The Homegrowns are Next

 

Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough." pic.twitter.com/o20thGNK9e

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2025

Trump is serious, He wants to deport US citizens to an El Salvador hellhole. Don't kid yourself it will be for "good reasons".  Accept and believe the evidence of your eyes and ears: this man genuinely believes that people who criticize him or those who help him should be labelled criminals. The threat of being "disappeared" is how Trump means to manage dissent in this country.

But it's not just the first amendment that is in danger. It's the whole bill of rights. 

 He doesn't believe in due process or the Constitution, and neither does his attorney general. His White House is full of people who will simply lie regarding this one man--but they will also lie about anyone Trump deems an enemy of the people, because that is how the lies of weak people work. 

They don't suddenly develop a conscience somewhere down the line. The weakness corrodes every scruple, and soon the rule of law is gone.

This should be front page, five-alarm, screaming bloody murder news. It's time to call it fascism, and it's time to seriously talk about impeachment and removal. It's past time, even. But it might not be too late.

Juris Doctor Vance, Not So Young, Also Not Credible

 

While we can tell ourselves that part of Karoline Leavitt's juvenile dissembling attempts are sheer youth and immaturity, we know for sure that Vice-Signaling Junior President Vance "tells stories" with a purpose. So, when he condescendingly insults a reporter for not having read a court document--I don't even assume the JD Vance was simply mistaken and responding in a hurry when he got the basic details entirely wrong. 

JD Vance is a Yale Law grad and quite capable of seeing whether or not Kilmar Abrego Garcia was convicted of or merely accused of being a member of MS-13. It seems to me he counts on MAGA not reading, and only superficially noticing a lot of liberals telling Vance he's wrong (which he is) and assuming they are "triggered."

Things Are Going to Slide

 

Giggleheaded Goofus, Elon Musk, has not had a brilliant day. His Tesla stock did a really big slide. His Twitter acquisition, which he wants us to call "X", was shut down a lot because of an apparent DDOS attack. Musk wanted to allege that the IP addresses of the attack were from the "Ukraine area" and this is when, not for the first time, I understood Musk is a dumbass. Because really? Are the haxxors using their IP address and not masking with a VPN or whatever? And wouldn't it be wild if the haxxors were from the exact place kind of depending on Starlink to work, and are kind of mad at Elon, but not suicide-mad yet?

And how isn't the Ukraine area also possibly Russian invaders? Since Russia has competent cyberwarfare capabilities, not that our Department of Justice under Pam Bondi is fixing to bother with it. 

Would it just be a stitch if Russia decided to attack TrumpWorld just when they decided for the worst of all possible reasons it was time to make nicey-nice? 

Anyway, Teslas and their dealerships are being protested and vandalized. 

Almost as if that brand was the clearest signifier of Musk himself, and attacking it was the clearest way to attack him. And it could and probably is organic--even if Elon wants to insist on the idea of astroturfing. ActBlue--blah blah blah. George Soros, more blah blah blah. Musk isn't funny or original. 

This is not Normal

 

How do you confront a man who has done a lot of damage in a very short period of time, and promises to get up in front of the American people and lie about everything? Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D., NM) chose to hold a simple sign: "This is not normal."  (It was snatched from her by Republican Rep. Lance Gooden.)

What the folks who attended or tuned into this speech beheld was a long rally speech--not really like a State of the Union speech at all. Trump called out the head of DOGE, Elon Musk (who isn't supposed to BE the head of DOGE, allegedly, for some sort of legal reason). He dwelled on the ideas of immigrant crime and trans people in sports for some reason. (Divisiveness. Feeding the bigotry beast.)

There will obviously need to be heroic fact-checking. This is a speech where Trump blamed Biden for the economy that he has actually contracted, threatening higher prices and a recession. Economists were not predicting a recession with Biden's policies--only with what Trump has been doing so far. 

But we aren't new to this game. Trump lies. Trump blames other people. Trump comes up with proposals that might just be a puppet show in a madhouse. We are in a trade war with our North American neighbors. Trump has openly sided with Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian war. 

This is, in fact, not normal. A ketamine-fueled megalomaniac with poor sleep habits is Peter-Panning his crazy ass through our government with his Lost Boys, looking to move fast and break stuff--not really understanding what he's breaking, just hoping to get the contracts to fix whatever it is. Daddy Ourbucks rose for a little applause during the speech. 

One could almost wonder why he didn't give speech himself. Shy? 

This is Juvenile Damage

JD Vance claims that efforts to suppress misinformation and hate speech "are going to destroy Western Civilization. They're gonna destroy Europe, and they would destroy the United States of America if we allowed them to fester. Thank God we have a president now who believes in… pic.twitter.com/EKIIF4rXoD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 4, 2025

March 4, 2025

Sometimes I wonder what JD Vance stands for, but to me, the persistent thing about him is that he tells stories. He creates narratives. He likes a good yarn. Jesuitical Dissembler Vance is insisting that lying is good, actually. I guess if you have a problem with it, you are probably "virtue-signaling." 

See what happened there? Lying is good and being concerned with what is true is fatally dangerous. (I personally despise the term "virtue -signaling" FWIW--people have VALUES and CONFESS THEM and LIVE BY THEM publicly if they are sincere in any fashion. Scoffing at the notion means you are basically an amoral putz.)

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. 

TrumpWorld is Riding Until the Wheels Come Off

 

Just so we are clear, when the GOP hit the TrumpWorld Trifecta--they motioned to keep riding the 2025/47 Agenda until the wheels came off. Apparently, though, the vehicle they have chosen is a Cybertruck, so the wheels will come off sooner rather than later.  (Panels, also, too!)  

Best of luck to the State Department on that Tesla contract. Ride in the best of health and luck, which you will need. 

Yes, I am comparing TrumpWorld right now to the Swasticar, 

Musk has fouled the brand of the companies he acquired because of being a wealthy dumbass, not founded because he's not actually what he represents himself as. I don't know why his Frankendick still gets ridden like it is. But it's clearly made up of dead to the game actual founders, who took Elon's money and decided they were good with him doing his thing to their brands.

Free Speech, Responsibility, and a Caution

 

I take potshots at VP JD Vance, as is my right as an American, and I do so only with a little guilt that he's a barrel of fish--a target-rich environment. All the same, something about him irritates me right in the patriotism.  I have described him as being if chewing on tin foil with a mouthful of fillings was a person, and I am not backing down from that. 

Take today as an example--he weighed in on Margaret Brennan asking Secretary of State Marco Rubio (a man chained in a dungeon of his own making, performing Trump's foreign policy while I guarantee you knowing better at any instance) if there was anything amiss in Vance's Munich speech regarding the "enemy within" and meeting with AfD where "free speech" led to the Holocaust. 

I' m going to help everyone out by stipulating that the Nazis were not big fans of free speech. They banned books, you know. "Un-German" books regarding different races, people who were considered deviant, people who were liberal or Communist. They would have really hated DEI. 

Went Over Like a Lead Turd

 

You know, taking your weird-ass conspiracy-theorist Pizzagate asshole friend along with you on serious European business all by itself is a whole kind of offensive fuckup.  Oh, wait, maybe that was a Hegseth team fuck up.  The down with America, up with Russia dipshit horror shows were so boldly evident at this flea circus display from the supposed America First crowd I guess I got confused. Hegseth was the one who told everyone we ain't got no navy to speak of so don't count on us and we can bug out our military presence in Europe so don't get too comfortable. 

I say wild ass shit when I'm hungover too, so I guess the Fox News veteran's words aren't all that surprising to me. 

But JD Vance being a condescending and unpleasant pro-Putin scold with no sense of irony is also not surprising to me. He chided Europe for lack of freedom of speech while at home, AP was being barred from the White House and Air Force One because their style guide stays with the more (for 400+ years) appropriate "Gulf of Mexico". And while Tom Homan hates on people who want to use the First Amendment to tell undocumented people about the other rights they have under the Constitution. 

The First Longest Day

Some people will look at the above video and assume that the Ketamine Cowboy was just feeling very patriotic regarding the installation of his preferred candidate in his new-found home. I am not one of those people. Trump gave a very specific sign regarding what he was all about with the seating of his guests in the Capitol Rotunda--where just four years and a two weeks ago his thugs invaded and committed acts of vandalism and violence--he seated his billionaires in the front row. His Krupp, his Farben, his Siemens, his...

Frick. Do you see where I am going with this? 

The day of service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. was a day of disservice to the fight for equality.  On the day we mourn the loss of the formidable Cecile Richards, the reproductiverights.gov website has gone down, because women I guess don't have those anymore. We are being saved from "gender ideology" (never hurt me one day in my life) only to be left without choices for our own bodies. 

Oedipally Wrecked

 

Charlie Kirk presumably has a biological father who molded him and his big head into whatever you would call him now, and I believe he is honestly straight married and isn't, in fact, closeted in any way. Also, he would play the mouth harp if the droopy-eyed SOB, lit from below as if telling a scary campfire story, in an angle reminiscent of his Georgia mug shot, depicted above, told him it was necessary to soothe an old man's slumbers.

(Get your mind out of the gutter--that's from the Bible, it is! )

There are big men, manly men, men who have never shed a tear in their lives, who want this apparition of bad-assedness in office, not because he is good at anything, but because of images like this. His followers can tell one another he wants vengeance and is a Bad Spanking Daddy because the "Russia Russia Russia thing" was his villain origin story, and they want him to be right. 

Like little kids who love their Daddies, they can't see he didn't need an origin story, he's just kind of generally dumb and bad. He wants to punish people for noticing what he did and "disrespecting him". 

In short, they want a motherfucker, and here he is. And this photo is looking pretty damn motherfuckerly. 

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.)

What Do MAGA have Against Sign Language?

 

Charlie Kirk called out by US National Association of the Deaf as sign language controversy escalates https://t.co/L5dW9CSvqV #deaf #interpreters #ASL #signlanguage

— Deaf News Today (@DeafNewsToday) January 12, 2025

I see Chris Rufo has also decided he needs to be mad about sign language interpreters, too.  Deaf people deserve to have access to information in a way that is immediate and relatable to them. It actually doesn't distract anyone--mostly. If you are distracted, maybe this is a cognitive problem about YOURSELF you need to get addressed. 

But as a person who finds aural processing a little more difficult in my older years who uses CC for tv--it sucks and is not reliable. I can hear, but I am aware it is not always adequate for people who can't. Also, CC is absolutely not great at all for someone who might be deaf or hard of hearing and also has an issue with reading facility, like dyslexia. 

Oh, They'll Get in Line

 

I can recall finally understanding what "elitism" meant to anti-intellectual MAGAs, and basically, it was them being told they were wrong or cruel and being made to feel bad by...anybody. It wasn't about class or education status--it was the idea that someone out there was gonna tell you you wasn't exactly as good as them. So there! 

So, in the H-1B visa debate that is roiling TrumpWorld, Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have been part of the mild fracas happening on X by letting US (White) Americans know they culturally weren't producing well qualified tech job applicants because they didn't rise and grind the way Asian kids do. Too many jocks and prom queens and peaking in high school. MAGA was fine with "pull your pants up and take care of your kids" lectures directed at Black Americans, but if you tell them that their four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High School doesn't qualify them for more than selling shoes, they are going to get Big Mad. 

And we already know where white supremacist Laura Loomer was on this one:

Welcome to the TrumpWorld Kakistocracy

 

Did you know that being a deer in the headlights "Me and My Shadow" fig leaf for El Cofeve might get you a berth as head of Homeland Security? Yep. Kristi "We Also Kill Dogs" Noem has gotten a little promise from the ship of state she chose to barnacle on. I guess it is something she promises beyond supporting Trump in his momentary "Swaycation" from a rally where he momentarily found himself beyond words. I'm trying not to think it's because she put a half roll of quarters in his front pockets and offered to make change. 

You know, if right wing fuck for brains want to pretend Kamala Harris slept her way to the top, there is no end to the fucktacular permutations amongst RW personalities permissible--especially if they have already demonstrated being down like a clown. I presume Marco Rubio's exceptional capacity for supine boneless nuggetry has enhanced his likelihood for being chosen for Secretary of State. I can also foresee his being eventually "You're Fired'd" after giving up a guaranteed lifetime Senate seat. Compared to the other Sec of State possibilities he seems like the least worst--so there has to be a catch. 

TWGB: Gonna Do Really Well

 

Trump thinks he has a little secret. And he must, you know--because what his campaign did at this Madison Square Garden rally was truly alienating and foul.  This rally wasn't intended to win hearts and minds in a blue state, it was a several hours' long hate rally, and this was only going to be ugly, because Trump, the Actual Candidate, is Ugly. If he had dreams of MSG being his coronation--no. 

What was promised here was slaughter and dehumanization. Puerto Rico was called an island of trash. Jokes about Black people carving watermelons was supposedly "humor". The Vice-President, a former US Senator and former state AG, was treated like a low-IQ mutt by people who associated IQ with race in the grossest, most late 19th century way. All Democrats were deemed the "enemy within". 

Because I am a person who tries to be logical, it seemed to me absurd that the Trump campaign would use its final push to just be the open enemy of decency that this shitshow was. It obviously isn't about winning votes--

It's about whipping up so much rage from Trump true loyalists that they are ready to do great violence. It's about keeping them raging and stimulated and certain that Trump is in peril from the murderous "them" and obvious "witch hunters" who seem to think, based on all the evidence, that Trump is likely to have committed crimes, to be determined by a rigorous legal process. 

I repeat, it seems to me they do not want votes, but violence, because they don't think they can get those votes. 

They can therefore not get votes and fight the world, then. Fuck all of them for this racist, murderous shit show where they let us know who they are. But there is no wishing them anything but failure from here. 

If Fascism is Baked in, Why Choose Fascism?

 

Q. Hearing John Kelly's disturbing revelation about Trump's admiration of Adolph H!tler, does it change how you feel about Trump?

Chris Sununu: No. We've heard a lot of extreme things from Trump. With a guy like that, it's kind of baked into the votepic.twitter.com/sMTbZicUrJ

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 24, 2024

So, I wanted to get this off my chest--fascism being "baked in" is the reason you REJECT a candidate, not the reason you support him. 

I might charitably presume Chris Sununu thinks this is Trump saying "extreme things" that he does not mean, and that he can differentiate the extreme things Trump says from what he intends to do, and from what those who surround him want to do. If this is how he is looking at it, he is deeply stupid, because people who support extreme words do so because they like them and want them to be so. Trump says them because he gets away with saying them and presumes that he can do what he likes later on, because he has persuaded enough people that the previously unthinkable is permissible. 

Sununu tells himself this is the direction that he believes people are going. So--he is following a multitude to do evil?  He is being a go-along-to-get along, imagining someone else will fix the problem of fascism? Or is he willing to get his hands dirty, too?

TWGB: Fox and the Sour Grapes

 

Media needs to play this clip for GOP candidates and say NOW YOU HAVE HEARD IT--and get them to respond. Because he is using people's names. Real damn people. https://t.co/wGtl0QjSpS

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) October 16, 2024

What would you call the shade Trump painted himself for this? Terror Cotta? The "enemy within"--which Trump has suggested siccing the military on, includes (Democratic) US Congress members. It probably also includes former GOP US Congress members like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. It likely includes certain former White House personnel--his own former White House. IT includes people like Gen. Mark Milley.  And this "enemies list" is not about people who lied about him--oh no. They did something far worse.

They told the truth.  Trump has never been a fan of transparency--even though we can see through him. Russian interference was real and the Trump campaign had multiple Russian contacts, and the perfect phone call wasn't perfect. It was extortionate. 

So, how does Fox News, who was sued by Dominion not so long ago and settled for a really amazing amount of money for lying about the 2020 election, in the person of one Brett Baier, presumed serious interviewer, use this information--that Trump considers various prominent American public servants fair game for being rounded up by the military and punished for being the "enemy within"? 

He whitewashes it to try and make the Democratic 2024 Presidential candidate look like she's being extra. 

No, really. 

Trump Discusses a Back-Stabbing

 

Trump: If I don’t win this election.. the Jewish people would have a lot to do with that if that happens pic.twitter.com/N9skHU0hnu

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 20, 2024

This reminds me of so much history that as human beings, we all should shudder to repeat. Trump has moved on from how US Jewish people would be crazy not to support him, to possibly threatening them that they should support him, if they understand what's up. 

There's an ambiguity there, as the threats of strongmen sometimes contain--a plausible deniability, Maybe the "blame" won't be repaid by anyone associated with Trump at all.  But maybe he wants people thinking about that. 

Here's what I'm not going to do--pretend I don't notice it. That was a threat. Maybe he meant that a Democratic administration would not be as supportive of Israel as his would be--but that is also conflating Jews with the state of Israel--not the same thing at all. He's basically saying what a "good Jew" is vs. someone who might "have it coming." 

I need not tell you what it reminds me of because most of us won't ever forget. 

You Know They Knew About Mark Robinson

 

Trump: We have to cherish Mark Robinson. You have to cherish him. He’s like a fine wine. He's an outstanding person. I've gotten to know him so well pic.twitter.com/ffkjfi56X8

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 19, 2024

This man's public comments were already a damn disaster: let's take us to before women were voting? Some people need killing?  His household has been sued by Girl Scouts and massively screwed up daycare . He said heinous things about civil rights. And we knew he was on the downlow and sleazy but we didn't know how downlow and sleazy. 

And now we have a very good idea what this man was about, and it was calling himself a "Black Nazi" and being down with golden showers and porn regarding the trans people he would oppress or even persecute right now. I don't know much, but I know one thing, Mark Robinson isn't too diverse to the NC GOP. They are, as a popular song once had it, standing by their man.