Pure and Simple Disgust

 

RAMAPHOSA: I am sorry I don't have a plane to give you

TRUMP: I wish you did. I'd take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it

RAMAPHOSA: Okay pic.twitter.com/TgvODTok9P

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025

I took a bit of a vacation from political blogging because every time I look at Trump and company, all I can feel is pure and simple disgust. I can barely scrape it together to rhetorically fluff the corruption and assholery into something mildly amusing, anymore. In the clip above, the president of South Africa has been subjected to an ambush of white genocide claptrap by a senile racist lunatic, and levels Trump with a quip about his obvious corruption--and Trump, unknowingly sells it: of course he would take a plane from anyone. He's a taker, a crook. 

And everyone knows it. 

Of course, this is about the "free plane" from Qatar, which has now been accepted by the Department of Defense. There is no such thing as a free plane. It will need to be hardened for use as a base f operations for the US C-i-C, and it should be inspected minutely for any surveillance devices.  And the funny old thing is--Trump asked for it. 

Declaration of Incoherence

 

This guy just shut down the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/SSwsrw7oll

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 1, 2025

I fully intend to add to this, but my word, it is made of stupid. The man literally seems to have no idea what the Declaration of Independence is. And he just says random things. 

 UPDATE: I do not know where his brain short-circuited, but Harvard went in one ear and Harlem came out of his mouth:

Smith asked Trump what he would say to those who view his attacks against the Ivy League school as “an attack on academic freedom, rather than a defense of fairness.”

“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly if you look at what’s gone on—and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side,” Trump said.

“You know I got a very high Black vote. You know that? Very, very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment to me,” Trump continued.

You know what never happened? That. That never happened.  

MS Paint-13 and our Dumbass President

 

TRUMP: He had MS-13 on his knuckles, tattooed!

MORAN: That was photoshopped

TRUMP: Terry, they're giving you the big break of a lifetime. I picked you. But you're not being very nice. pic.twitter.com/NgCpEB8o1S

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 30, 2025

I was certain that Trump was cynically using visual propaganda in a way that took advantage of the utter dupes and dopes that are his people, but the above interview snippet sure does look like someone showed Trump the picture of the knuckle tattoos, helpfully Photoshopped so that he would understand the interpretation of them, and took it to be, uh, part of the picture.  

People around him are offering cynical visual propaganda to use, but he's such a Fox News pilled dopey old grandpa, he believes what he's being told to say.

We saw this just earlier in his Time Magazine interview as well:

"That's not what my people told me--they didn't say it was, they said it was--the nine to nothing was something entirely different."

Yeah. Sometimes his people don't tell him anything, and sometimes they completely lie to his big stupid face, apparently. 

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.

How About That OPSEC?

 

Look at that Murderer's Row in the above picture. You've got NSA Mike Waltz, who added The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, you've got very pompous VP JD Vance, SECDEF Pete Hegseth. who let us know America USED to be foolish (whatever we look like now, he will probably have to face in the morning after he's slept it off a bit), Secretary of State Lil Marco (Alleged Adult) Rubio, DNI Tulsi We Don't Compromise Classified Intel Gabbard, and Steve Witlesskopf--who was using his cell phone to join in from Moscow where Putin was making him wait. 

Everyone on that chat should have known better than to be on that Signal chat. If they preferred Signal for some reason, it's hard not to think it was to avoid FOIA. So, they chose being potentially open to access by GRU (known to try to exploit apps like Signal by following people of interest) over institutional transparency. 

Fresh New F*ckery Incoming

 

President Trump on JFK Files: "We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files...I don't believe we are are going to redact anything...it's going to be very interesting...approximately 80,000 pages." pic.twitter.com/0NW4QdLSzL

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 17, 2025

Remember when the White House traipsed some little right-wing influencers off with their photo op and their binders of nothing-burger Epstein files? 

Well, I think this is kind of like that, except it smells to me that they are doing this on the same day that Trump is going to be in contact with his buddy Putin and has been talking about pre-surrendering Crimea and continuing to lie about Ukrainian forces surrounded and so on. They have a good idea which showcase the goofballs in our media are going to pay attention to on this cursed game show.

 It feels like a distraction that will be as enlightening as a flashlight with a dead battery. I mean, we will see....

Glory to the Heroes

 

I can't imagine anything more appalling than Jethro Dull Vance being the condescending haughty motherfucker who ended the leadership of the United States in the free world. But he was the one who, with his jumped-up ding-a-ling hauteur, who tried to interject a font of pure RU agitprop, and invoked Zelenskyy's need to set things straight and tell the bloody simple stupid truth, that Russia is never to be trusted, has broken ceasefires, and is the source of grotesque war crimes, at Bucha, at Izium.  Wherever the Russian army has had its way, mass slaughter has been their plan. 

It was always about genocide of the Ukrainian people--why else would Russia say they are not a country, and they haven't a proper language and try to stamp out their history? You can't surrender anything to a genocide. You just can't. The terms of peace are maybe you keep your right arm, except to the elbow-today. Until we don't like the look of your other arm tomorrow. And what about those dangerous legs? Will you defend freedom on stumps? 

President Zelenskyy told the truth--his people are truly being slaughtered. Sure, the odds are bad--but surrender is worse. Because of the rape, the mass graves, the kidnapping of children. And the Trump Administration response is to ask a man who almost certainly has reason to fear assassination from Russia---whose people every day have the threat of a bomb killing them, mothers and children--maybe even especially, since the enemy targets maternity hospitals and schools and all--to consider what if a bomb?! Landed on him?!

In Defense of Wonks

 

Klippenstein is a good reporter and a generally good egg, but my God, the juxtaposition of housing as a problem (which can be understood in terms of zoning, affordability, Nimby-ism, etc.) and matters of foreign policy, that are obviously understood as federal in nature, is just...

Look, I would like it if HUD had a strong hand and a strong plan for overriding local twattery that keeps housing unaffordable. But there are limits to what can be legally done at the executive level to demand housing access--it's complicated!

Foreign aid is a bit different, isn't it--it's one thing, it doesn't go through state and muni filters You're not dictating to developers and actual neighborhoods with people in them about what they do and don't want. It doesn't have a myriad of red tape things to fool about with. 

We're not talking about the difference between apples and oranges, but apples and eggs. Knowing the difference is very useful, because you really shouldn't expect apples to fall out of any aperture of a hen. Klippenstein isn't an idiot and isn't juxtaposing those things thinking otherwise. 

Trump on Any Day Ending in "Y"

 

Trump announces he wants to throw “everyone on the [January 6] committee” in jail. pic.twitter.com/33hEYGByu1

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) December 8, 2024

Trump "Met the Press" and in his interview with Kristen Welker, he said all kinds of incredibly fascinating things. He still only had "concepts of a plan" with respects to health care. He's going to deport the "Dreamers" and is looking into ending birthright citizenship (which is actually in the Constitution). He lied about how many murders have been committed by undocumented migrants. He admitted he "can't guarantee" his tariffs won't raise prices (because they will).  He's going to get rid of Christopher Wray as head of the FBI for no other reason than wanting his own attack-dog there. 

Oh yes, and he wants the 1/6 Committee in prison for noticing he defrauded people by lying about the 2020 election and directed a crowd of rioters at the Capitol to "Stop the Steal (AKA the lawful certification of the election)" and then the Committee really went wild and pointed it out. 

TrumpWorld is always a bit more mad that people point out wrongdoing then that they are guilty of it. Trump is allergic to accountability. It makes him break out in vendetta.

Stupid or Bad Faith?

 

Rampell: Do you know that there actually was bipartisan legislation intended to to increase our fentanyl detection technologies at the border. And trump killed it.

Jennings: You keep fighting these old battles. Donald Trump won.. Mexico has to do something.

Rampell: They have… pic.twitter.com/szaKgKSuGI

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 27, 2024

This is why I think cable news is basically worthless: someone like Scott Jennings (it could be so many other GOP mouthpieces, though) will argue something that is either based in sheer ignorance (possible) or they HAVE TO know better than, but this is the GOP line and their "job" is to defend it. The networks can argue that they are doing this for "balance"--but that's not what it is. They are airing out a position that is basically absurd with no penalty for either lying or being as dumb as a stump.

I used to go back and forth with myself about this kind of representation, especially at the top of the Bush years. Is it ignorance, is it lying, and what's worse?

And the answer is: what does it matter? If a position is completely detached from facts, it just is bad. Donald Trump winning an election doesn't change the facts of what is happening at the at the border with Mexico any more than George W. Bush winning affected whether invading Iraq over WMD's (dumb--or lying?) was a good idea. 

Silence is Darkness When Light is Needed Most

 

I don't have any confusion that I am, at best, an editorialist--an opinion-writer, providing somewhat informed comment on the basis of well-reported investigative journalism (other people's). I'm also not under any illusions about what even the endorsement of an august paper of record like The Washington Post means to someone who in late October is still undecided--who knows what sources of information that person seeks out? 

But the decision not to endorse comes down to editorial credibility, and whether the paper (a quaint linguistic atavism for a journal now so-often received in digital form) can speak truth to power. In the spirit of Woodward and Bernstein--do you speak truth to power?

In the spirit of Vladimir Kara-Murza, do you speak truth to power? 

In the spirit of Jamaal Khashoggi, do you speak truth to power? 

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?

RFK, Jr. is a Complete Shit Individual

 I had to see a bit more of RFK, Jr.'s Twitter after seeing this whole spiritual savior moralizing fuckshit:

So, I wonder if RFK, Jr. is in constant contact with God when he's pretending that he did not solicit and share nudes from a much younger reporter and does stuff like support Donald Trump when he's "critical" of the EPA because they...acted on Trump's say-so to play-down the harmful effects of various chemicals. 

Another example of the corrupt influence of industry on our government. In this case, the EPA.https://t.co/8WzOQuGlks

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 22, 2024

Who did what to whom and when matters. I don't think the whole world of Olivia Nuzzi--she managed to go far, fast, because of her looks very probably and good for her, but you have to combine it with smarts.  And courting a "digital" romance with a subject in the name of access journalism isn't smart. Especially when she gave more than she got. 

This Tenet Thing--

 

Since 2016, I've felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn't welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign's silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird. 

I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here--and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling "Liberty" "Freedom" "Heritage" or "Family"-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever. 

But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem--people who love the hell out of money and don't care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox--someone will try it.

The Things They Say

 

The desperation is hilarious. https://t.co/8OZ0H0y44C pic.twitter.com/Owr6iTAPaO

— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) September 1, 2024

(This post been busted--here's a link adjacent as fuck.) I should have saved the image. 

The same kind of people who think Kamala Harris never saluted also are mad Barack Obama saluted once with a coffee cup or wore a tan suit that one time.  The same kind of people will boldly assert she doesn't know where Arlington Cemetery is, when she knows the route. Someone like Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a book about Arlington, can say with some confidence that Biden and Harris should have attended an event to which they were not invited on his weekly Sunday chat shot hit. (Yes, weekly, and why? Do people want to see this mook?) He says it with confidence not because it's true, but because he doesn't expect to be thrown out on his ear. 

This is the guy who wrote the letter ages ago that recommended we back out of the JCPOA, and it was literally one of the dumbest foreign policy decisions ever. He's an open partisan whose opinions aren't to be trusted--ergo, he's on tv every week. 

Apparently, the media just exists to air opinions without context. 

Same Old Tired Playbook

 

Bash: “Trump suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.”

Vice President Harris: “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.” pic.twitter.com/F2PrHOXETK

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 30, 2024

It's been clear for a while now that Trump does and says things entirely for attention--good attention or bad attention, he just wants people to talk about him and to have the conversation to revolve around him. It's regrettable that so much of the media falls for this, and politicians end up discussing some peculiar brain-scat from an obviously unwell person instead of talking about actual issues, because they rely on someone else's opinion of whether or not said brainshit was a whole mental turd or not instead of being able to call anything out as the steaming puddle of cerebral diarrhea it is, out of fear of not being seen as "objective". 

This is me saying this. The person who has whole pages devoted to TrumpWorld. I have dissected the pellets of Trump-droppings from time to time myself. 

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, used seven curt words to dismiss the idiot birther and suggest the interviewer try something more substantive. She isn't bothered by what he said. We don't have to pay attention to it. 

I just freaking love her for that. 

The arsonist wants to set fires, but we don't have to give him oxygen. (I feel like this is a preview of how she will handle any debate provocation, and I am looking forward to him trying to confront a whole shut-down of his stock in trade.) 

TWGB: The Bedminster Bore

 

Not that long ago, I watched some right-wing commentator on Bill Maher's show try to say that Trump was NOT a "country club Republican", and for some reason, no one told her that Trump owns the fucking country clubs. (Was it Batya Ungar-Sargon? I can't find the clip but it's hardly worth my time to keep looking for it.) He owns the country clubs. He is not a working-class hero. He stiffs working people whenever he can. 

He just sat down with fellow billionaire Elon Musk and talked about how unions were bad because working people would be paid more if they were unionized. And today, he stood in front of his country club in New Jersey with some prop groceries and...um...talked about Hillary Clinton's emails and calling Kamala Harris a communist. Because how long can someone talk about the economy when he's only talking about it to get elected?  He lied, as per usual, because it's what he does. 

It was a dumb snooze version of his stump speech that he fooled certain chosen journalists into turning up for. Low energy. Lower-case "t" Trump. 

Trump is Showing Us Who He Is--Again

 

Trump tells Black journalists that Kamala Harris "is of Indian heritage ... is she Indian or is she Black? ... she became a Black person." Note the audience laughing at him. pic.twitter.com/PAhmgr1yBS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024

Trump sat for 35 minutes for an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists that was supposed to last an hour, but his own team advised them to wrap it up.  Ending an interview halfway through is exactly what a campaign would do when their guy is "crushing it"--right?

Of course not. Trump put on a racist shitshow because he is a racist shitshow. That's not actually new. What is new is, I think, is the laughter. He is ridiculous beyond belief.

He's befuddled by the idea of someone being able to claim two cultures. (He does not know, I think, where to send her back to.) He projects his inability to grasp the concept on her--it's something she's doing, right? In so doing, he's trying to cast doubt on Kamala Harris' authenticity--where have we seen that before? 

Birtherism. He did the same thing to Barack Obama. And to be completely honest, that should have ended his political career right there. But here he is, running for president--again. Displaying his astonishing ignorance and arrogance--again. And his fellow Republicans and some of his little friends in the media will let him do this again. Maybe for an encore, Trump will request Harris' college transcripts.

It's Up to Us

 

I spent the last few days putting off writing about the "Pass the Torch" movement. Oh, I was getting ready. I was going to sit down and take names and call out the fuckery. People didn't start one minute from the first question during the debate before I think the "drop Biden" movement started, in a way that felt coordinated and desperately shitty to me. 

Who the fuck treats a decent man who just gave us an astonishingly successful 3.5 years like this? Why are Democrats even airing our laundry in public? I'm a fan of transparency on one hand, but on the other it felt disrespectful to the man and his honorable public service. 

Every dumb horserace "Here's what a contested convention would look like" article, every "who might we see in a blitz primary?" thumbsucker, seemed to be a repudiation of the primaries we just had. 

The last straw wasn't the has-been campaign mahoffs of yesteryear who have displayed the political savvy of brain-damaged lemmings in the rush to shaft the incumbent Democratic president, though, that was going to make me bleed my frustration all over the internet--it was the distilled self-parody of Sorkinism: suggesting Democrats nominate Mitt Romney. 

Big "not The Onion" energy, but why did my eyes water? 

Because much as my feelings about Mitt Romney have moderated from 2012--he still isn't a Democrat, and it felt defeatist. One major party is captured by racist, violent authoritarianism, and the other is consigned to irrelevance and mere "Never Trumpism"?  Fuck that. 

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.