23 X 2026: No courage among reporters?

Yet again, Trump lost his temper when asked an embarrassing question and attacked the reporter: “Quiet! Isn’t she a fresh person? You’re a horrible little reporter, aren’t you?” 

Are there none among the Washington reporters who will interrupt Trump at a point like this to say “Mr. President, you’re being rude and unfair.” Was everyone of the people attending there afraid to speak up to a bully? I don’t care if he is the President, that does not permit him to be a bully any more than it permits him to be a thief.

17 X 2026: The perfect Trumpie

I read that Steven Cheung, White House disinformation director, called Katie Zacharia “uniquely qualified” to be Trump’s press secretary. I think this must be true, for it would be hard to find a professional liar as deceitful and careless as she.

11 X 2026: Will Trump be one of the shooters?

Our Secretary of “War” wants to televise the coming execution by firing squad at Fort Hood. Will Trump o.k. this first public execution of the twenty-first century? I can’t think why he would not. I am wondering, however, whether Trump plans to attend the execution and take part as he does in other televised spectacles.

29 IX 2026: Naivete of “experts”

The news is reporting that Sen Eric Schmitt of Missouri had been the likely choice for Vice-President on a ticket with J.D. Vance until the catastrophe of Schmitt’s hyper-dramatic and pathetically uninformed questioning of Jack Smith before the Senate Committee. And now the news is saying how Schmitt’s very public blundering eliminates his chances of appearing on the Republican ticket.

But the so-called experts are often mistaken. I think that his ignorance and ludicrous error will improve his chances of being chosen as J.D.’s running mate. He is a perfect fit for MAGA. His huffing and puffing and acting out the tough guy will go over very well. His ignorance of the facts comes right out of the MAGA playbook. And his being made to look a fool by the “elites” can go a long way towards making him a MAGA champion.

21 IX 2026: Trump and monumentality

Trump seems determined to leave his name on buildings and create new monuments in D.C. For some reason it all reminds me of the Governor William J. Le Petomane Freeway in Blazing Saddles. 

Trump should bear in mind the ancient practice, called damnatio memoriae in modern literature, of excising from inscriptions the names of thoroughgoing scoundrels and tyrants. We will need a patient clean-up committee to clear away all of Trump’s droppings.

Looking ahead, I wonder what plans Trump has made for his tomb (assuming he will die like everyone else, and not be made a god by the Republican Senate). Will he be buried in his Library? Will it be sufficiently monumental? Or will he create a separate mausoleum for himself, his wives, and his offspring? And, are we to assume that we will have to pay for it?

15 IX 2026: Haven’t we heard this before?

Headline from apnews “Trump calls AI risks a ‘hoax,’ says there is a ‘SICK conspiracy’ against AI and data centers” It would be amusing to total up all the accusations that Trump has called a hoax. Indeed, hoax is one of his favorite words, and more often than not the word is used to describe something true that Trump needs to pretend is untrue. I wish also that we could “follow the money” in Trump’s resistance to regulating AI. It’s hard to believe that he is taking this stand without some people of the “Epstein class” paying him to do so. Trump is the doddering, insane tool of some morbidly greedy men who are as indifferent to the welfare of the United States as Trump is.

12 IX 2026: Natalie the Nanny

Observers and co-workers are struggling to describe the relationship between Donald Trump and Natalie Harp. Ms Harp is many things to Trump; she fulfills a spectrum of needs. But if we are to posit a single job description for her, she is a nanny caring for a special-needs child. She helps conceal his incontinence and work around other ailments, the most obvious of which is his pitiful lack of self-esteem. This may seem paradoxical, for Trump is well known as a monument to megalomania. But this sometimes comic megalomania is his way of coping with the self-contempt that was instilled into him by his father and that he constantly renews. So Natalie is on hand to keep him clean and wind him back up with litanies of praise to neutralize his self-contempt.

24 VIII 2026: The cost of revenge

I wonder if anyone is keeping track of the amount of taxpayer money is being wasted on Trump’s vendettas. He pushes his DOJ to prosecute his “enemies.” That’s silly enough, be we have to pay his DOJ. With the right data, one could assign an arbitrary hourly wage to all involved in these bogus cases, count up the hours devoted to Trump’s fantasies, and then come up with an imprecise but very indicative figure of how great is the waste.

So you have Russel Vought in the Office of Management and Budget virtually destroying our government in order, he says, to save money, while Trump pisses away who knows how much on his entertainments and monuments and vendettas.

18 VIII 2026: Trump and the Tar Baby

Our President’s personal war on Iran reminds me of the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. The Rabbit takes offense that the Tar Baby does not return his greetings. His browbeating the Baby yields no result, and so he moves on to make a series of threats. Finally, in a temper, he follows through on the threats, throwing punches and kicks into the Tar Baby. The Tar Baby is unmoved. But the Rabbit finds himself stuck to the Tar Baby hand and foot and cannot escape his predicament. The sinister Brer Fox eventually frees Brer Rabbit from the embrace of the Tar Baby. Now who is going to get Mr. Trump and the United States unstuck from Trump’s War?

14 VIII 2026: Stephen Miller’s cattle cars

I’ve read a report that ten huge airplanes for which we paid nearly half a billion dollars are rusting away on a runway somewhere. Homeland Security/ICE purchased these planes for use in deporting what they hoped would be hordes of illegals, but this scheme seems not to have worked out. So we’re stuck with 1/2 billion dollars worth of aircraft for which (I pray) we have no use.

These airplanes are the jet-age revival of the cattle cars the Nazis used to deport people to the concentration camps.