James Gillen

“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.

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid, if it lets him do a thing that his cleverness forbids.”

• John Steinbeck, East of Eden

One of the reasons that the world is stuck in the current Age of Trump is that everything that could be said against him is already baked in. One might say it’s part of the appeal. When he does something, no matter how disastrous it appears even to Republicans, Trump just blows off his critics, says belligerently stupid things and makes goonish faces at the camera, ALMOST AS IF he were a total retard who can barely spell his own name.

Which begs the question of whether the performance skills that serve to be a clownboy for public amusement are sufficient to lead the largest government in the world. I mean, even Jerry Lewis knew how to direct movies.

The main example right now is “Liberation Day,” or the broad based global tariff program announced April 2 (because April 1 would have been too obvious). It was so popular and business friendly that Trump held his press conference to announce it after the markets closed. In the following days the markets loved the policy so much that it wiped out over 11 trillion dollars compared to the week before Trump was re-inaugurated.

On Wednesday morning, Trump declared he was putting most of the across-the-board tariffs on a 90-day “pause”, which caused the markets to rise 3000 points.

All bow down and serve our new Lord and Savior, who causes the grass to grow and the birds to sing. Who is the only reason the sun rises in the east every morning, by his allowance. Verily, let us all love and worship our new Lord and God, Donald John Trump. Cause he makes that Jehovah guy look like a fuckin’ pussy.

But then, His Majesty said the targeted tariffs on China would actually increase over 100 percent to 125 (it’s probably higher now) prompting the Communist government in Beijing to respond with equal tariffs on us. And that caused everything to crash on Thursday again. The Dow Jones industrial average is still a net -4 percent from April 1. Things picked up on Friday, but who knows how long that’s going to last? You just have to keep watching The Trump Show!

The general consensus was that Trump caved because the same financial class he was trying to impress told him the policy wasn’t working. It is also more evidence that he has less emotional stability than a teenage BTS fan. At the same time he wants to preserve the option of tariffs because that is his main economic agenda.
Several observers, like Senator Chris Murphy (D.-Connecticut) and right-winger Richard Hanania have a different take. Both of them came to the conclusion that Trump’s apparent fickleness on tariffs is actually a form of leverage on the population at large, where “every industry or company will have to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.” Hanania: “Trump has always believed in tariffs, but something that he appears to have discovered is that they are an excellent way to aggrandize his own power and sense of importance. Countries and businesses want exceptions, and you get them by deferring to and praising Trump. Politicians who are subject to pressures from private sector interests also must go hat in hand to the president. …This is not to say Trump has ever thought all of this out. Rather, the man has an instinctual understanding of how to manipulate and control others.”

This theory makes a lot of sense, not least in that it tracks with Trump’s desire to see himself as a Mafia boss, and his already demonstrated moves to turn his ‘administration’ into a patronage outfit. There’s just one problem with the theory: This is Trump we’re dealing with.

The US borrows money by selling Treasury bonds. Those bonds are in the hands of rich guys and in the hands of other countries. Like China. The value of these bonds is based on concepts like “the full faith and credit of the US government”, which is no longer guaranteed. Normally in a stock market crash the bond market would stay secure, the problem was that everyone knew that the crash was artificially created and arbitrary, meaning, other assets like bonds are not secure because government (Trump) policy is not secure. After “Liberation Day” there was a spike in creditors dumping US bonds. Jake Broe: “And when bond yields go up, all other asset classes go down, your real estate, your crypto, your gold, because this is the risk-free rate that every investor has to weigh against. ..This is something any individual or nation can do. Why risk your money in stocks or equities, when you can put it in bonds?”

In other words, by directly undermining securities (not just threatening them), Our Lord and Savior was undermining the leverage he needed to control the elites.

Truly, Our Lord is all-good, all-powerful, and all-wise.

But while tariffs may not work as long-term scheme to control the country, the on-again/off-again was a great scheme for insider trading, as Trump twitted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!” as stocks were down, just before announcing the tariff pause. NASDAQ call volume went up 10k volume minutes before the pause was announced.

Which is another reason that when (or if) this colon cancer of a political party is removed from power we need to child-proof the whole process of government.

But in the short term, one might reasonably argue that we depend too much on foreign trade or that our manufacturing sector is too dependent on China in particular. I honestly think that is a national security issue. But clearly the ‘administration’ that put Pete ‘Whiskyleaks’ Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon doesn’t care about national security. If rebuilding the manufacturing sector is a priority then you make it a government priority by incentivizing American businesses to build here (since it was they, not China, that decided to outsource American industry). And you do that BEFORE starting a trade war that does more to undermine American businesses than the Chinese government. Just as Trump clearly seeks to establish not mere self-sufficiency but economic autarky – or as North Korea would call it, Juche – not in the interest of workers, but because he seeks to invade his neighbors (like Canada and Greenland) and minimize the consequences of blockade. Like Germany did.

But when Nazi Germany re-armed, they actually did rebuild both domestic and military industries with economic policies that were dodgy but actually did work in the short term. One thing the Nazis didn’t do was immediately alienate all of their trading partners in the first three months of the regime so that they would start blockading or working around them before the Nazis started their expansion in earnest. They also didn’t alienate the vast majority of the population before starting a war, including the people who voted for them. Clearly the 2024 election demonstrated that a critical mass of Americans don’t think that fascism – excuse me, ‘post-liberalism’ – is a danger and may even see it as attractive. But Trump and his cult are both so high on their own supply that they think they can piss off every American who isn’t them before they attain absolute power, when their margin of popular victory was 1.62 percent in an election where a lot of Trump voters didn’t choose a candidate for Senate, which is why a lot of the swing states that went for Trump still elected Democratic Senators. As a result, Republicans are getting massive protests even in Idaho.

That’s the problem with the Trump Party: They can’t even do fascism right.

Hi, I’m Donald Trump.

Hi, Donald.

And I’m bein’ told… that I’m a dummy.

We’re not here to judge.

But I’m like, the President of the United States, and I’m in control of the largest economy on Earth, and I got some people tellin’ me that it’s not workin’ out.

That’s why we’re here. What would you like to know about economics?

Lots.

Well, can you be more specific?

Well, the tariff thing. Last week, I announced this great, big beautiful tariff plan, cause I wanted Wall Street to like me.

That’s why you did it?

Yeah, cause before I came along they had this thing called progressive income tax where you have to pay more money if you’re rich.

Yes, because the rich have more money.

Well, I’m rich, and I don’t like that. Nobody likes that. But before we had progressive income tax, we had the tariff system. Tariff. It’s my favorite word. And groceries. It’s all about the groceries. Did you know I invented that word? Groceries.

I did not know that.

But the reason this country was so great before the Radical Left took over is cause our government ran on tariffs for consumers and not income taxes on the rich. That’s how it worked with William McKinley.

Wasn’t he the president that got assassinated?
What?
Never mind.

But I announced these tariffs to help the upper class, and they don’t like it! Like, the stock market has been going down by thousands of points every day since! Even Elon Musk is saying free trade is better than tariffs!

Maybe he knows something you don’t.

The whole point is these other countries have been ripping us off cause we give them more money than they give us.

That’s … not how free trade works.

Well, what’s wrong with tariffs, then?

Well, let’s look at one hypothetical case: If the US is the largest economy in the world, and we trade with say, Bangladesh, Bangladesh is a really small, undeveloped country. So by definition there’s gonna be a trade imbalance cause they’re not on the same scale of economy as us.

Okay.

Smaller countries trade with us cause they have some things we don’t have, and we have money and things they don’t have.

Okay.

That’s how ‘trade’ works.

That sounds like a rip-off.

So that’s why you came up with this tariff plan. How does it work?

Well, in my big, beautiful White House presser, I showed everybody the chart and it shows all the tariffs we got against EVERY country in the world.

Except … Russia. And North Korea.

Really? Well, they’re not the ones screwing us. They’re my FRIENDS.

Okay, where are these numbers coming from?

Well, it’s so beautiful. What we did is, the figure is trade deficit with a country divided by their exports to us.

That’s NOT how trade works.

Well, who cares.

I’m looking at this list and one of the territories is ‘British Indian Ocean Territory.’

Yeah.

That’s Diego Garcia.

Yeah.

That’s a US military base.

Yeah, well, it said ‘Diego Garcia’, I figured it was Mexican.

Why are you having all these high-level tariffs against territories that don’t even have people?

Well, what happened was, we just ran everything through an AI program to make extra sure. Cause like Howie was saying Sunday, if you leave anything off the list, them other countries are gonna art- artifice – get around the tariff program.

Jesus Christ, you fucking hammerhead, now I see why that assassination attempt failed. The bullet bounced off your skull.

Yeah, well the preachers around me says that I was saved because God wanted me to be President.

Really? Have you read the Bible?

Uh, yeah. Sure I did.

In Exodus, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and has him resist Moses when he says to let the Hebrews go. So the Hebrews are kept in bondage in Egypt and to punish Pharaoh, God sends a bunch of plagues and they culminate in the death of the Pharaoh’s firstborn son.

Wait, Pharoah does what God wants and then God punishes him for it?

I’m just saying, this God guy doesn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.

Yeah, well who cares.

Then why are you asking for advice?

Cause- cause look, you seen all them protesters on April 5? How did they get all those protesters? They had thousands of people in Utah! They LOVE me there! How did they get all those protestors? Don’t people have jobs?

Well, maybe a whole bunch of people became unemployed in the last two months for some reason.

They got everybody real antsy! We had Rand Paul sponsor a bill to take my tariff powers away! Rand! He’s like Ron, only with better hair! They can’t take my tariff powers away! That’s not in the Constitution!

Actually it is, sir. Article I.

Well, who cares. If anybody ever read the Constitution, I wouldn’t be here.

True enough.

But it’s worst than that! If I lose enough Senators and enough Congressmen, they’re actually talkin’ about IMPEACHING me! Like, it might WORK next time!

That would be a shame.

I mean, the whole point of bein’ President again was cause I was gettin’ convicted of crimes – crimes which I had EVERY RIGHT to commit, by the way – and if I was a regular citizen again I’d have to pay fines! Might even go to PRISON!

Gee.

I don’WANNA go to prison! …I’m too PRETTY for prison…

There, there.

I never really wann’ed to be president really! I just wanted all the power of an unaccountable god and none of the responsibility!

Really.

Why do you think I got Elon running everything?

That would explain much. But really sir – did you ever think that even if you’re the most powerful man in the world, you can’t always get away with screwing everybody all the time?

….no….

Then you really are a dummy.

Mid-March, you may have seen how Viceroy Donald Trump made a big show of killing the Department of Education, accompanied by the Education Secretary, Mrs. Smackdown herself, Linda McMahon.

The fun thing about this was that somebody had the idea to stage the event at a public schoolroom, with a whole bunch of small children around him, so they gave him a tiny “Resolute Desk” on the same vertical level as the kiddie desks, meaning that Trump appeared to be at the same grade and emotional level as the schoolchildren, which is about right.

Of course the executive branch can’t actually kill an agency created by Congress, but it can do the next best thing and completely gut its funding and personnel, like it’s doing with everything else in Washington.

While that was a substantial policy change, it is probably more telling that one of His Majesty’s other royal proclamations this month was that he rescinded all pardons that Joe Biden made prior to leaving office, ostensibly because he used an “Autopen” as if Trump has never auto-signed anything. If you’re wondering why no one else thought of this, it’s because no one else thinks you CAN cancel a pardon once it’s given, because of double jeopardy and other aspects of common law that apparently no longer apply in America now that Khmer Orange has reset the calendar to Year Zero.

It should have occurred to people that if you’re going to arbitrarily override a pardon and blank out the point that a future president can do the same thing to you and the people you pardoned, then the only reason you can be safe in doing that is if there are not going to BE any future presidents. As it is, Congress is beholden to Trump and they are the only path to legally removing him via impeachment. Some courts, including conservative judges, have ruled against him, but they have no power to enforce their directives against the executive branch. Basically we are going to be stuck with the Clownboy Caesar until he dies, which may never happen, since he can always sign another executive order to make himself immortal. After all, the laws of this country have no power over him, why not flip off the laws of physics?
And even if God lapses in His sadism for a moment and allows His favorite Son to come home and sit at His right hand, that just means JD Vance takes over, and he’s a sincere religious fanatic, as opposed to Trump, whom we all know is just a religious fanatic for the money.

But then if Trump could make himself immortal, he wouldn’t be trying so hard to disguise his real age. He’s the only White guy I know who gets darker as he gets older. And among the many, many articles on “Signalgate” one point gets kind of buried: The Cabinet members discussing the Yemen strike are acting on the passive assumption that Trump approves their actions but he doesn’t seem to be included on the details. Heather Cox Richardson, March 25:

“The messages reveal that President Trump was not part of the discussion of whether to make the airstrikes, a deeply troubling revelation that raises the question of who is in charge at the White House. As the conversation about whether to attack took place, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote about Trump’s reasoning that attacking the Houthis in Yemen would “send a message”: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” To go back to the Keith Olbermann thing, it’s quite possible the Cabinet did this conference outside classified channels not (just) to avoid having it be subject to access by official government investigation but to avoid Trump being involved. After all, it’s not like this particular Senate is going to hold them to account.

Meanwhile, several outlets have reported the story of Jennifer Mooney, a Canadian actress who came over the border to apply for a work visa and was detained for almost two weeks with limited contact with attorneys. There was another story of a German citizen who was detained at the airport, “stripped naked, and forced into a cold shower”. He is now “reportedly” locked up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Wyatt, Rhode Island.

These are white people, ladies and gentlemen.

In his Substack, Robert Tracinski quotes a Wall Street Journal article:

“The Wall Street Journal reports:

A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to multiple people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else.

Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration, given Musk’s powerful role in the federal government. …

“We now see brands returning in quite significant numbers, because the easiest route is to just spend a minimum viable amount on the platform,” said Ebiquity’s Schruers, “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of the legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”

This is a circular trade—money for power for more money for more power—typical of the corrupt logic of authoritarian regimes. Musk uses his political connections to shake down advertisers for money, which he then uses to prop up the media platform that is the source of his political power.”

How’s that for a free-market economy?

Of course Musk is doing this because his real cash cow, Tesla, is imploding in the public eye, not just because of his noxious political allegiances but because of minor technical stuff like having to recall all of his Cybertrucks because their doors are falling off. Last week Musk had to have a employees’ meeting, telling everyone to “hang on to your stock.” This matters insofar as Tesla is one of the few auto manufacturers with no unionization at all, and keeps wages down by compensating workers with stock options – which are now nosediving. “National car shopping site Edmunds said this week that Tesla owners are trading in their electric vehicles at record levels.”

A real capitalist would accept the results of his actions in the marketplace, including the marketplace of ideas. But as with other examples of the elite, Musk would rather not be a real capitalist. Unlike most of these people, he has an entire government to shield him from the consequences of his actions.

If you technically have a smaller government but it is more under the control of one unaccountable individual (who may be indebted to an even less accountable individual) and that person seeks more unitary control over the country, that is not a gain for liberty.

But failing to grasp the distinction accounts for a big part of the woke Right’s internal contradiction and American authoritarianism’s main difference from old-style fascism. The new Right wants to be both fascist AND libertarian, and contrary to the current ownership of the Libertarian Party, that’s just not gonna work. Why? Because people expect government to give them stuff. And that is how fascists traditionally cement their support. Fascists clear marshes. Fascists build Autobahns. Fascists have Four Year Plans and Five Year Plans. Fascists have Lebensborn agencies to encourage the birth rate. Trumpniks ban abortion on one hand but take away the support structure for women and infants on the other. Statism is socialism, but if it makes life worse, then statism is fine.

If you make people more dependent on government and then turn around and make government undependable, that is not a recipe for success in elections.

But again, you don’t do this sort of thing if you plan on having competitive elections.

If there’s no consistent philosophy to this, why is it done?

The Occam’s Razor answer is: Because they can.

As we say, the cruelty is the point. It’s not like there is any other one.

Many Americans, including former conservatives like myself, have long joked that since Reagan, the premise of Republican election campaigns is that government IS the problem and not the solution, and then once they get elected, they do everything they can to prove it. As with so many other things on the Right , the Musk-Trump regime is simply taking the previous standard and stretching it to the most absurd extreme. In this case the formula is to use government to make everyone’s lives a living hell, and then, because people are conditioned to be dependent on government and authority, cast themselves as the saviors who will solve the problem that they created. And if you think that doesn’t work, how did Trump win re-election four years after giving us all Trump Virus? ™

This is the sort of belief that can only be justified by a religion that believes in quid pro quo from God and still has to justify why God doesn’t always (or usually) provide it. The idea that you can get anything you wish for if you just pray hard enough. And if God doesn’t grant your wishes, you just have to accept it, because who knows God’s plan? What happened was going to happen anyway. You have no agency.

It’s a very convenient philosophy if you’re trying to justify autocracy against its manifest record of incompetence and failure. But it was Voltaire who said “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

I was putting together a different sort of commentary about the Musk-Trump occupation government, (Tusk? Mrump? Mump?) but the thing we have to address now is that the Trump Cabinet had a meeting over Signal, a commercial, non-government service, over personal phones, to plot a strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg in on the chat. This led to an expose that has since been called “Signalgate”, in keeping with the post-Nixon standard of attaching “gate” to any scandalous government event which once might have been cause for making officials resign but is now just business as usual.

We can tell this because just a day or so after the Atlantic story, most of these officials were called upon to testify on Capitol Hill on what would have otherwise been a scheduled briefing, and denied under oath that they had revealed classified data. Fox News himbo and accidental Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.” So The Atlantic then revealed the full transcript of the chat server, listed as “Houthi PC small group” which clearly showed that Hegseth and the Cabinet were, in fact, coordinating a military strike over Signal. (Houthi PC Small Group would be a great name for a punk band, by the way.) Goldberg’s transcript also confirms that Mike Waltz invited him to the Signal chat. Of course since Republicans are the Trump Party, they are not going to do anything about the officials lying under oath on matters that in the past would have gotten people electrocuted.

Milblogger Jake Broe shared a social media post from Piers Morgan saying, “If you don’t consider this to be classified info about imminent war plans, it * may * be that you’re too partisan to recognize the truth when it slaps you around your tribal chops. If this had happened on Biden’s watch, Republicans would have rightly gone berserk.”
Piers Fucking Morgan, people. Who has never met a Republican ass he didn’t kiss.

Vice President Trump, of course, told reporters that he knew little of the details or whether the discussion was classified data. “Eh, I’m just the most powerful guy in the world who demands complete loyalty and obedience from everybody under me, that don’t mean I know what they’re doin’.” But then, plausible deniability is a lot more plausible when you’re senile.

Just today, Keith Olbermann’s podcast had the headline, “THEY USED SIGNAL TO BYPASS TRUMP THEY KNOW HE’S GOING CRAZY“. Now on one hand this could be more Olbermann raving, but seriously: If you were trying to keep the lights on in a house run by King Ook-Ook Gorilla, how much would you want him to know?

I am not sure what is worse, the fact that the Musk-Trump regime is obviously traitorous and fascist, or the fact that they’re so fucking bad at it.

Of course Hegseth and the others sneered that this was all ginned up by a biased mainstream journalist. But that gets to my take, which I’m not sure anyone else has addressed yet. We know that the Trump Party, which is really the Putin Party, does not consider Russia the enemy. We also know that they do consider the mainstream Liberal Media to be the real enemy. So that raises the question: If you don’t care about letting classified data into the hands of authoritarian governments, why don’t you care about letting it into the hands of liberal journalists? The cabinet failed to practice data security against the real enemy, and that is the failure.

If I were a Trumpnik right now, I would be looking at myself in the mirror and asking why I should support people who are counterproductive even to my goals.

What this all means, ladies and gentlemen, is good news and bad news. The good news: When, presumably not if, Trump dies, Democrats will get back in charge. That was less likely given the returns on the last election, not to mention demographics turning against Democrats in both the Electoral College and Senate races. But now that the Putin Party is going after Social Security people will know who’s responsible. And when Democrats are in control of Congress, they will do investigations and launch prosecutions of all these malicious bumblefucks, perhaps aided by some pro-military Republicans who would no longer be in fear of Trump’s literal personality cult.

The bad news is, the Putin Party is fully aware of that future, and that is why they are making all the radical changes they are making as quickly as they are, because they know that in a normal democracy they would be reversed on the next go-around which is why they’re trying to trying to make sure there are no free and fair elections again and why they’re trying to accelerate from mere Turkiye/Hungary style strongman regime to full blown dictatorship. That’s why they’re sending ICE on public raids to round up anybody who disagrees with them, even if they’re “accidentally” white people or American citizens. The problem, of course, is the execution of the agenda. I mean, clearly they are planning to create a goon squad but how well is it going to work when the rank-and-file don’t know what the hell their orders are and what the hell their superiors are doing?