Note: I do regularly ask myself if I’m obsessive about Trump. The answer is Yes. But I like to believe I’d have been obsessive re Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. The podcast/article on ICE below is horrific. It’s the latest example of what happens when an over-powerful tyrant gives unlimited power and immunity to the sociopathic scum of the earth.
Trumpism
There’s nothing about me in the Epstein files, other than evidence of a conspiracy against me by him and others. [So, the real victim . . .]
News
Trump says he’ll be suing the NY Times for a billion dollars over its ‘fake’ reporting on his demands on Harvard university. He might or might not.
Recent developments have sparked fears that the Trump administration is plotting to engineer its ideal outcome for the upcoming midterm elections.
Trump is closing the Kennedy Center for 2 years because ‘it needs renovation’. So, nothing to do with a dearth of performers and low ticket sales. Some folk expect fruit machines in the lobby. And lots and lot of gold and mirrors.
Quotes
- We’re living in MAGA’s warped upside-down world, where nothing matters except who has power and who doesn’t. They believe in nothing except power.
- Another day, half a dozen more scandals
Non-comedic Commentaries
The New Republic: Trump ICE Threats Take a Darker Turn as MAGA Calls for Blood: As Trump’s designs grow more unnerving and MAGA figures demand an escalation, a journalist who closely tracks ICE explains how the agency is effectively becoming an instrument of authoritarian state terror. Trump falsely claims undocumented immigrants are voting illegally, then calls on the GOP Congress to somehow take over the voting in numerous jurisdictions. Listen to the podcast here. Read the transcript here.
Susan Glasser of the New Yorker doesn’t believe Trump is pivoting because of the Minnesota horrors. He is in damage control mood and will say or do anything in line with his often used playbook. Distraction, disinformation, denial and delay. He might have lost a battle but he will never never admit it.
The Daily Beast: Essential listening.. . David Rothkopf joins Joanna Coles fora blistering, wide-ranging conversation about a presidency defined by vulgarity, fear, and damage—starting with Rothkopf’s searing argument that Trump is the ugliest expression of American power yet. From the White House’s gilded excesses and the planned hollowing-out of the Kennedy Center, to the Melania “bribe-umentary,” its Epstein-adjacent fallout, and the mounting contradictions exposed in the Epstein files themselves, the episode tracks how taste, corruption, and impunity collide. Rothkopf digs into the murkier questions Trump can’t outrun—from Howard Lutnick’s shifting Epstein story to why so many powerful figures are suddenly caught in bald-faced lies—while also unpacking the strange Tulsi Gabbard whistleblower saga, Trump’s renewed fixation on “stolen” elections, and the quiet groundwork being laid to destabilize 2026.
Incidentally, I doubt that any of the adjectives Rothkopf uses in respect of Trump are missing from my schedule of around 2016 and recently reposted in this blog. He’s been a known quantity for a long time.
Lawrence O’Donnell
An horrific incident. ICE are the most horrible cowards ever employed by the federal government, at work for the most horrible coward to ever occupy the White House.
Comedic Commentaries
Finally . . . .
Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain 