A TrumpWorld Cabinet of Curiosities

 

Pictures often are worth a thousand words--take a look at the picture above of Elon Musk, standing, not seated at the table, while Donald Trump is not even at the head of the table, but slumped, unnoticed by anyone, apparently drifting off to sleep. Just a podgy senior citizen with his hands in his lap, while everyone is listening to the real boss, who has not even bothered to put on a suit for the occasion but is dressed, as he generally is, like some close approximation an adolescent might make at adult clothing. He threw on a big-boy jacket over his play-clothes. 

It's not exactly The Last Supper, but what if I told you one of these folks assembled would betray Trump and every last one of them had eaten of his body and blood? 

We are getting on to a political Carnival. Lent for you, and Fat Tuesday for rich motherfuckers forever, so I felt like sprinkling a little Catholic consciousness over the above tableau. Also, I am very, very mean. 

I thought to myself when I perused Twitter's commentariat regarding the first cabinet meeting that what we were looking at was a Dunning-Kruger Group Therapy session where no one realized what their problem was and no one was getting any better. 

Shart of the Deal 2: The Takers

 

This blog (me, Vixen!) understands that Trump thinks of himself as the Deal-maker, and his mishpocha love that for him. We discussed The Shart of the Deal a minute ago, and it's holding up. He imposes a threat, and will accept any terms that make him look like he got his "deliverables". He just got the Mexican president to send 10,000 troops to the border that were going anyway. He got Justin Trudeau to agree to the same kind of commitment he was already making. 

It's ok--just so long as Trump gets to take credit for something, even if it was nothing he actually accomplished (other than demonstrating to our allies that his government is duplicitous and not to be trusted, ruining our relationship in a completely shartastic way!)  And the 30-day pause probably just means we get another round of Trump drama. 

But the thing to recognize is Trump didn't do anything other than wreck our allies' faith in us Just like him patting himself on the back for the flow of the water (which is idiotic) into lakebeds that have nothing to do with the already-contained LA fires. It's bullshit--but he's a tv president for dipshits who watch too much tv. 

Which brings me to Elon Musk--his avatar Vizier and the shadow-president. 

Trump takes credit. I don't know what Musk is taking--but it's a whole lot, because he's rooting through our servers, gathering our information, and I have no earthly idea what all he means to do with it. But he is using boys young enough to be his sons to do it. 

The Cruelty is *Almost* the Point

 

NEWSMAX: Why should other states be bailing out California for choosing the wrong people to run their state?

TUBERVILLE: We shouldn't be ... they don't deserve anything to be honest with you unless they show us they're gonna make some changes. pic.twitter.com/SUvVPRDgKm

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 13, 2025

There's some good conversation in the comments in the last post regarding MAGA attacks on sign language interpreters--it's about punching down and divisiveness. I recall during the pandemic, the Trump administration pit blue states vs red states for access to resources.  Also, some conservatives fairly openly wanted to sacrifice elderly and disabled people for the sake of the economy (even though that would have been a box of horrors--and we have alternative ways of thinking). We should by now understand the America First problem.

In TrumpWorld, there are only things that serve Trump's (MAGA) needs. If there is a crisis, people just have to figure out how to serve Trump's needs with it. Maybe that means "punishing" a blue state in the hopes the fed-up citizens will just elect Republicans next time around. If Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security have to get cut for Trump's budget to make sense--so be it. 

Who thinks they deserve their promised benefits, anyway? (They have deluded some folks into thinking it's all a Ponzi scheme.)

Asma Triggers

 

JUST IN: Former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's wife files for divorce and plans to move to the United Kingdom. pic.twitter.com/WGQLXrlvFX

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) December 22, 2024

Asma wants a divorce, of course, of course,

because no one wants stuck with a dumb dead horse

a coursing bore, a nasty sore,

Syria's famous former head!

(Apologies to the Mr. Ed theme song writers and absolutely no one else. She's a nasty piece of work herself.) 

UPDATE: This morning, Twitter tells me this is apparently not true. Or as I tend to think, not true yet. 

UPDATE: To get all my ducks in row, Moscow says she isn't divorcing Assad to get her ass out of Russia and back to the UK. Also she might have leukemia.  I was going to find a solitary fuck for her, but it might have got lost in a mass grave somewhere. 

Obeying in Advance, or: "What Rats Won't Do"

 

#FBI Director Christopher Wray announces that he will step down at the end of the current administration.

Learn more: https://t.co/W7xY34F37h pic.twitter.com/FIJ5QIjI29

— FBI (@FBI) December 11, 2024

I hear scientists are starting to use lawyers instead of lab rats in their experiments. They do this for two reasons. For one thing, they become less attached to the lawyers. For another, there are some things lab rats won't do.    

 I get the idea that one shouldn't obey in advance, I really do.  And I get the argument that FBI Director Wray should have said "C'mon and fire me." Take a damn stand. Show Mr. Trump and the world what you are made of. 

But he did that. Remember when he shit-canned all the tips about Brett Kavanaugh? Because I'm not forgetting that. Remember when he took the job in the first place after Trump, Jeff Sessions, and Rod Rosenstein concocted a reason for Trump to fire Jim Comey that wasn't what Trump expressly told Lester Holt (and Sergey Lavrov) the reason was (to end the Russia, Russia, Russia investigation).

The End of Assad

 

I haven't really known where to start this week. Tblisi? Romania? But it's Syria. Good gracious if I were ever to believe, God. The rebels took over everywhere. Everything, after so many years, fell. And Bashar al-Assad's Russian friends have been run off, too. And he has fucked off to Moscow. (Actually, I know he was in Moscow last week and never noticed him leaving. When the heck did he leave to fuck off on back?)

I don't know if Assad-cheerleader and avid consumer of RU agitprop, Tulsi Gabbard is at home crying into her Putin shaped comfort woobie, but the quality of her often-offered pro-Assad and pro-Putin opinions are about to take an uncommon beating.  Which she totally has earned. 

I also don't know how Trump and them feel about what Romania has done with respects to their dodgy election. I personally think Trump should have been disqualified as an insurrectionist, but we just don't do stuff like that here, regardless of what our Constitution says. 

I do winder if some of the people who voted for him are feeling the buyer's remorse yet. And what exactly would happen if we tried to stage a "do-over" here. 

But this post isn't about the US--it's about this:

How About South Korea, Huh?

 

The political roller-coaster of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration then suspension of martial law was extreme even by the standards of South Korea. https://t.co/snAiREZDmH

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 4, 2024

I have literally no insight into South Korean politics, but I really think that guy chose poorly.

Listening to the Felon

 

Trump: A criminal is a criminal, they generally stay a criminal and we do not have time to figure it out. pic.twitter.com/LJ1NRSVXtA

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 28, 2024

Trump isn't any nicer since he was shot at--he says so himself! His attacks on Vice-President Harris are nasty but unfocused. ("Low IQ"? Really?). And maybe he really did mean he would "fix" things so "his Christians" wouldn't have to vote anymore as in--there wouldn't be any more elections. But in the above clip--he really makes a point, doesn't he?

A sex pest like Trump stays a disgusting misogynist. A white-collar fraud stays a fraud. Trump's 34 convictions, like his 2020 loss and his two impeachments, stay on his record. It's completely true that SCOTUS can partially immunize this mess--but we can look right at him and realize that whatever his deal is--

We do not have time to figure it out. Trump says a lot of things. We shouldn't go tiptoeing through the tulips picking and choosing which crazy things he "really, really" means. (We are way past the "seriously" vs. "literally" question.) He's a conman and a thug, and that should be enough. We had whatever you want to call 1/6--he'd do it again. He lied about the election being stolen--he'd do it again. He took classified docs for whatever reason--he'd violate national security for his own weird reasons again. He screwed up the national response to COVID and crashed the economy--he can't be trusted in an emergency.

J. D. Vance: The Pence Replacement

 

Collins: The last time I checked, Joe Biden didn’t approve of the chance to hang his Vice President. Does it give you any pause to be Trump’s Vice President given how he treated Mike Pence?

JD Vance: I'm extremely skeptical that Mike Pence's life was ever in danger

Collins: I… pic.twitter.com/P0WQ8hfKRg

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) July 15, 2024

Well, I feel like this is a theory that may get tested in some way, but Vance is on the record saying he would definitely violate the bejesus out of the Constitution on Trump's say so in the way Pence refused to, which totally explains how Vance (who once described Trump as "Hitler") got picked for the job. 

I mostly savage Vance around this blog for being a yellow-bellied Putin-appeasement monkey, but I also want you to know he's an authoritarian Christofascist fucknut with extreme anti-abortion views who thinks women should stay with abusive husbands "for the children" (yes, a deeply unhealthy POV). He's a climate change denier and a faux-populist--he talks some kind of game about the working class but despises actual working people. 

He's basically what you'd get if you tried to Weird Science-up a VP candidate by feeding a computer the Project 2025 manual and hooking it up to a My Buddy doll. 

A Little Foreign Policy Discussion?

 

Forgive me if I'm disregarding "the discourse" about President Biden's press conference regarding foreign policy--it's very stupid. Biden is exceptionally knowledgeable about world affairs and has simply done a fine job as president in fraught times. He isn't going to make everyone happy. A press conference isn't going to rescue him from a fickle media or self-aggrandizing "smart guys".  They want bumper stickers, he's got volumes of actual experience, just with a few "typos". 

While this pivotal/not pivotal press conference has been taking place, the former president has been sitting down with Viktor Orban, who had just been enjoying the company of Putin and Xi. Orban is pretending he's on a peace mission. Let me show you the Russian definition of peace:

It's not just that they want to keep Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. They don't want Ukraine to be a country. This is not peace. It's the ragged bloody end of genocide. (Actually, why should they be rewarded by keeping anything they stole via murder? ) This is the "peace" Trump says out loud where people can hear that he would resolve "before inauguration". Oh and get back WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich. 

Intimidation is the Point

 

It's a beautiful thing, seeing Trump use a crime underboss with blood on his hands as his character witness calling for "strength and honesty in our New York courts." It really takes you back. Once upon a time in America, the specter of the NY mob and the menace of the Five Families might have fucked with a prosecutor or a judge. Maybe after Rudolph Giuliani and Gravano's own turn, this isn't as certain as it used to be. 

Am I being tongue in cheek? I recall when Trump was proud of a mob celeb at one of his South Florida businesses not so long ago. He's not shy about his associations with this kind of people--he has relied on it as a business fact. He was denied a casino license in Australia because of this business fact. 

Now, I don't pretend I've researched a lot into what degree Trump, the builder, had to ingratiate himself with the mafia consortium who owned everything to do with concrete back in the day, when he was supposedly changing the NYC skyline (I only expect those contractors, for sure, were the ones who got paid), but I do understand what he's doing here:

He's just letting people know he's got friends in all kinds of places. Loyal ones. Maybe dangerous ones.

NBC Cleaning the Augean Stables with a Squirt Gun

 

It's all very well to feature a four-time indicted adjudicated rapist and racist serial liar on your television program to lie to your audience for an hour or so, and if that four-time indicted adjudicated rapist and racist serial liar is a former president and the front runner for his party's 2024 presidential nomination, it might even be newsworthy, but I think if that's the person you're hosting, be upfront:

"We are hosting a serial liar so you can see the things he is lying about." 

That he is all of those things is more important than his self-serving babble, is it not?

Because a little after-the-fact fact-checking isn't even where you need to begin. Our man Trump is a veritable Augean Stable Genius, the result of decades-worth of unshoveled livestock excrement. He is a man I'm almost certain who watches himself with the sound turned off because the bare fact of his fame is enough for him. What he says hardly matters. He doesn't want to be loved so much as he wants to be inescapable.  Omnipresent. He is without shame.

So, he can spit out a firehose of lies and possibly even incriminate himself? He can be partially rebutted and yet, even fact-checking him turns up little kernels of truth that his fan club can seize on: See? He's not all wrong. And people can argue whether he was mistaken or "fumbled" or just exaggerates. 

The above screencap is from a post on Truth Social from Trump to Jewish Americans wishing them a Shana Tova in his unique way. by basically calling liberal Jewish people traitors. He hopes they have "learned a lesson" which doesn't at all sound like a threat, right? Or does it sound like a threat when it isn't the first time? When prominent figures increasingly have been scapegoating minorities (including migrants, Blacks and LGBTQ folks?)

Can a practically mundane, respectful interview speak to that? Can it do so more than a decade after the national media as a whole seems to have given him a pass for birtherism, which truly always was racism?  

I don't think these particular stables get cleaned out until "justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream." 

The Convoy is 1/6 *ON WHEELS*

 

And that includes the uniformed officers who murdered Ashli Babbit, it includes the officers who’ve murdered countless people during red flags and all the people arrested for not masking or vaxxing. pic.twitter.com/6evTibo4Ll

— laidee🦝 (@laideeliberty) February 21, 2022

Yeah, I knew this was what was up. The trucker rebellion is another expression of regime change for democratic nations by way of really stupid bullying. They want to effect change by way of annoying us to death during a moment when actual global shit is going down. 

Like, fuck these cretins. They aren't martyrs, they are mofos asking for it and ultimately deserving of getting it.  Referencing Ashli Babbit is just another way to know they are signaling their victimhood for any justifiable penalty they experience for their cause. They hate cops and the idea of government too. They are basically asking for the wake-up call. The penalty for fucking around should be finding out. And I think these mofos should, if they really try to shut down the Beltway. It's already a cluster fuck. 

UPDATE: Yes, they really are the same folks in some cases. And have the same people funding them. And have the same politicians in the US offering moral support. And even if the attempts to logistically manage a meaningful protest are currently fraught with issues, the opportunity to fundraise off it or sell cool trucker-themed swag and the general "friends we met along the way" tribalism are, like Tea Party dos and Trump rallies, markers of the faithful having done a pilgrimage that strengthen the radical base. The point is in showing some kind of numbers and making some kind of demo that will eventually capture eyeballs in the mainstream media. 

If good press--great! If bad press--hey, lugenpresse! The way they have it figured; they can't lose.  Unless someone points out they are basically tantrum babies who were astroturfed into being a thing and are generally not great community organizers so much as drama queens who all thought they'd get medals for showing up. 

So maybe there's a lot of ways to take the air out of the tires on this one. 

The Bad Case of Vladimir Putin

 

In a fiery speech, President Vladimir Putin made the case that Ukraine is by history and makeup an integral part of Russia.https://t.co/Oz1k7cAOpH

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 21, 2022

It might be better said that, rather than having "made the case", Putin advanced an argument based on revisionist history that fell just a bit short of crowning himself "Tsar of all the Russias". Putin has felt this sense of being robbed about the fall of the Soviet Union for a long time, and it wasn't actually a secret. 

It bothers me that people are framing recent events in contexts that are not complete because the story isn't recent, and address what Putin is doing in terms of what "the West", or particularly the current US administration, have or haven't done, which sometimes gets framed in the terms of "weakness" or "strength". It seems particularly hard for many of my fellow Americans to grasp that the world does not revolve around US politics. What we're looking at here is Russian imperialism.

This is something Putin wanted to do, and well, bucket list items do not cross themselves off. He benefits from the frame that he is reacting to the actions of other people; like all authoritarians, he uses the language of victimhood as justification for atrocity: "Look what you made me do." 

No one made him do this. He is responsible for the invasion of the separatist regions, and there is no reason to believe he will stop there if you listen to what he is and has been actually saying. 

This is God-Awful

The hagiography! The thankfulness! The "savior to our nation"!  And who is this wonder of wonders?

Trump. 

I will never get over what a revelation this sort of thing is. And not of a very good nature.