you need to “break bread” with them. But not here and not now. You want us to break bread with the guys who tried to stop Joe Biden’s inauguration by force? You want us to break bread with the guys who started the Civil War? Sure. AFTER Sherman has his march to the sea. AFTER Sherman marches through Atlanta and turns it into a pile of smoking rubble. AFTER the traitors have learned their lesson. NOT BEFORE. Because we are at war, and it started when they declared war on the rest of us.

This idea of the Bill Mahers and Chuck Schumers of the world, that we can just get back to dialogue and negotiation, is exploited by the alternative-to-being-Right, becase reasonable dialogue was not working for their side, and it will not come back in this era because they destroyed it, and now are just exploiting the liberal need for good faith negotiation, when they will never act in good faith. People like Steve Bannon are self-described Leninists: not in the sense that they want to destroy global capitalism (though they are doing a fine job of that) but in the sense that they only act within liberal-bourgeois systems until they have gained enough control over them to neutralize opposition, and at that point, there is no dialogue, just dictating.

Bill, don’t give us this “I’m not important, I’m just a comedian” spiel. So was Zelenskyy, when he started out. You are good enough at what you do that people pay attention to what you say, and that’s why Trump wanted to coup you. And he did.

Now you will be just like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, elitist liberals who used to be on the completely opposite side and bought into Trump for the sake of their ulterior motives, and in exchange he destroyed their brands by association. Your reputation as a truth-teller is gone. And just like how Trump switched and told his cult to buy electric vehicles to support his new friend, all the “conservatives” who despised you for repeatedly making fun of them are going to yuk it up and cheer you on like you’d agreed with them all along. Because they are gullible and stupid. But as we can see, you don’t need to be stupid to be gullible.

Fuck you Maher, I am never watching your show again.